We All Live Downstream, So Let the Honey Flow by Jordan Engel

Vandalism is the number one threat to beekeeping on surface mines.
These hives have been stolen, toppled, and shot at, leaving
no choice but to install this tall fence to protect the bees.

Biodiversity hotspots in the US

The Ecological Restoration class said our fond farewells to Dr. Tammy Horn today after spending three days touring her Eastern Kentucky bee yards on mountaintop removal mines. Our last day together was spent on a mine site in Letcher County. The largest of her yards, containing some twenty hives, is located here near the headwaters of three major rivers - the Cumberland, the Kentucky, and the Big Sandy. As the source of so many streams, the health of Eastern Kentucky's ecosystems has wide ranging effects for all those who live downstream. The ecological services provided by the mesophytic forest include filtration and purification of water, erosion control, and flood control, among many others. Eastern Kentucky is also home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world, much of which is endemic to the region and threatened with extinction as habitat loss and invasive species continue to disrupt the fragile ecosystem.

Tammy's project, Coal Country Bee Works, has worked for many years to restore the forests lost to surface mining in a way that better supports pollinator habitat. One of the most undervalued trees, says Tammy, is the sourwood. Blooming in early July, the sourwood provides a good source of pollen in the lull between the blooms of the spring and fall seasons. This is called a bridge species, and its importance in pollinator reclamation is vital. Conversely, pollinator reclamation is vital to the restoration of native ecosystems because about 90% of angiosperms rely on animal pollination.

Our work today involved continuing the process of dusting Tammy's hives with powered sugar, which induces the bees to clean themselves and rids their bodies of parasitic varroa mites. After two days of practice the group was efficient at this but perhaps most impressive was our handling of the hives on an overcast day when most of the bees were at home in the hives.

In the latter part of the day, we helped Tammy in her ongoing work to establish a queen production program. Bee genetics can make or break the viability of a hive, and queen rearing is how commercial beekeepers manipulate the evolutionary process. Through a process called grafting, we extracted larvae from a hive with desirable genetics and moved them into synthetic queen cups where worker bees would feed it a diet of royal jelly, developing them into queens. The queen bees produced from these mine sites will either replace Tammy's older queens or will be sold - further establishing hives in Central Appalachia that are genetically adapted to the region. From these hives, Tammy hopes to restore the tradition of commercial beekeeping in the mountains. Thinking ahead, she's starting a new economy on the back of the old one.

Karen Reynolds searches for tiny worker larvae

Jordan Engel attempts queen grafting.