Part one of a two-part feature on honeybees explores existential threats they face, from climate change to mites and bears.
The pickup truck eases to a halt, its tires hissing softly against the gravel. In the bed, colorful wooden boxes are stacked high. Two figures climb out, suited in mesh veils, brown rubber boots and long gloves stained with dirt and wax. As they move toward the hives, the low, resonant hum of hundreds of thousands of honeybees swells.
“My whole farm is mobile,” said Rob Rienstra, an artisan honey producer and owner of BeeWorks Farm in Whatcom County.
For Rienstra, tending to hives scattered across the county is just one part of the job. Today, he and his employee, Torin Lawley, are visiting “Sam’s place,” the property of a local blueberry farmer who hired Rienstra to install hives to boost pollination. Here, they’ll check the growth of hives to see if they need to add what’s called a “super,” essentially an added unit to a hive so the colony can continue to grow and isn’t at risk of dividing itself.
“In Whatcom County, we live in one of the biggest berry-producing counties, and honeybees are completely integral for that equation,” Rienstra said. “Even though I only do some pollination, it’s really important, and there are a lot of bees that come here from out of state, from Eastern Washington to pollinate all those berries.”
In addition to pollination services, BeeWorks also makes raw and unfiltered honey from various botanical sources such as maple, blackberry, fireweed and alpine flower. Whatcom County residents may recognize the name from the Bellingham Farmers Market or its addition to the honey shelf in many local grocers.
But before that golden honey ends up in tea or yogurt, it undergoes a long, grueling journey — one that local beekeepers like Rienstra are deeply invested in.
“I think the biggest thing is, there’s this real integration of my life and this job,” Rienstra said. “I cannot leave this job, no matter what hour of the day it is. I’m thinking about this all the time, it’s very hard to set down. And in some ways it’s kind of cool, and in some ways it’s kind of awful.”
For Rienstra, starting the day at 4 a.m. — or even 1 a.m. for that matter — is nothing unusual. Year-round, he and other beekeepers face threats ranging from bear break-ins and mite infestations to extreme weather, emergencies that can strike at any hour and demand an immediate response.
“One of the first years, I was putting bees up in the forest service land,” he said. “I was driving up this dirt road at one in the morning. I came to this spot where the road had washed out a little bit, and I figured I could get past that with a little bit of maneuvering.”
He dug out part of the road so he could get his truck and trailer, loaded with hives, across the shallow creek running through it. At first, everything seemed fine. But after cresting a small incline, the truck came to a sudden, soft stop.
“I was like, ‘Oh crap,’” Rienstra said. “So I get out, I had this big load of bees on the truck, and the creek is going under the truck, between the front wheels and the back wheels. It’s real shallow, and the tongue of the trailer is totally buried in the gravel.”
Rienstra started digging.
“There’s nobody who can help you,” he said. “I think that’s the thing at times with this job, especially being out at night, there’s no cell service, there’s no tow truck that’s gonna come get a truckload of bees.”
By the time the sun began to rise, Rienstra had finally freed the truck. Then came the next challenge: hiking a mile down the road to fetch a forklift. He drove it back up the trail, mile by mile, and by 8 a.m., he was unloading hives at the drop site.
“That was probably — almost certainly — the most miserable night of my 15 years doing this,” he said.
From a humble hobby
Rienstra’s beekeeping journey began in his mid-30s with a humble hobby and one beehive. When he met a local beekeeper named Bill Blanchard about 16 years ago, Rienstra ended up apprenticing for Blanchard and eventually buying Bill’s Bees and renaming it to BeeWorks Farm.
Although they care for hundreds of thousands of bees, BeeWorks is a small operation, just Rienstra and two to three other employees.
The year begins in January, when the team gathers hives from various 12 sites around Whatcom County to assess colony strength. Strong hives are loaded onto a semitruck and sent to California to pollinate almond orchards until March. Meanwhile, Rienstra “plays Robin Hood,” redistributing honey from well-stocked colonies to weaker ones in need.
April is the busiest month. The team creates starter hives by splitting surviving colonies and introducing queens to grow new colonies. Most of this takes place at night when most of the bees are in their hives.
“April’s really tough, but the thing that I like the most is being outside and being really connected to nature and what nature’s doing,” Rienstra said.
From spring into early summer, the focus shifts to expansion — feeding bees as needed and adding supers to give growing colonies space. By late June or early July, hives are moved to mountain sites to pollinate specific botanicals like blackberry, thistle, wild rose, wildflower and alpine bloom.
The rest of the summer is spent tending hives, maintaining bear fences, and, by mid-August, harvesting honey for extraction. Throughout the year, the team continually removes failed hives — often due to mites, queenlessness, weather or bears.
In theory, this is how the year progresses for beekeepers, but in reality, the shifting weather patterns keep them constantly planning and adapting, Rienstra said.
“Yes, every year goes that way, but some years it goes three weeks earlier than other years,” he said. “Some weeks, those periods of time are stretched out longer, and sometimes they’re short and furious. It just depends on the bees and the food.”
Adaptation is a skill he’s learned throughout his career, whether that’s responding to a hive that’s lost a queen bee or shifting seasonal patterns. Although it’s a helpful and necessary skill in his line of work, it takes a toll on his personal life.
