Sometime in 2018, Bay Shore apiarist Tom Santorelli was alarmed when he noticed that the bees in his hives were dying prematurely.
The Italian honeybees, which have a lifespan of up to six weeks, were perishing sooner, he said, because of insufficient nectar, a nutrient key to their survival.
“If there’s not enough food for the [honey]bees, there’s definitely not enough food for bumblebees and whatever else is out there,” Santorelli, 65, said.
Santorelli took his concerns to John Cochrane Jr., an Islip Town councilman. Cochrane recalled visiting Santorelli's hives and being disheartened by the bees' death. “I was upset and concerned...It’s like he’s the mother hen for these hives.”
Spurred by Santorelli, Cochrane said he sought input from local environmentalists to address the issues affecting the bees' mortality.
After determining that more pollinator-friendly plants were needed to provide nectar and pollen for bees, Cochrane drafted a resolution recommending that all developments set aside a minimum of 10% of their landscaped area for pollinator-friendly vegetation. Bees play an essential role in pollinating food crops. And, honeybees, some of the only bees to live in a colony, are supreme foragers, leaving little resources, which are already limited, for solitary bees and other pollinators.
The recommendation was unanimously passed in June 2020 by the town board. The town also drafted a list of pollinator-friendly plants that they recommend designers use. The town engineering department said the town board could require specific future projects to include bee-friendly plantings . Since 2020, the town has renewed its efforts on educating property owners and architects when they submit development plans.
"The applicant and their design team propose a planting plan, and staff evaluate the proposals verifying compliance, viability and theoretical survivorship of the plantings to be placed," the town engineering department said in a statement Friday.
A Newsday review of other Long Island town codes shows no such recommendation or requirement for developers to include bee-friendly plants in their design. Brookhaven Town requires native plantings between solar panels, which could be helpful to native wildlife, including pollinators.
The beekeeper of Bay Shore
Santorelli, who formerly worked in the music industry, developed his passion for beekeeping after reading a book about bees. His first year was a journey fraught with trial and error, and dead bees.
Tom Santorelli inspects the frames inside his beehives at the St. Peter's by-the-Sea Episcopal Church farm in Bay Shore on April 21.
Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
On a recent April day, he inspected the two hives he keeps at the St. Peter's by-the-Sea Episcopal Church farm in Bay Shore for the business he founded eight years ago, Tomaso’s Apiary. As the pollinators swarmed over each other, buzzing and flapping their translucent wings at a mind-boggling 230 beats per second, Santorelli — barehanded but in light-colored clothing and a protective face covering — deconstructed the hives, methodically scanning the hexagon-shaped beeswax cells for pollen, bee larvae or any pests, like Varroa mites or small hive beetles.
He has mastered the art of keeping a colony alive and learned to “read” the frames — where the bees make their honeycomb — which can indicate the health and diet of the bees. During his recent visit, one hive appeared healthier than its companion, so Santorelli planned to provide them with sugar syrup. On a good year, he harvests 2,500 pounds of honey.
“Through observation, learning, they kind of talk to you in a way,” he said. “In a box, you open it up, you got something to gauge from. ... The hive is a great diagnostic tool to see what’s going on in the environment."
Pollinators at risk
A push to save bees and other pollinators comes amid a global decline in bee populations, which is being addressed by the federal government. The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture in 2019 awarded nearly $4 million in grants to fund pollinator-health projects.
John Turner, a senior conservation policy advocate at Seatuck Environmental Association in East Islip, said Long Island used to be filled with wildflowers, especially in the former Hempstead Plains, a once expansive prairie of native grassland. The post-World War II housing boom was the “final death knell” for the plains, Turner said.
“It’s become a global issue and certainly one that’s been a focus on Long Island to promote and increase habitats where pollinators can go through their whole lifecycle,” Turner said.
Tens of thousands of acres on Long Island are what Turner calls “hostile habitats” for pollinators. His own yard in Setauket was hostile until he introduced pollinator-friendly wildflowers to his garden, and now “come August and September, it is like a riotous airport with bees flying around,” he said.
When Santorelli noticed the decline in his bees, nearby housing construction was ongoing, he said, which he suspected contributed to the dwindling nectar supply. His two Bay Shore hives are doing better but he supplements their diets with sugar syrup when needed.
Bee-friendly tips
The idea of uprooting your yard and replacing everything with native, pollinator-friendly plants is intimidating and certainly doesn’t have to be done all at once, said conservation policy advocate John Turner.
Even something as simple as adding pollinator-friendly flowers to only one section of your yard can provide a needed boost to bees. He recommended planting native wildflowers, blazing stars, goldenrod, as pictured here, asters and milkweed, which can also bolster monarch butterfly populations.
If planting flowers is out of your wheelhouse, Turner suggested focusing on insect welfare by limiting chemicals. It’s also easy to construct bee habitats; he suggested Googling “bee hotels” for a step-by-step guide.
The decline of bee populations was a “slow, gradual process," Turner said, adding that on Long Island, the mass use of pesticides and harmful chemicals throughout the '60s during the real estate boom contributed to the decline. A 2017 report from the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit, shows that more than half of North America’s native bees are dying.
“The real world implications of a loss of pollinators and a loss of insects in general is potentially — at the risk of sounding a bit dramatic — catastrophic to human society,” Turner said.
Bee-friendly vegetation
Bees play a vital role in the pollination of fruits and vegetables, which the Center for Biological Diversity says is a $3 billion annual industry for the United States alone. With no pollinators, or even declining pollinators, your favorite nuts, spices, vegetables and fruits are at risk. Without pollinators, “you’d be hard-pressed to put together a meal,” Turner said.
Tom Wilk, a Queens beekeeper and Empire State Honey Producers Association director for the New York City-Long Island district, said while the lack of nectar contributes to bee deaths, it's also an indicator of overpopulation.
Wilk, who keeps six hives in Lattingtown Village in Nassau County, said with the addition of honeybees comes even more of a fight for limited resources, putting the region's 250 native bees, like carpenter or bumblebees, at risk of starvation. Islip's recommendation won't be an overnight fix for pollinators, but it's putting them on the right track by expanding their food access, he said.
“I agree with getting municipalities to push for the planting of flowers," he said. "Having more flowers and more pollinator-friendly plants is one of the things that I preach more than having more bees."
With Laura Mann and Judy Weinberg
A bee's world
Each hive, roughly the size of a filing cabinet, holds tens of thousands of bees.
Worker bees scour the land for nectar that they carry back to the hive in one of their two stomachs (called a honey stomach). There, the nectar is transformed into honey and stored in one of the hexagon-shaped cells.
While the bees perform the honeymaking task, the queen bee focuses on replenishing her colony, since the worker bees die after about six weeks. The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day.
Brinley Hineman covers the Town of Hempstead and the City of Long Beach for Newsday. She previously was a reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a West Virginia native.
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