A drought has gripped Chile for 13 years and the flowers that fed Carlos Peralta’s honeybees around the central town of Colina have grown increasingly scarce.
Peralta said that he has lost about 300 hives since early November and was left with a choice: try to keep the 900 that remained alive with an artificial nectar, or move them to a place where flowers and pollen are more abundant.
“If the bees die, we all die... The bee is life,” he said, referring to the insects’ role in pollinating wild and commercial plants, and helping Chile maintain its position as a major fruit exporter.
Photo: AP
Peralta decided to move his operations about 1,000km to the south, to Puerto Montt.
Andres Gonzalez, a regional expert on biodiversity for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said that a reduced population of pollinating insects “has to do ... with the use of pesticides and fertilizers, monocultures, droughts caused in great part by climate change and by bad management of [water] resources.”
These factors and parasites have hit bee populations globally, and Chile has seen its exports of honey plunge over the past four to five years — a decline also aggravated by transport difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Marco Peralta chose to stay in Colina rather than join his brother Carlos in the south, saying that he feared losing bees to pesticides if he moved.
An FAO study in 2018 found that Chilean imports of pesticides had grown by 460 percent over the previous two decades — a trend that beekeepers blame for part of their losses.
“You enter an orchard with your bees and you don’t know if you’ll come out with living bees or dead ones,” Carlos Peralta said.
Marco Peralta has been feeding his bees with sugar water augmented with other nutrients, although that leaves them unable to produce honey.
“The bees grow weak [with sugar water]. It’s like eating just pasta every day,” said Mario Flores, a beekeeper in the southern town of Temuco.
Teresa Sarmiento, president of a beekeepers’ association in Colina, compared it to “giving a sweet to a hungry child.”
Before the drought, beekeepers would use the substitute food during some winter periods, but now the practice continues nearly year-round.
The substitute lacks proteins that bees need to develop their bodies and nervous systems, and it leaves them more vulnerable to illnesses, Gonzalez said.
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