Michael Kliks

Michael Kliks is upset about how little government has done to help local beekeepers during their recent hard times due to so-called colony-collapse disorder.

The president of the Hawai‘i Beekeepers’ Association admits the concept is vague, but says it’s undeniable that bee hives in Hawaii have been under stress due to various factors, and lack of government aid has led to many of Hawaii’s beekeepers to quit the trade. Another problem has been disappearing farm lands locally and the rise of growers who discourage pollination of their crops entirely.

“We’re losing the farm lands that are needed to produce pollinated-dependent crops,” he said earlier this month. “At the same time, agricultural science worldwide is trying to find ways to replace pollinating with non-pollinated-dependent crops. …We now have a non-pollinated-dependent cucumber, and tangerines that don’t require bees. In fact they keep the bees out. … We’re digging ourselves into a very large hole.”

Kliks, owner of Manoa Honey Co., which sells the Pele’s Gold brand of honey, so far has been one of the survivors, but he also is planning to leave the business. Partly it’s because he is approaching age 71.

“The reality is, it’s tough, hard, dangerous work, and the financial rewards are pretty slim,” he said. “This business needs to be done by someone who’s far younger than I am and who has access to capital.”

Kliks runs his company with his wife, Dolores, and volunteers. It has annual sales of honey of about $250,000, he said, and oversees about 160 colonies in 11 different “bee yards.” It also offers pollination services to farmers islandwide and bee-removal to the public in general. Twice a month he is at the Kapiolani Community College farmers market, selling his honey and promoting the cause of honey bees.

Kliks has been a beekeeper for more than 50 years, starting in Oregon, where he was born and graduated from Beaverton High School and Portland State University. He also has a background as a scientist and professor, including at the University of Hawaii. Awarded three Fulbright scholarships, he has lived and traveled throughout the world conducting scientific research.  His master’s degree, from Tulane University, was in medical parasitology. His Ph.D. was in medical entomology, from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also studied medical anthropology.

When not working with his bees, Kliks likes to bodysurf. He was meet director for the annual Redwing Memorial World Championship of Handboarding, at Point Panic, from its founding in 1998 until just this year.

“I was out (bodysurfing) last week,” he said. “It’s not as easy as it was. The main part is just trying to compete with the younger guys, because they snake all the waves. So eventually I just drop in on them; what the hell.”

QUESTION: So what’s up with the bees in Hawaii right now?

ANSWER: Well, it keeps changing all the time, but right now I think the most serious problem for all of us is how to deal with the small hive beetle.

We more or less now have methods in both chemical and physical, using integrated pest management — IPM — techniques to manage varroa mites, so varroa mites is a minor problem now, although two or three years ago it was a very serious problem.

But the small hive beetle we have no specific chemicals to use for it, except some that are just so powerful and contaminating that no one uses them, that I know of anyway.

Another problem here is that we don’t have a winter. So in most places the small hive beetle larvae have to pupate deep in the ground and they don’t survive a harsh winter. Here there is no diapause, there’s no periods of cold where the larvae and the adults estivate, or hibernate. Here we have the cycle of egg to larvae to adults going on year-round with the beetles. That’s a major problem.

The other major problem here in Hawaii is we have rotten fruit everywhere. Just think about it: every back yard in Manoa — Mrs. Fujikawa’s mangoes and papayas, Mr. Ching’s avocados, my fruits on the ground over here. So everywhere it’s possible for the beetles to get some food.

The mites are obligatory parasites on honey bees — they can’t live without honey bees — whereas the beetles are quite opportunistic; they can feed on anything. So I’m quite doubtful that any but the strongest and most dedicated and wealthiest beekeepers in the state will see through this period. We’ve lost most of our smaller and medium-sized amateurs now, and I don’t think there are many so-called sideliners available. Sideliners are people who have more than 50 but fewer than 200, 300 colonies, and they are struggling very hard to stay in.

Q: Is this related to the colony-collapse situation?  

A: Colony collapse disorder, that’s a construct that some people have put together without any really powerful evidence that there is such a thing. It’s like a gelatinous mass. You can call it whatever you want. I think it has different causes in different places. But colony collapse disorder is definitely cumulative and synergistic. It occurs over time, and it gets worse over time, so it accumulates the problems over time, and different problems synergize differently. So it depends on the cluster of problems you have.

For instance, here we don’t move honey bee colonies hundreds of miles or thousands of miles two or three times a year. So that stress is missing. That’s part of the mainland problem.

And here we don’t have so many of our beekeepers keeping bees right in crops, as they do on the mainland. There’s some problems that they have on the mainland in dealing with abuses of imidacloprids and neonicotinoid insecticides, which causes neurological changes in the bees and they just forget where they’re going. …

There’s been evidence that these so-called neonicotinoids — that’s a general group because they’re based on nicotine, which is a naturally occurring product, but they synthesize stuff even more powerful — there’s evidence here that the neonicotinoids have been problems for some beekeepers who are keeping bees around the corn farmers. But no one wants to stand up and shout and point the finger at Novartis or Pioneer Seeds or Monsanto. Nobody wants to do that because they’re hugely powerful companies.

Q: Why would that be a problem to point that out? How would that rebound on anyone who did that?

A: (Laughter) Really!?!

Q: Well, what? They won’t let you keep your bees on their property or what?

