Sustainable beekeeping needs both good practices and good policy

Depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers on what sustainable beekeeping means and what stand in its way. A beekeeper will tell you about winter losses, lack of forage, and low honey prices. A veterinary regulator at the authority will talk about surveillance of food safety and registered products. Both are right, but they’re only seeing their part of the picture.

Sustainable beekeeping lies on three pillars

There are different aspects to consider for beekeeping activities to be sustainable. And what I mean here is mainly that a beekeeper is able to carry on over years. I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past months. In addition, I’ve travelled even more this year, seeing different realities, which added insights, thoughts and experiences.

Recently, I’ve found a paper that deals exactly with sustainable beekeeping activities. It defines sustainability for beekeeping operations over three pillars: The environmental, the social, and the economic pillar. And guess what, bee health and education run through all three of them. Honey bee health is most notably an element of the environmental pillar – parasites and pathogens are environmental stressors and drive colony losses.

However, bee health is also part of the other two pillars: Colony losses mean a loss of income for the beekeeper and costs for replacing the colony and perhaps sanitizing materials. And obviously, health management, like varroa treatments, has a cost, too. What’s less obvious is the social cost: Honey bees play their role in pollination services and in some crops, growers almost solely rely on them (like almond pollination in the USA). And these pollination services do play a role in human health.

I know that many don’t want to hear this anymore, but varroa mites remain the main problem for bee health. With everything linked to it. Things like using treatments correctly, knowing when to treat and what substances to use is crucial to keep colonies healthy. In this aspect, I disagree somewhat with all the papers I’ve been reading in this context. In general, the recommended strategy is to shift to organic compounds and biotechnical methods like queen caging for brood interruption.

That I have objections here may surprise you. But hear me out. I definitely agree that oxalic acid, formic acid, and thymol are the better options for varroa treatments compared to synthetic compounds. Oxalic acid is the best option we have at the moment, very efficient and it’s safe for the colonies. But it must be used without brood because it acts only on mites on the adult bees. Formic acid kills also the mites in the brood, but it has several caveats for the safety of the treatment. Mainly, it works best between 15-18°C, which is quite cool. With higher temperatures, it evaporates too fast and can damage the brood or even the queen. So, as you can see, “organic” doesn’t automatically mean “safe”. That’s a very common misunderstanding between beekeepers. You still have to know some basic things to treat correctly. In addition, there are still many beekeepers who don’t treat at all. If they go first with the easier-to-use synthetic options and use registered products – I can live with that. You have to meet people where they’re at.

And this brings me to my second favourite topic: education. I was quite shocked to read that 40-50% of beekeepers in a global survey never attended a formal training. More than 11,000 beekeepers responded, so that’s a pretty solid database. It also asked about where the beekeepers got their information from, and here it gets interesting: There’s a division between Europe and North America on one side, and Asia and Latin America on the other. Africa and Australia are missing in the survey, unfortunately.

That itself may not be such a big surprise. However, there’s a sharp contrast I didn’t expect to be that clear. In Europe or North America, there seems to be a larger proportion of hobbyists. At least those who responded to this survey: 80.1% of the European beekeepers and 66.2% in North America didn’t have a commercial interest in beekeeping. This means higher average age and a different motivation to learn and look after the colonies. I don’t let these beekeepers from the hook, though. They still need to know about honey bees and good practices. And sustainability is a topic for them, too. They get their info mainly from written resources, like journals and books. But many of them are also in beekeeping clubs, which – in the best case – offer both the possibility to exchange knowledge and get some formal training.

In Latin America and Asia, on the other hand, the focus is more on the commercial side. 80.3% of Latin American and 73.6% of Asian beekeepers do it for a living. They’re younger and they rely more on digital sources. Social media has surely reduced gatekeeping for knowledge. But it has some downsides as well. For instance, there’s a lot of misinformation and lacking context. What counts on social media are emotions, not that many facts. This isn’t helpful, when you’re trying to put food on your plates and send your children to school. Then, you need reliable information that takes your conditions into account.

Especially, when it comes to adapt practices that were developed in Europe or North America to the different conditions they experience. Here, I need to point out the SOLATINA network. They follow a collaborative approach for bee research – which in the end helps to generate this reliable information for sustainable beekeeping in Latin America. And they do it in Spanish and Portuguese, which helps getting it out to practical beekeeping.

In a recent paper, some members of SOLATINA point out that it needs inter-institutional networks and long-term policies to establish collaborative research frameworks and support the training of future scientists and honey bee health experts. And it’s those future scientists and specialists that will take over the training of beekeepers.

Which brings me again to the three levels of responsibility. Every beekeeper can do something to improve his practices. Sustainable beekeeping, in the end, happens at the apiary. But there are things they can’t do alone. They will need the community of associations, mentoring, trainings. It’s this community level that links each individual beekeeper to scientists, vets, and – last but definitely not least – regulators and policy makers.

Sustainability needs the support of these political frameworks that make applied research, training, collaboration even possible. What the SOLATINA scientists said in their paper is true also at the very practical level. Collaboration between beekeepers will give them better access to resources. When this collaboration extends to vets and researchers, beekeepers will get the necessary knowledge and skills to adapt to changing conditions and upcoming challenges. And all this needs good and science-based policies.