First Native Hawaiian Beekeeping Class on Molokai a Success

Against the red dirt and blue sky background of Molokai, in their brand new suits with their hats on and veils up, the class looked like a group of rather tentative astronauts on their first mission. They milled around the truck, adjusting sleeves and tugging on elbow length gloves, talking to each other in hushed voices as Scott gathered the smokers from the bed of the pickup. “Now, lighting these isn’t as easy as it seems,” he warned, “In fact, I think it’s the most difficult thing about bee keeping.” It certainly seems easy, in theory. After all, the smokers are nothing more than a glorified hand-held bellows, with a chamber that holds the burning material, an air-filled bag you squeeze to keep the flame going, and a nozzle where the smoke exits. But as Scott divided the class into smaller groups and handed out a smoker to each one, it soon became evident that he wasn’t kidding.

The class gathered around their respective smokers. Under Scott’s instruction, they ripped and wadded up chunks of dead grass which they then stuffed into the smoker’s chamber. The hardest part seemed to be getting the material to burn long and strong enough to keep the flame going until the bag could be squeezed to feed the nascent fire with air. The class crouched around their smokers, crowded together, white hats touching, as they offered each other encouragement and advice. Again, the visual was one of some strange, futuristic ritual: an analogy that was humorous, true, but also completely off the mark. Because, the truth was, while the class might look alien in their full gear, this was a group of people who were dealing with a very real, very local, and very immediate problem. They were about to meet what they hope was the solution.

A few tries and four clumps of dead grass later, everyone in the class had successfully lit a smoker. Scott flashed the group a thumbs-up sign, his big grin evident even through the mesh of the veil. “Great job, guys,” he said. “I’m serious. That was the hardest part.” He himself was holding a smoker, its contents burning merrily.  “Everyone ready? Good. Let’s go meet the girls.”

All 50,000 of them.  

It should be evident by now that this class isn’t your run-of-the-mill University offering. In fact, the Molokai Native Hawaiian Beginning Beekeeping Class is something of a pilot program, a collaboration between the University of Hawaii’s Honeybee Project and the UH/CTAHR Cooperative Extension on Molokai. In a nutshell, its goals are twofold. It aims to teach local farmers how to keep bee hives (and this includes understanding bee biology, behavior, and how to ensure that hives are healthy and happy) as well as educating farmers in alternative farming practices that can increase pollination rates. As progressive and beneficial as this idea sounds, a decade ago the program would most likely have been dismissed straight away. A decade ago, it might even have been called ‘un-needed,’ or ‘unnecessary.’ So what has changed?

            The most obvious answer is that farmers on all Hawaiian Islands and Molokai in particular, have recently shifted to farming higher-profit crops: mainly the cucurbits which include honeydew melon, watermelon, pumpkin, and various species of squashes. The problem with this transition was that cucurbits, unlike banana and papaya, rely on bees for pollination and fruit production. Populations of wild pollinators, once adequate for pollinating non-bee dependent crops, suddenly could not keep up with the increased planting of cucurbits. Farmers would often find their fruit misshapen on the vine and unfit for market. Additionally, although local farmers prepared their land and their soils for the transition to cucurbits, they did not alter other key farming practices such as the type of pesticides they sprayed and the frequency of their use. Often, they would continue to spray their new bee-dependent crops with chemicals that were inimical to the very pollinators they depended on. This lack of critical knowledge about pollinators meant that although local farmers were growing higher profit crops, they were often struggling with poor harvests and low yields. It is no surprise then that within just the last couple of years farmers have begun to seriously consider keeping their own hives solely for the benefits of pollination. Castle, whose farm is an innovative mix of watermelon and a shade crop called buckwheat, summed it up best when he told us, “I don’t care about the honey. It’s the bees I want. Just the bees.” 

But that’s where the story gets complicated. Because, not only do these local farmers know very little about bee keeping, but in the last three years, it has become exponentially more difficult to maintain hives in Hawaii. It all began in 2008, when an arachnid named Varroa destructor, more commonly called the Varroa mite, or just Varroa, arrived.

It was only after years of experimenting with various pesticides, educating local farmers on beekeeping and hive maintenance, and rebuilding destroyed colonies back up to working strength, that  local farmers have begun to recover from the sheer colony losses sustained by the mite. And then just when things were looking up, enter the small hive beetle in 2010. Arriving on the literal heels of Varroa, and with just as much warning, the beetle infiltrated wild and domesticated colonies and began to breed. Unlike Varroa, the small hive beetle is large enough to easily spot with the naked eye and the damage it causes is unmistakable. If left unattended in a hive, individuals will consume everything, from pollen to honey to bee larva growing in their cells. In fact, they are so destructive that they are capable of reducing a functioning colony to nothing more than a pile of mush.

No one knows quite how the small hive beetle made the jump from O’ahu to Molokai but jump it did. In May of 2011 it was found in the hives of Brenda and Dennis Kaneshiro, two of the island’s largest commercial beekeepers. Although it has not yet spread of other domesticated colonies, more beetle populations are guaranteed to exist within the unmonitored feral hives on the island. And the reality is, without the total extermination of all individuals from Hawaii, the beetle will continue to spread.

So, in essence, Molokai stands at what has become a very convoluted crossroads. The small hive beetle is present but in currently low numbers. Varroa hasn’t yet arrived but time is ticking there too. Given this ecologically precarious situation, the farmers’ desire to transition to bee-dependent crops might at first seem like an incredibly risky idea. The truth is, however, that the timing couldn’t be better. O’ahu and the Big Island were hit so hard by both bee parasites because the majority of their small scale farmers relied on unprotected wild hives which quickly succumbed to the pests. Molokai farmers, on the other hand, with their new interest in maintaining apiaries of their own just might be able to avoid a similar disaster. By domesticating wild colonies and/or capturing swarms, farmers remove individuals from unprotected conditions and place them in colonies whose health can easily be monitored. The bees benefit, the farmers benefit, and an ecological crisis is diverted. 

This plethora of reasons was why the Molokai Native Hawaiian Beginning Beekeeping Class was first launched, and why these some twenty students were all suited up like extraterrestrials under the hot, tropical sun. It was why, underneath their excitement, they were deadly serious about trying to absorb and learn every little detail they were taught. It was why not one of them flinched when Scoot, with the liberal use of his smoker, cracked open the class hive and encouraged them to come and take frames swarming with hundreds of bees. This class wasn't about grades- it was about livelihoods, about sustainability of both farming practices and farming families.