“My life is very connected to this,” he said. “It’s not just a job. It is not nine-to-five. It is whatever it asks for. And if you don’t give it whatever it asks for, you’re not at it for very long. And that’s true of all my farmer friends.”
Demystifying the role of honeybees
Honeybees often face criticism for being nonnative and potentially competing with native pollinators like bumblebees. Priyadarshini Chakrabarti Basu, who holds a doctorate in zoology with a focus on wild Asian honeybees and is an assistant professor of pollinator health and apiculture at Washington State University, emphasized that such criticisms oversimplify a complex reality.
‘Climate change is … disrupting the synchronized
timing between plants and pollinators’
“These two groups, managed bees and wild bees, have very different purposes,” Basu said. “Honeybees have been introduced hundreds of years ago because they were needed for commercial pollination and honey production that wild bees necessarily will not be able to provide on a large scale for the global food production system.”
Like many native bees, honeybees are generalists, meaning they can collect nectar and pollen from a wide variety of flowers. This trait makes them vital not just for agricultural productivity but also for maintaining diverse ecosystems.
The impact of climate change
Basu and her students are researching how climate change is affecting honeybees’ access to food by studying changes in the quality and quantity of pollen and nectar. Their research involves exposing plants to simulated climate stressors — such as heat, drought and a combination of both — and analyzing how these conditions impact floral nutrition.
The team is also studying how climate change influences entire plant life cycles, including seed production after pollination.
“Under best circumstances, from one plant, after successful pollination, you can have enough seeds to create five other plants,” Basu said. “But with increasing heat and drought stress, we’re seeing a drop in seed production, and then you’re coming up with fewer plants for forage, so the overall quantity of forage would also shift.
Beyond nutrition and plant abundance, climate change is also disrupting the synchronized timing between plants and pollinators — a phenomenon Basu described as “pollination mismatch.”
“There could be bees emerging before the flowers are in bloom, or the flowers are blooming before the bees are emerging,” Basu said. “So the bee and the flower are not essentially able to sort of match up along the same time or the same location.”
Although their research is not yet complete, Basu reported they are beginning to see differences reflected by climate related variables.
Bears and bees
On top of climate and habit impact, bears pose an additional stressor on honeybees. While honey might be the obvious attraction, bears are often more interested in the brood, bee larvae, which has a meat-like taste and are packed with fat and protein.
To keep them out, Rienstra uses solar-powered electric fences, but each summer, a few determined bears break in, especially at the mountain sites.
“If I don’t go address it right then, the bear’s just going to trash a bunch more hives that night,” he said, “so I’ll either go repair the fence or get the big truck and lift, and go move those old beehives out.”
Sometimes, the bears don’t even bother hiding.
‘Beekeeping changed for everyone in the United States
when we got the varroa mite in 1987. It’s been devastating.
It is the single biggest killer of honeybees in the world.’
“I’ve twice now set up bear fences, in the dark, where the bear’s just 70 or 80 feet away, watching the whole time,” he said.
But despite their size, bears aren’t the biggest problem. That title goes to something far smaller: mites.
The global threat of the varroa mite
Jeffrey Harris, who holds a doctorate in insect physiology, works as an extension beekeeping specialist at Mississippi State University and has studied the impact of varroa mites on honeybees for over 26 years.
“I’ve been in beekeeping my whole life, and beekeeping changed for everyone in the United States when we got the varroa mite in 1987,” Harris said. “It’s been devastating. It is the single biggest killer of honeybees in the world.”
The mite feeds on bees to raise its young, transmitting deadly viruses in the process.
“Beekeepers are trying to wrestle with this beast in different ways, but we’re still averaging 35% to 40% loss now every year from this mite,” Harris said.
And that’s a nationwide loss.
Varroa mites are native parasites of the Eastern Apis cerana, a honey bee species that evolved natural defenses. But the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera — the commercial favorite due to its larger colonies and honey production — is defenseless.
“Those two bee species came into contact with each other, and some of the mites jumped onto a new host,” Harris said. “Our honeybee, the new host, has not had any evolutionary relationship to this mite at all, and so they’re defenseless. Whereas Apis cerana has evolved for eons with this parasite, and it has many, many defense mechanisms that our bees do not have. And this might not kill Apis cerana, but man, it kills our bees, so it’s been devastating ever since.”
As honeybees are transported all over the world for beekeeping, so are the mites. Australia was the last mite-free continent, until 2022.
Harris shared that recent hypotheses suggest varroa mites may also be affecting queen bee quality. Queens that once lived for two years now survive only six to nine months. Scientists are predicting that when the virus gets into the tissues of worker and drone bees, it eventually makes its way back to the colony.
“Then what can happen is drones are male bees — their only function is to mate with Queens — get loaded with viruses, and go off to mate with a queen, and it becomes a sexually transmitted disease.”
It doesn’t stop there. When that infested queen starts laying eggs, she can transmit the virus into her eggs.
“We call it vertical transmission, because she’s transferring a virus from her tissues into the next generation,” Harris said.
— By Sophie Cadran
Also read in Salish Current:
• “World buzzes over Lynden honeybee accident,” May 6, 2025
• “Invasive ‘murder hornets’ found in Washington have been eradicated, officials say,” Dec. 19, 2024
• “Giant hornet effort approaches milestone as another pest shows up,” Feb. 26, 2024
• “‘No Mow May’ keeps pollinators in mind,” May 12, 2023