yearofplenty

New Proposed Laws for Spokane County to Allow Beekeeping in Residential Neighborhoods

We've been making progress in the Spokane area when it comes to chicken laws. The City of Spokane Valley looks set to approve new laws allowing chickens in residential neighborhoods. The new ordinance will have it's final reading on March 22 and based on the tenor of the meeting earlier this week, it looks like it will be approved. Our group of chicken activists is currently meeting with Spokane County Commissioners to garner their support to change the laws in Spokane County. You can help the cause by emailing the commissioners and letting them know you'd like them to ask the Planning Department to take action - tmielke@spokanecounty.org , mrichard@spokanecounty.organd afrench@spokanecounty.org. Go here to join the Facebook group and stay up to date on the Spokane Chicken Revolution.

While the Spokane chicken revolution has been unfolding in a public way, the move to change beekeeping laws in Spokane County has been quietly progressing behind the scenes for over a year. 

Here are the current laws regarding beekeeping in the Spokane area:

In the City of Spokane, Beekeeping IS ALLOWED as an accessory use on single-family residence lots.  View the Ciity of Spokane Beekeeping Ordinance can be found here.

The City of Spokane Valley municipal code provides an even broader use for beekeeping - allowing up to 25 hives on a residential lot.

 City of Spokane Valley - Residential Zone Permitted Uses

 City of Spokane Valley - Supplemental Use Regulations for Residential Zones

 City of Spokane Valley - Definition of Beekeeping

Beekeeping is currently not allowed in residential areas in unincorporated Spokane County. Apparently the current laws are problematic in a number of ways, and so for the last year local beekeepers have been working with the County to improve the ordinance. According to Jerry Tate, who is among Spokane's beekeeping experts, the new and improved ordinance will come up for its final reading in April, and it includes a provision allowing up to two boxes on residential lots. While I haven't seen the ordinance, like the other area ordinances, it probably requires that you have to take a class and be a certified beekeeping apprentice before you can keep bees, and you likely will have to register your boxes with the County.

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder May Be Linked to Pesticides

For the last couple of years I've been regularly reporting on the problem with bees dying in unprecedented numbers and whole colonies collapsing. Go here, here, and here for previous installments in this ongoing story.

The latest news is that it is suspected that a pesticide, known as neonicotinoids, is making the bees much more susceptible to disease. The Independent reports:

A new generation of pesticides is making honeybees far more susceptible to disease, even at tiny doses, and may be a clue to the mysterious colony collapse disorder that has devastated bees across the world, the US government's leading bee researcher has found. Yet the discovery has remained unpublished for nearly two years since it was made by the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory...

The American study, led by Dr Jeffrey Pettis, research leader at the US government bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland, has demonstrated that the insects' vulnerability to infection is increased by the presence of imidacloprid, even at the most microscopic doses. Dr Pettis and his team found that increased disease infection happened even when the levels of the insecticide were so tiny that they could not subsequently be detected in the bees, although the researchers knew that they had been dosed with it.

While bees on one front are endangered by industrial chemicals, there are some promising developments in the world of beekeeping, which is fast becoming the next wave of interest in the local food movement. It's apparently very hip for restaurants and hotels in NY City to have their own bee colonies on the roof, and then market the honey to the customers. One recent story the NY Times reported that the rural flight of bees closer to the city has brought some unexpected results. In one case it led to Brooklyn bees discovering a maraschino cherry factory as a source of sugar, which packed the honey combs with Red Dye No. 40. 

It's also more common for people in residential areas to keep bees. If you're interested in exploring beekeeping, the Inland Empire Beekeepers Association is offering a class starting February 26. Currently the County does not allow any beekeeping in residential areas, but the City of Spokane does. Here's their link to local zoning and regulations. Once again the County, which should be much more friendly to traditionally rural pursuits is behind the curve.

