Among the questions we are still asking about the impact of the October fires is, “What about the bees?”
A comprehensive answer will unfold over time, as bees and their keepers have three aspects of impact to deal with, destruction of colonies by the fires, loss of fall and winter forage, and long-term exposure to smoke. For wild bees, there’s a fourth, potentially catastrophic, impact: Loss of habitat. A beekeeper can build a new box for his colonies but it takes years for a tree, for example, to develop the sort of nutritious hollow that wild bees need in order to thrive.
For now we know that many hobbyist beekeepers lost their hives, although some randomly survived, like lone houses in otherwise destroyed neighborhoods.
Joey Smith of Let’s Go Farm lost his bees to the Tubbs Fire, which took his farm and home, too. It was particularly devastating as his colonies were thriving this year, he explained, doing the best since he began beekeeping.
Hector Alvarez, Sonoma County’s biggest professional beekeeper, lost 52 hives. He keeps between 600 and 700 hives but loses as much as 25 to 30 percent each year because of colony collapse.
“It will be a hard year,” predicted Alvarez, who comes from generations of beekeepers. Among the challenges: He needs to buy equipment, build new boxes, re-establish more colonies, and find locations with enough forage for his hives.
Alvarez follows the bloom, moving his hives from south to north in the spring, so that the bees may pollinate specific crops, but only locally. For professional beekeepers, pollination is their primary endeavor; honey and bees wax are secondary sources of income. The largest beekeepers begin in early spring in the south, traveling north sometimes all the way through Canada. Without such pollination, countless crops would fail.
It is hard to measure the financial impact of bees on our local economy because pollination itself is hard to quantify. In 2016, apiary products such as honey, wax, and the renting of hives for pollination, had a value of $263,200, up from $97,400 in 2015, according to Sonoma County Crop Reports. But this modest figure does not account for the thousands of stone fruit, apples, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, flowers, and more that bees pollinate.
Nationwide, bee pollination contributes about $30 billion to our economy. The USDA categorizes bees as livestock. They are as essential to us as water and oxygen, or nearly so.
Surviving colonies have many challenges to deal with now. Fall is a time when bees must grow from their larval stage into foragers before winter sets in, a process that takes six weeks. Summer bees live just seven weeks, but fall bees live for about seven months, with tremendous chores to do throughout their long lives.
The bees that survived within fire zones face a loss of forage, not only the wild and cultivated plants that would normally be blooming now but also plants like Eucalyptus that bloom throughout the winter and early spring.
Yet bees adjust. Certain colonies are already showing evidence that bees are flying greater distances than usual to find pollen and nectar.
The big unknown is the impact of sustained exposure to smoke.
