Photo by Sandy Millar
The State of Bees
By Anna West
What Can Be Done To Protect Our Pollinators? In the summers I spent in the Czech Republic with my grandparents, there was always an abundance of honey. My grandfather’s friend Franta was an amateur beekeeper and supplied us with jars of raw, unfiltered honey that he harvested from bees at his chata. In the mornings, jet-lagged and hungry, I would make my way to the dining table, where my grandmother had left me toasted housky, margarine, and Franta’s honey jar. Even now, I recall its amber colour and crystalline texture, like semi-dissolved sugar at the bottom of a coffee mug. Beekeeping has a long tradition in the Czech Republic. In fact, the Czech Beekeepers Association (Český svaz včelařů) was founded by the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa in 1776. Under her rule, beekeeping became a well-respected trade, as it provided widelyused products, such as beeswax for church candles. Beekeepers even received tax exemptions. At the turn
of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Carniolan bee was introduced into the country, ushering in a new age of beekeeping. The Carniolan was easier to rear than the black bee, which had previously been the most common species. Today, in a country of over 10 million people, there are more than 50,000 beekeepers who maintain over half a million bee colonies. On average, beekeepers have ten bee colonies that they keep to make honey for themselves and for friends, as Franta did for my family. Empress Maria Theresa was right to hold beekeeping in high regard. Besides producing honey and other products for our consumption, bees pollinate crops. Today, beekeeping operations are critical to modern agriculture. Pollinators are responsible for one in every three bites of food we consume. Nevertheless, the world’s bee population is in decline. While reductions in colony numbers have been observed throughout
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