The Bats and the Bees - Hidden Heroes of Agriculture in Danger

I've reported on the precarious health of bee populations in Washington State, and bee colony-collapse disorder has received worldwide attention because of the irreplaceable role that honey bees play in the pollination of agricultural crops. Just last week scientists announced they were beginning to understand the combination of fungal and viral infections in bee colonies that are leading to widespread collapse.

Apparently bat populations, natures most important pesticide, are also under siege;

For several years now, scientists have been sounding alarms about a devastating fungus, White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), that has literally decimated bat populations in the Northeastern U.S. The fungus leaves a white substance on the bat's nose, wings and body, and disrupts the bat's hibernation patterns, forcing it to burn through its fat reserves, which quickly leads to starvation. Earlier this year, a survey of the bat population in New Jersey estimated that 90% of that state's bats had been killed off.

I didn't really have bats on my radar as virtuous creatures of the night, but their role in the food chain is amazing;

Bats are the primary predator of night-flying insects. That not only includes pests like mosquitoes but also insects like corn earworm moths and cotton bollworms. In their caterpillar forms, those insects can destroy crops. A 2006 study of several counties in South-Central Texas concluded that the local bat population had an annual value of over $740,000 a year as a pest control -- or up to 29% of the value of the local cotton crop.

A bat eats 60% to 100% of its body-weight in insects every day. Adams says one colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in Colorado's San Luis Valley, an important agricultural region, "pulls about 100 metric tons of insects out of the air in a year." And having bats in agricultural areas, he says, tends to move insects out of those areas, creating less need for dangerous and expensive pesticides.

This is a good reminder to me of the interconnected web of nature. We tend to find a problem in one area and try to fix the problem as if it were isolated. Our philosophical heritage is to imagine the world as a machine, and with a machine when one cog breaks down you can isolate it and fix the one cog to get the machine running again. It would be easy to look at these issues as isolated problems with bees and bats, but they are more likely reflections of systemic problems. While the scientists work on "isolating" the fungus and virus to study it I hope there are some ecologists working on the big picture question of why vital parts of the system are collapsing. Could it be that the over-generous application of anti-fungicides in agriculture is leading to the rise in especially harmful varieties of fungus? Or could it be that regularly covering a good portion of the earth's surface with herbicides like Round-Up is killing some important bacteria that controls fungus populations? It may be completely unrelated but those are some questions that come to my mind.

Unprecedented Struggles for Northwest Bees & Beekeepers

I was talking to Jerry Tate of Tate's Honey Farm at the Farmers' Market last night and he explained that bee colonies are experiencing something that he's never seen in his 40 plus years of bee keeping; bees starving to death in June because there are no flowers.

I hadn't thought much about it, but I have noticed recently in my efforts to take pictures of all our area wildflowers that there really aren't many flowers out there. All the cool weather spring flowers have come and gone but the hot weather, high nectar producing flowers like vetch have yet to really get going. I mentioned to Jerry that I have seen a lot of yellow clover, but he explained that even the yellow clover doesn't produce nectar until the temperature gets higher so even though there are flowers, they are not producing the food from which bees make honey.

I am continually surprised at my blind spots when it comes to the web of food and nature. It wasn't until Jerry started explaining that the current conditions are leading whole colonies to starve to death due to a lack of nectar and honey that it occurred to me that bees make honey as food stores for the colony and not just for me to buy at the farmers' market. Instead of bees filling up beekeepers stocks of honey, the beekeepers are having to feed the bees to keep them alive. The more I pay attention to the matrix of food and nature the more delicate and miraculous it appears.

Jerry did say that a beekeeper friend of his in Dayton, which is a week ahead of Spokane weather, has an abundance of vetch in bloom and when it came on his bees filled up the hives with honey in less than a week. Hopefully the heat will come on in the next week and the bees will bounce back.

For a February post about the challenges facing northwest bees and beekeepers go here.

Jerry Tate's honey is available every Wednesday from 3-7pm at the Millwood Farmers' Market.

Picture: Vetch, one of the high nectar producing flowers that bees rely on in our region.