A: Some people may have leases on land, and they will lose those leases if they complain. So people may have to go through other people’s property to get access to their property. … We’re talking about a six-to-eight-billion-dollar business here. Don’t mess with them. Nobody does. Nobody will.

Even the biggest of our beekeepers, one of whom had a serious problems with kill — probably from the neonicotinoids from a corn seed farmer — did not want to make it public. He depends on farmers who depend on Monsanto — and the Legislature, you know, listens to Monsanto. …

I even have doubts about the chair of the Department of Agriculture. I don’t think he is acting in the best interest of agriculture, certainly not in my best interest.

For example, officially, colony collapse disorder was never declared in Hawaii. I believe I saw some of that back in 2006, and I made it known, and basically the bureaucrats in the City and County and the state, the USDA and the county farm association, they said no, it didn’t occur here.

So we lost out on benefits, like USDA benefits. And I felt ashamed that we didn’t have anybody stand up for us and say, we do have it, we have the mites, and the mites are clearly causing the tipping point in colony collapse disorder.

And they said, well if you have mites, that’s because you’re not a good beekeeper. They tried to blame it on us, like if you have blue eyes it’s your fault and you’re a bad beekeeper.

So the Hawaii and Pacific Basin Farm Service Agency state committee … refused to give us any assistance under the ELAP program — that’s the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program. It’s a big program. We didn’t get a penny out of it, because they simply denied that the problem existed. And that right there killed about two-thirds of the beekeepers on this island. They just disappeared.

Q: How many are left on Oahu?

A: Well, there’s only really two small commercial-level beekpers on this island,  and I’m the only one who has more than a hundred colonies; I have 160. The others have 20, 30, 40, 50, and most of them are bringing in … they’re brokers. They’re in the business of bringing in someone else’s honey and selling it. That’s what they do. They produce very little honey of their own, and they can’t produce much of their own because they just don’t have skills, and the labor help and the money.

Q: How many honey companies are there in Hawaii overall?

A: There are seven or eight that are commercially licensed to sell honey as a food product. Among the larger companies you’ve got the Captain Cook Honey — that’s Garnett Puett; they’re also called Big Island Bees. Then you’ve got Michael Cummings up in Hamakua; His Hawaiian Island Honey Co. probably has, I don’t know, 4,000, 5,000 colonies. The beetles hit him pretty hard. I think he lost close to a thousand colonies at one time. That’s hard to imagine for me. He probably has a thousand colonies now, something like that.

Q: With the growing popularity of farmers markets and the eat-local movement, has it gotten easier to sell local honey?

A: There’s plenty of local honey in the local market. Down to Earth, Whole Foods, most places carry lots of local honey. Even Long’s carries Mike Cummings’ honey, the one I just mentioned to you, and I see that Garnett Puett’s Big Island Honey, Big Island Bees, Captain Cook Honey — they use different labels — he’s in everything from Costco to Whole Foods. He produces probably close to a million pounds of honey a year. His Big Island Bees has some very nice packaging at Costco, and it’s far cheaper than I could produce it.

Another big person in our industry here is Gus Rouse. He owns Kona Queen Co. He produces queen bees. He also produces lots and lots of honey, but he’s famous for his queens. He does something on the order of close to half-a-million queens a year —  300,000 to 400,000, depends on the year — and so he’s one of the leading producers of queens worldwide.

Q: Which he exports to the mainland perhaps?

A: He exports them all over and saves a few for us here. He’s been very kind to us. He’s given us more than usual because we’re losing queens.

This is another really disturbing thing, Mark: The queens we’re putting into the colonies are not staying there; they’re disappearing or they’re dying or they’re being superceded. We don’t know what it is, whether it’s the presence of the beetles, the presence of the mites, the weather; there may be some new non-visible disease, maybe a virus or a fungus we’re not seeing. But we’ve had to re-queen some colonies two and three times this year already.

Q: In the past when you’ve tried to work with the Legislature — for example, on the origin-of-honey bill, the labeling bill — whom did you go to for help? Who would be an ally for your interests?

A: Well, we had Brian Taniguchi help us write the first bill, and we had others help us write the second bill. I mean his aides, of course. We tried, I think, five different times in five different years, and we drafted the bill in five different ways. But it got stuck because the Department of Agriculture deferred to the Attorney General’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office deferred to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. But the Commerce Clause of the Constitution didn’t stop California, Florida, Texas, Washington and two other states — Arkansas and Minnesota —  from passing their own country-of-origin laws. They haven’t been sued. What’s the problem?

Our government here is so timid. So unbelievably timid.

Q: I understand the association has a program where the public can help with reviving the local bee population.

A: Yes, the garden hive program has been very successful. It’s for people who are so concerned, that they’re self-motivated — we don’t advertise it; they have to come to us; they have to want it badly enough to come to us; that weeds out a lot of the fantasy folks who think they’re going to sit and meditate in front of the bees while the bees collect on their face or something. We just want people who understand that they’re going to get the benefits of just pollination and the satisfaction of knowing that they’re part of a distributed beekeeping enterprise, and that’s called the Garden Hive Program.

And we focus on areas where there are significant assets that we can handle and harvest, like kiawes. Right now we have a lot of garden hive members like around Diamond Head, Kahala, Black Point. They have irrigation, they have lots of all the stuff we need and a lot of kiawe, so we’re happy to do that.