From Maydha Devarajan, Chatham News + Record
Tucked off the highway is a community of hundreds of thousands at work.
Their office, near U.S. Hwy. Business 64 East, is nestled between holly trees and blueberry bushes, and their busy schedule keeps them confined to a number of tasks at hand — so blink too quickly and you might miss an appearance.
Who are these workers? Honey bees at Pittsboro’s Water Recovery Center.
The bees are at the heart of a series of pollinator gardens that Chatham Park has planned, the first of which was installed at the WRC last summer. A second installation with beehives was put into place at Mosaic at Chatham Park this spring.
“What we’re trying to do is establish these pollination stations all throughout Chatham Park to provide honey bee pollination coverage to the entire development,” said Bill Oestereich, a property manager with Preston Development, Chatham Park’s developers. “By the time we’re done, we’ll have these stations all over the place.”
A pollinator garden — dubbed a “pollination station” by Jody Moore, the N.C. Master Beekeeper on the project — is intended to attract bees, butterflies, birds, moths and other insects with the goal of supporting pollinators by providing them a source of nectar and pollen.
The garden at the WRC has eight bee hives — each with 30,000 to 40,000 bees, depending on the time of the year — that have been shaped to mimic a hollow tree trunk. In addition to hives, Chatham Park has also implemented native pollinator condos like birdhouses for bees and other pollinators.
‘Little safe spaces’
The bees at both sites were raised by Moore, the owner of Rocky River Bee Farm and the former president of the Chatham County Beekeepers’ Association. Moore, who has been keeping bees since 2000, transported the bees from his 15-acre farm south of Pittsboro.
For Moore, beekeeping began as an “expensive hobby” but eventually turned into a full-time gig. More than a decade ago, he set up Rocky River Bee Farm; now, through the registered business, he raises bees, sells local honey, offers consultation services to local beekeepers and even performs bee extractions — the most recent was off the ledge of a roof at Mosaic a few weeks ago.
In the case of the Chatham Park pollination stations, Moore appreciates that native plants are being incorporated as a requirement into the gardens.
Honey bees also typically have a range of a couple miles from their hive, Moore said, a factor that was taken into consideration when planning the locations for the stations.
“It’s great that they’re given a chance for these pollinators that would otherwise just have been pretty much wiped out,” he said. “And it’s pretty cool that they’ve got these little safe spaces within the area to thrive.”
The idea for incorporating the stations into Chatham Park started even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to Oestereich. He said the pollination stations follow along with a set of core beliefs at Chatham Park — namely the idea of “stewardship.”
“We wanted to see if in a project as large as Chatham Park, where we’re developing almost 8,000 acres, if we could do something on a large scale that would make a difference with pollinators and honeybees,” Oestereich said.
Bees as pollinators
One in every three bites of food a person takes is because of the work of pollinators, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And within that group, honey bee colonies managed by humans are the primary pollinators, responsible for increasing the country’s crop values annually by more than $15 million.
Managing honey bee colonies is no easy task. Rocky River Bee Farm has about a dozen bee yards across the county, and Moore pays regular visits to each.
In the spring, he goes into the hives every seven days to make sure the bees aren’t swarming — a natural process in which a honey bee colony reproduces to split into more colonies, but something that beekeepers try to avoid because the bees often don’t survive due to lack of forage or being overcome by pests, and because they may take up residence in someone’s home.
During a visit to the WRC’s pollination station, Moore carefully pulled out frames in one of the hives to show the honey bees at work.
The drones and worker bees remained clustered closely together, but were clearly busy, crawling up and down the plastic honeycomb foundation to fulfill their duties. An onlooker would be able to spot larvae, tucked like little grains of rice in cells (the only one to remain hidden was the elusive queen bee).
In spending time out in the garden with Moore, it’s clear he was in his element, rattling off facts about bees and answering what were probably elementary-level questions with a never-ending supply of patience. But it’s also clear he has a great deal of respect for the pollinators.
“Going into a hive, and just to understand how much goes on in there, and that it’s all coordinated — there’s so many individuals, but, ‘Wow, they work as a single unit,’” he said. “It’s really mind-blowing. And the more you learn about them, the more you realize what you don’t know.”
A tricky time
At the moment, the bees are in a summer dearth, a dry period between spring and fall flowers in which there is a shortage of nectar sources.
Late summer is a tricky time to be a beekeeper, Moore said, because he’ll need to maintain enough food for the bees, manage high mite counts and ensure the bees being raised now are strong enough to raise the bees that have to survive through the winter.
Rebekah Gunn, a veterinary pathologist and the president of the Chatham County Beekeepers Association, said two of the biggest challenges faced by honey bees are varroa mites and a lack of forage.
The mites, first identified in North Carolina in 1980, have contributed significantly to cutting back honey bee populations in the state, according to the N.C. Cooperative Extension. The red-brown parasites have decimated wild honey bee colonies.
