As Christopher Heard pries off the top of the wooden box, an audible buzz escapes the container, but the thousands of bees remain inside.
“Watch now, they’ll just pour out like water,” Heard says as he dumps the bees inside their new hives at Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield.
By the time they’re done, Heard and another volunteer beekeeper will release more than 25,000 bees at the botanic gardens, which recently lost its entire resident colony to a particularly voracious bee-killing mite.
First discovered in the United States in the mid-1980s, the menacing sounding varroa destructor mite has been attacking honeybee colonies across the country, worrying fruit and vegetable farmers who depend on bees for pollination.
In California, the mite infestation has left almond growers struggling to find enough bees to pollinate the crops, which support a $2 billion industry there.
While the impact to crops has been far less severe in Colorado, the mite is still to blame for wiping out most of the wild bee colonies and creating serious hardships for commercial beekeepers, according to one official at the state Department of Agriculture.
“When the varroa mite hit Colorado in 1995, it hit hard,” says Jerry Cochran, the department’s apiary coordinator. “At the time, no one in this area was really treating for them, which made it even more devastating.”
The pinhead-size parasite, which latches itself to the backs of bees and sucks out their insides, has even developed a resistance to some pesticides, making the mite particularly difficult to eradicate.
The Longmont-based National Honey Board is among the many organizations sponsoring research to try to find new ways to control the mite. Much of the national research is aimed at working with bees with a natural resistance to mites and experimenting with elements such as plant and mineral oils.
Heard says chemicals were used to control the mites that invaded the botanic gardens colony, but they were not enough to spare the 50,000 bees that began dying in February.
“With one adult bee, you might find up to 30 mites,” says Heard, who has been volunteering at the botanic gardens for four years. “And they reproduce a lot faster than the bees do.”
Heard says he and the other volunteer beekeepers at the Chatfield nature preserve hope additional chemical treatments will help keep the mites from attacking the new bees, which were shipped from Wyoming.
The Chatfield bee colony, he explains, plays a crucial role in pollinating the gardens’ pumpkin patch.
“Our lives really depend on the roles bees play,” Heard says. “When the bees die off, we can’t be too far behind.”
Staff writer Kim McGuire can be reached at 303-820-1240 or kmcguire@denverpost.com.
