Richard Reich of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture (right) presents Jim Blome, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience LP with the official proclamation from the governor's office.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- This week, Bayer CropScience celebrated the one-year anniversary of its North American Bee Care Center.
The center, located in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is part of the company's efforts to bring together technological, scientific and academic resources to promote improved honey bee health, product stewardship and sustainable agriculture.
“We are excited to celebrate an incredibly successful year for our North American Bee Care Center, which was developed to further our agricultural investment and protect resources critical to the success of growers around the world” said Jim Blome, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience LP. “The center helps us leave a better world through protecting pollinator health and providing a more sustainable future for growers who depend on honey bees to pollinate their crops. The research and development innovations developed here are a necessary component of providing enough safe, healthy food to nourish a rapidly expanding global population.”
Becky Langer, the program manager of the North American Bee Care Center, said the center has made major strides for pollinator health through education and outreach efforts.
Becky Langer“We’ve had more than 3,000 visitors come through the doors of the Bee Care Center in our first year,” she said. “That’s 4-year-olds to 80-year-olds, from preschoolers or beekeepers or customers. We’ve hosted them all. It’s been fun to see people understand the true challenges the bees are facing and what they can do to help.”
Richard Reich of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture was on hand to present the company with an official proclamation from the governor's office that April 27 would be known as "Honey Bee Day" in North Carolina.
The center, part of Bayer CropSciences’ more than $12 million investment in bee health last year, hosts researchers including entomologists, apiarists and graduate students who develop comprehensive solutions for bee health. Some of the accomplishments of these scientists and the Bayer Bee Care Program over the past year include:
- Developing new non-invasive technologies known as Smart Hives to track changes in colony health and help improve hive management.
- Developing and testing new delivery systems, including the novel Varroa Gate technology, to prevent colony re-infestation by Varroa mites during the summer.
- Hosting more than 3,000 visitors at the North American Bee Care Center and participating in more than 100 conferences, meetings and tradeshows dedicated to pollinator health.
- Establishing a bee health student research platform, involving visiting graduate students and sponsored research projects among universities.
- Launching “Feed a Bee,” a major initiative to increase forage for honey bees and other pollinators, including growing 50 million flowers and providing additional forage acreage in 2015.
- Working with the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) to create bee-attractant habitats along highway rights-of-ways.
- Working with Project Apis m. to establish pollinator patches across 130 miles in Kansas and 3,000 acres of bee forage in California and Washington.
- Developing Bayer’s Fluency Agent, an innovative technology that significantly reduces airborne dust associated with corn seed planting to reduce potential bee exposure.
- Promoting Bayer’s CARE Program, emphasizing communication and stewardship of Bayer CropScience products and the long-term viability of modern farming.
For more on any of these initiatives, download the Bayer CropScience North American Bee Care Center Annual Report, available at http://bit.ly/1HO6JF9.
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The 6,000 square-foot center houses a full laboratory with a teaching and research apiary, honey extraction and hive maintenance space; interactive learning center; and meeting, training and presentation facilities for beekeepers, farmers and educators, as well as office space for a full staff and graduate students. On-site honey bee colonies, pollinator-friendly gardens and a screened hive observation area have advanced education and collaboration to foster significant improvement in honey bee health and stewardship measures and best management practices.
For the anniversary event, the center also had a product station, which prominently featured Bayer’s newest insecticide, Sivanto, a Butenolide-class chemical that has been lauded for its friendliness to pollinators. Sivanto is currently registered for row crops, but Mark Schneid, chief marketing officer, NA, Bayer CropScience LP, expects it to be available for ornamentals under a different brand name by 2017. Schneid stressed that Sivanto and its active ingredient, flupyradifurone, is not as broad-spectrum as imidacloprid, the active ingredient in some neonicotinoid insecticides.
“We still believe strongly and the science supports our position that neonics have a very important place in offering safe and effective control of pests in these environments when used properly, protecting the health of beehives,” Schneid said. “We also are continuing to work on innovation not as alternatives or replacements but as additional tools that can be used in the toolbox to help our growers get the effective results they need while protecting pollinators and the environment.”
Bayer products on display in the center
During the event, Bayer CropScience announced Healthy Hives 2020, a new initiative aimed at improving pollinator health. The company is organizing a workshop on June 2-3 with the goal of determining present honey bee health conditions in the U.S. and setting three tangible and assessable initiatives to improve honey bee health by the year 2020. The best ideas from the inaugural meeting will become part of an action plan that will include sponsored research through collaborations with various organizations as well as research conducted directly by the North American Bayer Bee Care Center.
Also at the event, the company announced its pledge of $100,000 to the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) to be used for the development of roadside pollinator plantings this spring. The project will provide approximately 46 new acres of bee-attractant vegetation alongside North Carolina’s roads and highways, such as wildflower beds that promote honey bee population development and support crop pollination.
Bayer’s partnership with the NCDOT is the most recent in a series of collaborations that Bayer is forging as part of its recently launched Feed a Bee campaign that has a goal of growing 50 million flowers and providing additional forage acreage for bees in 2015.
Langer said the company plans to blend the Feed a Bee program with its Smart Hive technology. Smart Hives are digital sensor that monitor hives and provide information about what is happening inside. “We’re going to partner with select golf courses to have Smart Hive applications installed into the bee hives they already have present on their courses,” Langer said. “Then we are going to analyze the health of the bees in relation to the products the golf courses are applying to the hives.”
