Flowers are blooming but there may be fewer bees around to pollinate them.
Timothy Ball, owner of Ball Bee Co. and North County Swarm Coordinator for the Central Coast Beekeepers Alliance, explained that one contributing factor to the bee population's decline is this year’s unstable weather pattern.
“We've had a lot of good rain this year and last year, which is awesome for the bees. We need the rain because that's what makes the flowers bloom. That's what makes the nectar flow,” Ball said. “Basically, half of the colony left and was looking for a new home, but before they could find a new home, it got really cold and rainy again and so that bee swarm, the clump of bees hanging on a tree or on a mailbox or something, they got just too cold and that's why a lot of them have died.”
Templeton beekeeper and owner of Nature’s Touch Nursery & Harvest, Melanie Blankenship, added that unexpected periods of cold like we’ve experienced this spring can cause the flowers bees rely on to die.
“It's not a deep cold, but it's an overall consistent cold, so we've been cold for a while. Nectar is not flowing,” Blankenship said.
Without nectar or any food source, eventually, the bees can’t survive.
Pesticide exacerbates the decline of the bee population.
“When you're out there spraying your dandelions in the fields or in your lawn, you know, understand that there's a good chance that you're also spraying bees, too,” Blankenship said.
Ball explained that people looking to manage bee infestations on their own often use pesticides and create a larger problem in the process.
“People, they're not able to afford to have them removed safely and humanely, so they'll spray the bees with a pesticide and that is the worst thing because not only are you going to kill those bees, but then if there's any honey in the hive that they've developed, other bees are going to come from five miles around. They're going to take that honey and then they're going to take that to their hive or their nest nd those other bees are going to die, too. So it has a ripple effect,” Ball said.
That ripple effect trickles back to the flowers the bees pollinate which grow into the community’s food source.
“Almond crop, peaches, apples, nectarines, plots, cabbage, families, you know, all of us who grow for seed. If I don't have them going out and pollinating my broccoli flower, I don't have next year's production,” Blankenship said.
