The New Hampshire Beekeepers Association is expanding its efforts to understand why the state’s bees are dying over the winter.
The group opened its annual winter hive loss survey, now in its third year, on Monday and will continue to collect data until the end of April. The survey typically asks participants how many hives they had in the fall versus the amount remaining in the spring, and what caused hives to fail.
The results weren’t great last winter, with 58 percent of the state’s hives not lasting through the winter. It was a 7 percent decrease from 2016’s death rate. A definitive cause remains elusive – mites, starvation and moisture problems topped the list – but as more beekeepers participate, a clearer picture may develop.
The association is also asking beekeepers to submit to their dead bee autopsy observations using a process developed by the New Hampshire Honey Bee Diagnostic Network.
The network, a partnership between the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extension and the Beekeepers Association, was founded through a three-year Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant. It’s comprised of volunteers who are trained to diagnose causes of death in honey bees.
One of the network’s initial goals was to train people how to spot nosema, a parasite that lives in the digestive tract of bees and can eventually cause a hive to weaken and collapse. Although the disease is relatively widespread in the country, nosema hardly showed up in the NHBA’s previous surveys.
This year, the network was expanded to include citizen science projects for collecting data on “deadout” (a dead hive) observations and on monthly testing for the parasite varroa mites, according to its website. They are providing a checklist beekeepers can follow to diagnose the mites, which can be submitted online, via email or through the mail. The checklist and FAQ can be found on the network’s website.
Lastly, the association is launching a multi-year initiative to promote healthy hive management.
The N.H. Healthy Hives campaign will focus on different management themes each year; this year will focus on varroa mite testing, another scourge of honey bees. Participants will be asked to do monthly checks for mites and nosema spore counts and record the results on a spreadsheet. They’ll also be asking if the hive swarmed and whether beekeepers treated the threats.
Martin Marklin, who owns several hives around Hopkinton and behind his Der Markt store in Contoocook, said understanding deadouts is one of the more important things a beekeeper has to do when tending their hives.
“The question becomes, what caused the hives to not be able to overwinter,” he said. “Was it a lack of food storage? Namely, maybe we didn’t leave enough honey on the hive? Or were there other stressors, such as nosema, dysentery, varroa mites.”