Caring for Pollinators - Bundesamt für Naturschutz

Fonseca, Saraiva, Gonçalves, de Jong, Alves, Menezes, Francoy Brazilian Pollinators
Initiative
the AHB is the only honey bee found in nature and used in commercial beekeeping. At the
beginning of this new era of beekeeping, especially in the 1960s, the Africanized bees
caused serious concern due to stinging incidents; numerous social and economic problems
were caused by its aggressiveness and high tendency to swarm. At that time, the chaotic
period of our beekeeping history, researchers had no information available about the biology
of these new bees, and beekeepers did not know how to handle them; consequently many of
them abandoned their apiaries. However, fortunately thanks to the continuous scientific and
technical support of researchers and technicians, today the biology and behavior of the AHB
is better understood. The number of scientific and technical publications about bees
increased more than 30 times after the arrival of the African bees. Beekeeping technology in
Brazil improved considerably, so that today there is now no need to import beekeeping
equipment and working with these bees became possible. Brazilian honey production before
1956 was about 5,000 tons/year; today it is more than 50,000 tons/year. These bees thrive
in climates where European bees did not survive, making beekeeping viable throughout the
country. An important feature of the AHB is that they have been little affected by the mite
Varroa destructor, one of the world’s most important enemies of honey bees, which
appeared in the 1970s in Brazil. Honey bees in other countries must be treated with
acaricides in order to survive this mite. However, fortunately, the AHB rapidly became
tolerant to Varroa. As a result, no chemical products are imported or needed to treat for this
mite; indeed, Brazilian beekeepers do not treat their colonies for any disease or parasite.
This makes Brazilian honey ‘naturally’ organic. Brazil has not traditionally been an important
honey exporter. However, since 2000 the international honey market changed after
problems with contaminated Chinese honey; consequently, Brazil became a large-scale
honey exporter. Since 2004, Brazil annually exports around 20,000 tons of honey, especially
organic honey; the Northeast region of Brazil (with considerable native vegetation: Caatinga,
Cerrado etc.) is responsible for about 30% of the exported honey, produced mainly by Piauí
and Ceará states. However, beekeeping in that region still needs developing; beekeepers
lose about 50% of their colonies every year due to swarming and absconding. Brazil has
today about 2,500,000 colonies available for bee products production (propolis, pollen, wax,
royal jelly, bee venom and honey, including organic honey) and for pollination purposes.
There are already many beekeepers who rent colonies for pollination in Brazil, especially for
apples and melons. In order to obtain export quality fruit, bee pollination is absolutely
necessary. The aggressiveness and swarming behavior of the AHB are still a serious
problem for beekeepers and for the public. In order to understand and control swarming
behavior of AHB, we set up a project on swarming behavior induced by temperature using a
climatic chamber both in Ribeirão Preto-São Paulo state and Mossoró-Rio Grande do Norte
state. We observed that many factors can influence the colony and provoke colony
abandonment, such as: lack of water, high temperature, lack of food and other types of
stress. A key factor, according to our findings, is temperature. We observed in our
experiments that when the temperature reaches about 41 o C inside the hive, there is an exit
in mass of all colony individuals (absconding), leaving behind brood and food. This helps
explain the great loss of colonies due to absconding in the northeast every year. In other
research we have shown that the AHB is superior to European honey bees for pollination
purposes; however, before we can fully explore their potential the difficulties with managing
AHB for pollination in the field must be resolved. The main difficulties are:
68