Betting on Nature to Solve the Bee Crisis

The apple trees are blooming on Ken Simpelaar’s orchards in upstate New York, halfway between Syracuse and Rochester. That’s drawn 38 species of bees, who spread pollen as they forage for nectar. For years, Simpelaar paid beekeepers to truck insects in. Then colony collapse disorder struck, triggering shortages of commercial honeybees at peak flowering times. Three years ago he stopped bringing in hives and found he didn’t see any change in his yields. “I might have just been wasting my money,” he says. “You don’t see the native bees like you do the honeybees, but they do a lot of work.”

Simpelaar is one of hundreds of farmers turning to wild bees after nearly a decade of federally funded research failed to identify a solution or even a definitive cause for colony collapse, blamed on a variety of causes including pesticides and mites. A study released on May 13 by the government-funded Bee Informed Partnership showed winter losses in commercial bee colonies slowed this year to 23 percent from an average of 29 percent, but a spike in summer deaths pushed losses from April 2014 through this past March to 42 percent, the second-highest on record. “Ten years ago we all thought, the honeybees are cheap and we’ll always be able to get them,” says Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at Cornell University.