The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services reports nearly one third of Virginia’s honey bee colonies died last winter. But one Floyd County beekeeper had a better survival rate.
Turn into Mark Chorba’s driveway and you pass a pond with ducks and geese, and chickens stroll around in the front yard. In the grass behind the farmhouse are stacks of boxes of various heights holding hundreds of thousands of bees.
“So what do you want to do?”
“Let’s go see the bees.”
“Sure. Bees, the bees, the bees. Lots of bees. It’s been a good year for bees.”
He tears up strips of newspaper and lights them in the smoker.
“Few puffs of smoke and the bees will react to that. Instead of coming out and stinging us, they’ll be nice and calm.”
Chorba, who works in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, dons a white jacket and beekeeper veil to keep the bees from stinging him. Blueberry bushes, still heavy with fruit, grow along a waist-high wooden fence, separating the bees from the chicken coop and helping keep out hungry bears. Chorba says his family picked about 50 pounds of berries this summer and he attributes the bounty to his bees polinizing the plants. But it’s not been all good news for his bees. Chorba lost four of his 22 hives over the winter.
“So I lost very few. Some people were losing 50 percent, 60 percent or all their bees.”
About a third of Virginia’s honey bee colonies died last winter, according to the State Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. That’s higher than the national loss of nearly a quarter, but down from Virginia’s previous winter loss of almost half. Chorba and his fellow beekeepers are trying to keep the mortality rate below 15 pecent.
It’s hard to tell exactly why some hives die, but Chorba says it could be a combination of things. . .viruses, bacteria, or pesticides, and the Italian, or common, everyday bee has been decimated by the varroa mite .
“Which is a tiny little bug, a parasite about the size of the head of a pin. And they get on the bee and they sap the blood out of the bee and it weakens the colony and the colony dies. Thus we lose our bees.”
Chorba says mites may contribute to Colony Collapse Disorder . But there’s still no clear cause for why the bees desert their hive. He had a hive in Ironto several years ago succumb to CCD.
“Doing wonderful all summer long; put out a lot of honey. Checked them in October and the bees were gone as if somebody came and vacuumed them all out of there. They were just gone.”
“It was in October going into the winter so they didn’t make it through the winter. Wherever they flew to, they didn’t make it because they couldn’t have produced enough food to survive a winter.”
In the mid 1980s, the mite killed off bee colonies found in abandoned buildings but they’ve been making a comeback. For the past few years, Chorba replaced his queens with wild ones that had become resistant to the mite.
Then he discovered Russian bees which hail from the Southeast tip of the country which is native to the varroa mite. So Chorba and his fellow beekeepers are now replacing their Italian queens with Russian ones to create a Russian hive that can also withstand Virginia winters.
But he still worries about new farming practices that wipe out entire colonies.
“And there’s a lot of talk about these neonicotinoid that are out. They put them in the seed, the seed grows, the plant has the chemical already in it so when the bug bites the plant to chew on the plant it kills it. Same with the pollen. It produces pollen; the bee gets the pollen that has the neonicotinoid in it, goes back to the colony.”
Chorba says because keeping the bees alive is a challenge and beekeeping isn’t as easy as it may first seem. But by creating healthy colonies, beekeeping can become a rewarding hobby.