The stakes are high for honeybees. A survey conducted by the USDA shows apiaries continue to lose nearly one third of hives each year. That's led some environmental activists to push for further restrictions on a pesticide used to treat seed corn.
61-year-old Arvin Pierce has been preventing calls to the exterminator for seven years. Each colony removal is a discovery:
PIERCE: “You’ll get these open and it’s kind of like a present. You know, ‘cause you open it up, every time it’s different. It’s a little surprise.”
We’re standing in the dark, cave-like basement of cabin at a hunting club on a small lake near Chandlerville, in west-central Illinois.
The cabin’s owner, severely allergic to bees, called Pierce to remove the buzzing colony under his floor.
Pierce hands me a veil and then climbs onto a metal scaffold to pry open the ceiling:
PIERCE: “I started doing these cutouts, taking survivor bees out of trees and houses and barns, and my bees are doing really well as far as surviving. It’s certainly not anything I’m doing. I don’t have any special secret or talent.”
Pierce calls these colonies especially valuable. He believes natural selection makes these bees - thriving in the wild - stronger than those treated with chemicals to ward off pests and infection:
PIERCE: “I don't like chemicals. I grew up on a little black dirt farm and it is just the principle that I have that the less chemicals you use, the better off you are.”
While beekeepers around the country reported losses of bees around 30 percent, Pierce's loss rate over the winter has been closer to three percent.
Another central Illinois beekeper - who, like Pierce, collects swarms of live bees - has not been that lucky this year:
PIERCE: "As a beekeeper, bees are like a member of your family. And when you go out there and you find them dead, it’s very disheartening."
That's Rick Nuss of Rantoul, a town north of Champaign-Urbana. In May, Nuss filed a complaint with the EPA and the Illinois Dept. of Agriculture, claiming a farmer planting pesticide-treated seed corn killed two of his 13 hives and severely weakened those colonies that did survive.
NUSS: “I went out after he got done planting and looked, and there were piles of dead bees out in front of my hives. The next morning when I went out and looked it was like a carpet of bees.”
Nuss says he'll be lucky if he can produce a tenth of the honey he did in 2012. This year his local beekeeping association warned him about the suspected danger of neonicotinoids… chemicals found in popular pesticides, including Bayer’s “Poncho”, which is used to treat seed corn before planting:
NUSS: “It's one of the worst chemicals I've ever seen for killing things. I mean it's instant.”
So just how dangerous are these neonicotinoid seed corn treatments to honeybees in Illinois?
Not enough, it would seem, to warrant much reporting to government regulators whose job it is to investigate pesticide misuse.
Records obtained from the State Department of Agriculture through the Freedom of Information Act indicate only two beekeepers have filed incident reports in the past four years. Two out of the state’s 2,000 registered apiaries.
OLIVER: “Screaming about it to the media and reporting it to the EPA are two totally different things.”
Randy Oliver of Grass Valley, California is a veteran beekeeper, biologist and frequent contributor to the American Bee Journal. He says while some of his fellow environmentalists under-report, others over-react.
OLIVER: "If it's not reported onto paper somewhere, it does not exist, as far as the regulatory system is involved. So beekeepers have only themselves to blame about this."
Rick Nuss of Rantoul, one of the two beekeepers in Illinois who do claim bee kills were caused by pesticide-treated seed corn – says beekeepers in his area simply haven’t had enough information:
NUSS: “They're not reporting because they don't know what's going on. Now that we're aware of it, in our Association, next year when it happens they're going to get all kinds of reports.”
While the debate over honeybee health and pesticide use continues, Arvin Pierce presses on with his colony removal operations. He started preventing calls to an exterminator for a very personal reason:
PIERCE: "I really like them and I really don't like the idea of them being killed. They are really beneficial, they're helpful to all of us and… I think I like the challenge of it too.”
Pierce says just because his bees are thriving while others around the country are dying doesn’t mean he has any answers. If anything, he only has more questions.
But Pierce says the unknown - and the unexpected - are just part of the job:
PIERCE: “If you like flying by the seat of your pants, you will make a good beekeeper. Because you never know what you gonna find when you open a hive.”
-Peter Gray, WUIS/Illinois Public Radio
