Bee helpers want hive in Butler Twp. park

May 12--A group hoping to put a beehive in the Butler Township Community Garden would install a fence and signs to warn people with allergies, but says honeybees would encounter risks, too.

Bees have natural enemies such as mites, bears and skunks and face unnatural threats from pesticides that collectively led colonies to collapse and prompted gardeners like those at the Center for Landscape Design and Stewardship to become beekeepers.

"Survival is the biggest problem," Andy Lynn, a beekeeper, said Thursday morning when he and other members of the center asked the township supervisors for permission to keep bees at the community garden they run in Freedom Park.

The supervisors generally like the idea, but they and their solicitor asked about insurance and protections for people at the park, which draws softball and baseball teams, picnickers and other visitors.

Township residents can express their views on Tuesday at 6 p.m. when the supervisors are scheduled to vote whether to permit the beehive.

Krista Schneider said the center that she founded has liability insurance for the garden, which opened five years ago. Bees fly into the garden now, and honeybees rarely sting while collecting pollen. Beehives are part of other public places from first lady Michelle Obama's garden at the White House to the gardens of the Pennsylvania Governor's Mansion, Schneider said.

Children visit the garden for summer camps so the center wants to keep them safe but also teach them that farmers and gardeners rely on bees to grow food and flowers.

Bees pollinate one-third of the nation's crops, a service worth $15 billion to $20 billion, the Congressional Research Service said in a report on bee health in December 2012.

Populations of bees on American farms have dropped from 6 million colonies in the 1950s and '60s to 2.9 million in 2007. Honey production declined, too, from 220 million pounds in 1993 to 147 million pounds two decades later.

In Pennsylvania the honeybee colonies dwindled from 80,000 to 30,000 between 1982 and 2002. Pennsylvania honey production reached 1.6 million pounds in 2004, but has been below 1.2 million pounds the past seven years.

As bees declined, Pennsylvanians tried to help.

"The last three to four years, we've had up to 400 new beekeepers per year," Karen Roccasecca, the state apiarist, said.

Roccasecca said the center seems to be doing things right by intending to put a fence and signs around the beehive planned for Butler Township.

Lynn, who farms and keeps bees in Sugarloaf Township, said the hive he would manage at the community garden would have a wooden fence that would keep the hive out of view and deter children from poking it with sticks. The hive would be in a wooden case, mounted high enough off the ground to deter skunks and surrounded by gravel so no one would have to approach with a lawn mower.

Signs would note that honeybees are in the area, but except for the queen that fights off rivals, Lynn said honeybees only sting once and die afterward.

To keep bees alive, beekeepers need to protect hives from Eastern foul brood, a disease spread by spores that can remain virulent for 80 years, said Roccasecca, adding that state inspectors search for the brood on their biennial visits to registered hives.

Varroa and tracheal mites arrived in the United States in the past few decades and weaken the resistance of bees to disease and pesticides.

In a study in 2010, researchers at Penn State University looked at the chemicals in pollen grains that bees collect.

"We found up to 39 pesticides in one pollen sample, but the average was 6.7 different mixtures," Dr. Jim Frazier, a professor of entomology, said. "That 2010 paper kind of shocked everybody in terms of frequency and amounts of pesticides in colonies."

Next Frazier and colleagues from Penn State and the University of Florida looked at the four most commonly found pesticides.

In research finished in January, they found all four pesticides kill honeybee larvae in the hive. Also they found that a supposedly inert ingredient, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone or NMP, kills larvae.

NMP dissolves pesticides into formulas, is "super penetrating" and takes pesticides across membranes of roots and cell walls "so we chose it as a beginning point," Frazier said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate additives such as NMP. The agency regulates pesticides one at a time, although the research shows that bees collect combinations of pesticides in pollen.

"We're working hard to get them to change their attitude," Frazier said. "We really are charting new ground."

Meanwhile, beekeepers are following advice from the federal Agricultural Research Service to bolster the diet of their bees. Adding protein when pollen is scarce during winter helps bees survive.

In Butler, even if the supervisors approve the hive, Lynn said he might not be able to obtain a colony until next year, and he will try to keep the bees strong through ensuing winters.

The bees, he said, won't produce honey for two or three years.

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