Moore uses organic treatments in his colonies, implementing “Integrated Pest Management” with the Chatham Park hives. IPM is applied through multiple tactics to target pests and minimize risks, keeping sustainability and effectiveness in mind, the N.C. Cooperative Extension states.
When it comes to a lack of forage, Gunn said honey bees are “phenomenal” at regulating their own environment inside a hive, but they still need food, regardless of where in the country they might be located.
“I mean, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bee in Alaska, or you’re a bee in Florida, or you’re a bee in North Carolina, or any other pollinator — you need a food source,” Gunn said.
On an individual scale, she said people don’t often realize that their green manicured lawns or knockout rose bushes — common in many suburban front yards — have no nutritional value to pollinators (and in the case of lawns, have plenty of harmful chemicals).
Instead, Gunn recommends growing native plants, which offer forage and support to pollinators.
Pollinator gardens also provide a greater awareness to the public, she believes.
“It’s amazing to me to watch the quote-unquote ‘general public’ or non-beekeepers walking out at Chatham Mills [which has its own pollinator garden],” she said. “They walk past a plant that’s full of things like paper wasps and honey bees, and all kinds of other things that out of context might elicit a fear response in people, but yes, they see them on these beautiful flowers and they’re not scary. And so I think then that people begin to have this awareness about pollinators around us.”
For people looking to keep bees, it’s important to be aware of the work involved and to provide regular maintenance to the colonies, she said. From overharvesting honey to keeping too many bees in one spot, Gunn said there’s little sometimes done in managing bees “that’s actually what bees would prefer to do.”
“More and more people are getting into it, which is both good and bad,” she said.
Ultimately, it’s crucial to keep in mind native pollinators and a balance of quantity with quality when it comes to managing honey bees, she said.
Pollinator gardens
In designing the WRC pollinator garden, the landscape architects on the project pulled a great deal of information produced by the N.C. Cooperative Extension, Oestereich said.
Debbie Roos is an agricultural extension agent with the Chatham County Center of N.C. Cooperative Extension. Moore calls her the “go-to person” in the area when it comes to pollinator gardens.
Roos, who began working on a pollinator garden at Chatham Mills in Pittsboro more than 14 years ago, now has over 225 species of pollinator plants in the demonstration garden, which is maintained by volunteers and is open to visitors for tours. Her website, growingsmallfarms.ces.ncsu.edu, has resources on everything from apiculture and pollinator conservation to pest management and crop production.
Roos was part of early conversations about the pollination stations across Chatham Park, but wasn’t involved in the development of the project. She said she’s glad to see Chatham Park put in the gardens.
“Absolutely, I mean, if they’re building out all these places, we want them to be able to benefit wildlife, especially considering they had to take down habitat to put Chatham Park in,” Roos said.
She also emphasized the educational aspect of pollination gardens. The past 15 years of her work in this area has largely been working towards one goal: to empower people, whether it’s on an individual or large scale, to incorporate native and pollinator plants into their environments.
“So that’s the idea of it, is looking at how we can help,” Roos said. “Even in urban settings, whether it’s your backyard or in a natural area, or downtown Pittsboro, how we can provide floral resources, nesting resources, shelter, protection from pesticides, of course is important, and how we can provide all of that for pollinators.”
Anyone can make a difference to support pollinators, she said.
“It doesn’t have to be huge, you can make a difference by planting milkweeds in your yard to help monarchs, that kind of thing,” Roos said.
Similarly, Moore said there are several things homeowners can do to assist pollinators: planting different types of native plants (like fruit trees, ornamentals and flower gardens), avoiding pesticides or restricting use to the late evenings, and keeping a bird bath.
“You’d be amazed how many honey bees you could draw to a birdbath,” he said. “And that really does help them this time of year.”
Eventually, the WRC plans to host educational tours of the center and the pollination station. In the past year, Oestereich said they were able to harvest 248 pounds of honey from the hives, which they’ve given out at realtor events and to business associates. At some point, Chatham Park developers may sell the honey that was harvested from the hives, but Oestereich said they also want to avoid being in competition with Moore.
Preston Development is also in talks with Strata Solar to potentially install Chatham Park’s third pollination station.
Oestereich, who worked closely with Moore on the project, said he didn’t have such an intimate knowledge of honey bees prior to the program as he does now. Over time, the bees have become “[his] family.”
It seems like the goal for visitors to Chatham Park’s gardens is to develop a similar appreciation for the pollinators around them.
“It’s a never-ending sense of wonder,” Moore said. “It’s this really fascinating thing.”
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I sincerely hope the developers inform the new residents of Chatham Park about the dangers of pesticides (including spraying for mosquitos) after doing all this work to bolster pollinator numbers.
It would be a great thing for the HOA to prohibit any invasive species in personal or communal landscaping. If they really care about all of the scalping of habitat they have done and will do they should plant ONLY native trees, grasses, plants and flowers as well.
Please!