Kauai
At the beginning of Save the Honeybee Foundation, we realized that on the island of Kauai there were honeybees that were not showing signs of a depressed immune response the way bees on the mainland are. For one, there are still no reports of the dreaded, parasitic varroa mite showing up on the island. Kauai is one of a very few locations on the planet where varroa have not shown up. There are also no reports of Colony Collapse Disorder on the island. Part of this is probably due to the fact that the honeybees can fly and forage year round on a tropical island so the possible stress associated with winter conditions elsewhere is avoided completely. Forage is year-round and abundant. Equally important, we expected to find beekeeping methods and philosophy that would diverge from western beekeeping methods. Industrialized methods are dominant in the areas of the world where colony collapse disorder and varroa mite are most prevalent.
So we headed off to the island to take a look for ourselves...
When we first arrived on the island 3 years ago, we spent our "bee time" creating the administrative structure of our non-profit, creating our website and finding some bee hives and honeybee keepers to "bee" with. We originally thought that we would build our first honey bee sanctuary on the island and we spent some time searching for the right piece of land. We pretty quickly realized that the beehives that we were seeing in general and the beehives that we were invited to be with specifically, were already living in environments that have all the qualities that we imagined in a sanctuary...quiet, peaceful, secluded, surrounded by wild land growing without the use of synthetic chemicals, with abundant sources of high quality organic forage year-round. We are visiting with a group of 12 hives that live in such a natural sanctuary. And it is within this natural sanctuary that we are continuing our practice of heart-centered connection and communication with the honeybees.
Realizing that we did not need to build a sanctuary on the island we shifted our focus to listening and learning and trying to understand what it is that brings an undeniable vitality to bees. Stay tuned. We are gathering data about beekeeping philosophy and methods on the island. So far, our interviews with local beekeepers have revealed that beekeeping on Kauai tends to be less invasive than on the mainland. Hives are far more "wild," living in a relatively undisturbed, natural, and stress-free state. Our own experience with the hives has also been significantly different than with mainland bees. Bees seem more "animated," more organized, and more vital, and we are beginning to wonder about the effects of world-wide honeybee breeding programs in which bees are bred for such qualities as "gentleness" and "less likely to swarm" . Could they be negatively affecting honeybees' immune responses to toxic environmental stimuli?
