Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following appeared in The Floyd Press on January 6, 2011

“He’s creating quite a buzz around here,” said Floyd Country Store owner Woody Crenshaw about renowned author and beekeeper Gunther Hauk. Hauk, who heads up the Spikenard Farm and Honeybee Sanctuary in Floyd, spoke to a group of about 100 people at the Country Store Saturday night about Colony Collapse Disorder, a global crisis in which large numbers of honeybees are disappearing from their hives.

The event, which featured the screening of a film titled “Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?” was hosted by SustainFloyd. “You can’t think about sustainability without thinking about the honeybee,” Hauk, one of the beekeepers featured in the film said. “We are losing approximately 1/3 of our honeybee colonies every year, and we have to import 300 to 400 thousand from Australia each February to guarantee pollination on the west coast.” Pollination is the foundation of our food supply with honeybees pollinating about 40% of the food we eat.

Beautifully filmed in places around the world, Queen of the Sun is a life affirming film that features interviews with biologists, philosophers, historians, and beekeepers who speak with a sense of poetic wonder about honeybees, which have been revered as sacred since ancient times. Biodynamic, organic and commercial beekeepers are interviewed, along with city rooftop beekeepers, a 16 year old beekeeper in England and beekeepers from Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the United States who are dedicated to sustainable beekeeping practices.

Along with footage of beekeeping and information about the healing properties of honey and the life of a honeybee, documentary filmmakers Taggert Siegel and John Betz take audiences to a Beekeepers Ball, a protest march for the legalization of beekeeping in New York City, and a play with an actress playing the role of a Queen Bee in a cage, which the playwright referred to a symbol of the soul of the world in a cage.

The film presents a combination of factors thought to be contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder, including aggressive mechanized practices in the beekeeping industry, the increasing use of pesticide spraying, mono-crop factory farming, and the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMO) into our food supply, all of which stress colonization and weaken the immune systems of honeybees and other pollinating insects, inviting a host of diseases and disorders to take hold.

Questions from the audience following the screening included one about the best time of the year to collect a swarm. “The end of April, through May and into early June,” Hauk answered. A question about the role of mites in Colony Collapse Disorder was also posed. Artificially controlling nature has a price and treating hives with chemicals is not a long term solution, Hauk pointed out. Expecting science to solve the problems of viruses and infestations with chemicals is “like saying I got sick from bad nutrition and I’m going to get better with bad nutrition.”

Loss of habitat is as an increasingly pressing issue for honeybees and many other species. With the goal of keeping the honeybee from becoming extinct, which is a real danger, Spikeard Farm is focused on research and education. One project the farm is hoping to pursue is planting more flowers on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the bees.

Although the disappearance of honeybees is alarming, Hauk believes that a crisis is an opportunity for learning. “More and more people are becoming interested. Honeybee sanctuaries are springing up everywhere. I’ll have hope till the last day and the last plant,” he said.     ~ Colleen Redman

Note: Watch a video of the evening  HERE and another video featuring Hauke is HERE.