This story originally ran in the Charleston City Paper’s 2016 food issue under the headline “What Can We Learn From Dorchester County’s Bee-Killing Debacle?”. The article is no longer online, but the original text is preserved below.
When 2.3 million of Juanita Stanley’s honeybees were accidentally killed by a pesticide spray, her business was not the only thing she had to worry about.
Ten Lowcountry farms -- most in Dorchester County -- were lined up to use her bees as pollinators next spring to increase the yield on their crops.
Many farmers use honeybees to increase their crop yield. From beans and broccoli to persimmons and peaches, 80 percent of crops need pollinators like bees in order to grow, according to David Shields, author of Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine and Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
“Anytime there’s an absence of pollinators is very, very difficult. They’re absolutely necessary,” Shields said. “Any time the pollinator population is in peril is a potential crisis situation.”
Some farmers rent bees from beekeepers like Stanley, who had 60 hives before a Dorchester County aerial pesticide spray accidentally killed 48 of them (12 were safely offsite, split between a pecan farm and an organic multi-crop farm). Others, like Cheri Ward of Blue Pearl Farms, keep their own.
Ward has kept bees on her McClellanville blueberry farm for 15 years. The first year she brought bees on the property, her blueberry crop increased by more than 25 percent. A well-kept bee population can double a crop’s yield, Ward said
Beekeepers must take steps to ensure the aerial pesticide sprays bypass their land. The pesticides used in the Lowcountry -- Naled in Dorchester County and Trumpet EC in Charleston County -- coat the insects they come in contact with, killing them. The sprays are intended to kill mosquitos that carry infectious diseases, including those that could potentially carry Zika, although no Zika-carrying mosquitoes have been found in South Carolina to date.
Keepers can prevent their bees from getting in contact with the spray by adding their property to a county registry. Those on the registry are supposed to be alerted in advance of aerial spraying so they can keep their bees in the hive and away from the deadly pesticides. Dorchester County did not alert some registered beekeepers of the spraying that killed Stanley’s bees and others in late August, and has since apologized.
But even when beekeepers shield their hives from deadly pesticides, the wild pollinators -- butterflies, dragonflies, wild bees and others -- are still killed, impacting the level of pollination a farm’s crops can receive. The pesticide is not species-specific, so it cannot target the disease-carrying mosquitoes while sparing the pollinators.
“The tragedy of what’s going on is that this broad-spectrum spray is being applied to all of our pollinators,” Ward said. “The environment depends on all of our creatures.”
The pesticide’s impact on wild pollinators combined with the accidental deaths of bees likes Stanley’s could result in lower yields for some Lowcountry farmers if they cannot find a way to make up for the loss. Unlike the Midwest and the West Coast, there are few, if any, bee “mega-farms” in South Carolina with millions of bees and dozens of hives, Shields said.
Without access to the hives that they are accustomed to renting out, yields could be smaller. Despite a smaller supply, farmers like Ward would likely be unable to significantly raise the price of their produce because of competition.
“The farm would definitely feel an impact. Whenever you have variations in the crop supply, if you’re the only one impacted, you can’t really raise your prices that much,” Ward said. “We could probably raise prices a little, but we probably would choose not to.”
If farmers see smaller crop yields as a result of fewer pollinators, they could be hurt far more than local farm-to-table restaurants, Shields said. When one local farmer’s crop decreases, there is likely another local farmer with enough produce to go around.
“It’s not like Thomas Keller at the French Laundry where they only use food from their own garden,” Shields said. “It’s rare that a restaurant depends on one farm.”
If faced with higher prices or lower availability, some chefs at farm-to-table restaurants would still work to maintain their food’s local routes. Jacob Huder, chef de cuisine at The Macintosh, doesn’t anticipate an issue with pollinators affecting the farmers he works with anytime soon, recalling one farmer recently discussing bringing in more bees for a fall bean crop.
“We would fight as long as we could to support local produce, but I think we’re years away from facing that,” Huder said. “In the Lowcountry, we’re not facing a huge problem right now. We’re not losing a lot of bees. What you’re going to see first, the bigger effects will be the larger farms like almond orchards in California where they have to ship in thousands of hives for the crop to grow.”
If there was an unexpected shortage of local produce, Edmund’s Oast Executive Chef Reid Henninger said he would work with what was still available local before exploring other options. Without boxes of fresh vegetables at his disposal, he could shift to an “old bistro menu” heavy with beef, pork and potatoes.
But Henninger is also mostly unconcerned about pollinator issues affecting the food supply chain. Having come to Charleston less than two years ago after previously worked in New Orleans, he’s still in awe of the amount of fresh, local produce chefs can acquire in the Lowcountry.
“There’s so much variety that I almost sometimes feel guilty,” Henninger said. “At the end of the day, I just have to make some calls, tap out a few texts, and somehow there’s always a bunch of stuff that ends up at our door in the morning. With talented people and some controlled chaos, you can turn it into a meal and serve it.”