BEEKEEPING & DEVELOPMENT 48
ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS of AFRICANIZED BEES
by
Steve Balogh, United Kingdom Beekeeping in the USA is big business. It is difficult to calculate beekeeping’s contribution to Gross National Product. Although figures can be put to honey production and other products directly harvested by beekeepers, the major economic benefits from beekeeping are as a result of pollination. Beekeeping in continental USA is a heavily capital-intensive, year-round, itinerant operation. From citrus groves in Florida to cotton fields in the Midwest, a colossal agricultural enterprise is serviced by mobile beekeepers. Equipment and methods are specialised for rapid translocation of immense numbers of colonies from crop to crop as they come into season.
Every hive overwintering is like a pregnant cow On the East Coast, migratory beekeepers take trailer loads of bees to Florida, Gulf Coast and South Carolina locations. Each hive that overwinters in the south is like a pregnant
cow. The pollen and nectar of spring bloom stimulate the bees and it is “calving” time. The bees build up rapidly and more hives are
started From Florida, California, and the South, the thousands of truckloads of bees that have been used in citrus groves and market gardens for honey production and pollination, are loaded and transported to North-Eastern and Great Lakes orchards. Hundreds of thousands of hives are provided to pollinate the crops. Many crop growers are not able to get as many as they want, and most have to pay a little more than they preferred, but few are without
honeybees.
Techniques not
worthwhile elsewhere Stringent controls and preventative measures must be used to avoid the spread of diseases and parasites. with such highly mobile populations these could cause devastation. With so large an industry it is no surprise that US research leads the world and that techniques have developed that would not merit the investment elsewhere. The arrival in New Mexico and Texas of Africanized bee colonies now poses the kind of threat that pinpoints the weakness of intensive methods. The economies of scale that enable a small population of beekeepers to manage a prodigiously large number of
colonies, now become a significant liability. The vigilance and hive by hive attention common in the rest of the world are not feasible for US operators.
No northern limit to
expansion
Even where action to replace an Africanized queen can be taken in time, and every drone killed, the labour to successfully maintain hybrid-free colonies, assuming it were possible at all on the scale that US beekeepers are practising, is completely uneconomic proposition. The experience in Central America is not encouraging: Africanized bees proceeded to spread without any noticeable effect from the human intervention. a
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Africanized bees can overwinter even though they are a tropical race of bee. There is no northerly latitude which will mark a limit to their progress. It seems that the US Government is caught between rocks and hard places wherever it turns; it certainly appears to have no strategy to offer either beekeeper or farmers This is despite the catastrophic effect on agricultural output that will follow if conditions in the future become uneconomic for beekeeping.
FOUR
A Bees fer Development publication
