ME: When did you start beekeeping?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: About eight years ago.

 

ME: What inspired you to start bee keeping?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: We moved here in 2002 with this old orchard on the property that needed pollination. I convinced my dad to start bee keeping and harvesting the honey so that the orchard could be pollinated. I remember when he came with the bees at first, and I was hiding in my car with the windows rolled up watching him set everything up. One day the bees just left. My dad didn’t want to continue so since I had all the equipment I decided I would do it myself. Now I’ve been keeping bees for eight years, I started a club, and I became the 4-H bee keeping project leader.

 

ME: You mentioned that your dad’s bees just left. Do you think that that was Colony Collaspse Disorder?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: We don’t really call it that anymore. Since all the awareness spiked in 2013 about the bee decline more research and efforts have been made to figure out what was going on. CCD was an umbrella term that lumped many different issues together. When a colony just leaves, we can guess that they were doing something called “absconding” which is when the hive becomes so infested with parasites that the bees decide that it’s better to just leave.

 

ME: What’s your opinion on the declining bee population, and with your experience as a bee keeper what do you think the reasons are?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: Since 2013 we are actually seeing more of an uptick in the bee population. More bee hobbyists means more genetic diversity. Part of the reasons stem from in the 50’s when the government started encouraging monocrop cultures and big chemical companies encouraged farmer’s to start spraying their crops and all the weeds without telling them that it would harm the bees. Most bee keepers really care about their hives and want to see them thrive. They aren’t going to do anything that would cause their bees harm. One girl I talked to online once thought that bee keepers burned their hives every winter so that they could buy more bees to get a higher profit. That just isn’t true, in some places like Alaska they do have to burn hives due to parasites, but it isn’t something bee keepers do to turn a larger profit. Buying more bees each year doesn’t even make sense, it’s a very expensive thing to do.

 

ME: What can the average person do to help protect the bees?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: You can plant all kinds of things that are good for pollinators, but the most important thing I would say is to NOT spray your dandelions. During the winter, bees stay in their hive, but they don’t hibernate. They are in their hive all winter eating through their honey reserves which is only carbs. By the time spring start, the bees are starved for protein. And the first protein source that blooms in the cold, early spring is dandelions. When you spray them with a chemical like round off the bees ingest those chemicals and spread them to the hive which kills them. We don’t have to go crazy spraying everything that isn’t grass. By doing that we greatly limit what the bees can eat. If you absolutely have to spray your dandelions, use a pre-emergent so that bees don’t spread chemicals to their hive. Another thing you can do is buy honey farm local bee keepers at a farmers market. USDA regulations allow something that is ten percent honey to be marketed as one hundred percent honey. Most honey that you see in a super market isn’t even actual honey and it’s pasteurized which kills all the good bacteria which gives honey all of its health benefits.

 

ME: Is there anything you’d like to say about your experiences as a bee keeper vs. what the media says?

 

MRS. PIELEMEIER: Hobbyist beekeepers are a huge help. I’ve shown horses and dogs before and in those communities you get people who are looking to glorify themselves with what they do, but with bees you can’t “show” them so you get people who are very compassionate and really care about what they are doing. In the documentary (More than Honey) you mentioned that one of the bee keepers allowed people to spray pesticide on the trees that his bees were still pollinating. I want to stress that that is not what bee keepers are like and that they can’t all be lumped into people like him. Some people do bee keep as a living, but they care for their bees and are responsible.