Vincentian Allan Williams has been a beekeeper for the past seven years. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
DUMBARTON, St. Vincent, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

Allan Williams, 32, is an agriculture extension officer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. But as a trained apiculturist, he has also been involved in beekeeping as a hobby for the past seven years.

He has seen beekeeping grow significantly since 2006, as stakeholders became increasingly aware of its importance to the agricultural sector, and thus an important contributor to economic growth and development.What’s happening in the Caribbean should not be confused with colony collapse disorder (CCD).

But today, Williams is worried. Honey production has declined tremendously over the past few years and he blames the changing climate as one of the main causes.

He said unfavourable climatic conditions, such as continued heavy rainfall, reduce the honeybees’ access to nectar and pollen, weakening the colonies, which do not have enough food.

“This threat was very evident over the past decade, occurring exceptionally so in 2009, 2010 and 2013. The weather as you know is very unpredictable and it has definitely affected the production of honey for the last two years, but last year was the most destructive in terms of harvesting,” Williams told IPS.

“Climate change is evident as we see with the unpredictability of the rainfall and the flash flooding in very unusual times of the year.”

Last December, St. Vincent and the Grenadines was among three Eastern Caribbean countries (the other two being Dominica and St Lucia) affected by a slow-moving, low-level trough which dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain, killing at least 13 people, destroying agricultural farms and other infrastructure.

“Most farmers, from what I understand, did not suffer destruction of their hives but they suffered from the torrential rain,” Williams told IPS.

Beehives on a farm in Antigua increase pollination and crop yields. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

He explained that when there is continuous rainfall “the bees are not able to go out and forage on trees where they could get food, so that really reduced our production and I was really affected by it. For two years we suffered a very unusual rainfall pattern.

“In April, the middle of the dry season, we had continuous rainfall for about three or four days and that impacted out production and we are seeing drier spells in the rainy season so there is a shift in the honey flow season when farmers can harvest,” Williams told IPS.

He said it used to be from February to May and even April, but “we are not able to harvest anything. That kind of change of our weather pattern is due to climate change.”

With just a dozen hives, Williams said that he harvests an average of 30 gallons of honey per year. This figure increases to 40 gallons in a “good year”.

Local honey retails for an average price of 100 dollars a gallon, slightly less than the imported product.

The apiculture industry here, which primarily deals with the production and sale of honey, is now valued at 76,600 dollars. The sector is recovering from an all-time low in 2006, when the honeybee population was almost wiped out by the ferocious Varroa Mite.

Over the last three years, the sector produced more than 1,000 gallons of honey from 477 colonies across the country.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines currently has 54 beekeepers recorded in its database, including nine women.

Rupert Lay, a water resources specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), says climate change has begun to cause difficulties for bee farmers not only in St. Vincent but throughout the Caribbean.

“An interesting indicator occurring currently is the little to no production of honey in the region,” said Lay, who is participating in the USAID-funded Reducing the Risks to Human and Natural Assets Resulting from Climate Change (RRACC) project that is being implemented by the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

“This can be linked to the unpredictable weather patterns affecting farmer’s beehive colonies and thus honey production,” he told IPS.

“These events are disrupting farmers’ livelihoods which in turn affect adversely the fabric of society and livelihoods, including education. A farmer’s stress can be recognised by his or her children, thus creating worry which leads to decreased attention spans in the classroom manifesting in poor performance,” Lay added.

Williams pointed out that what’s happening in the Caribbean should not be confused with colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honeybee colony abruptly disappear.

While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, and were known by various names, the syndrome was renamed CCD in late 2006 in conjunction with a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honeybee colonies in North America.

Colony collapse is significant economically because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by honeybees.

According to the Agriculture and Consumption Protection Department of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, the value of global crops with honeybees’ pollination was estimated to be close to 200 billion dollars in 2005.

Williams listed other constraints to the development of the apiculture industry as the lack of appropriate sites for apiary establishment; exotic pests and invasive species; lack of equipment; aerial spraying and lack of staff in the apiculture unit.

For Ricky Narine, a beekeeper in Barbados, the toughest challenge right now is saving the bees.

“We are trying to save the bees. A lot of people out there are using a lot of chemicals that are killing them and they don’t realise that without bees the environment is going to suffer. As much as you tell them they still do it,” he said.

“They can call us or use something safer. There are a lot of different insecticides that you can use that are bee friendly. They might be a dollar or two more but they are bee friendly and will not kill the bees.”

An Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits the dengue virus, feeding. Credit: jentavery/CC-BY-2.0

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 10 2013 (IPS)

Mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever need clean, still water and warm night temperatures to reproduce and thrive. That is common knowledge, but now scientists in Brazil have managed to measure the relation between increased rainfall and temperatures and the risk of dengue epidemics in this city.

A study at the National School of Public Health in Rio, titled “Temporal analysis of the relationship between dengue and meteorological variables in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2001-2009” and published in the journal Cadernos de Saúde Pública, evaluated the relationship between climate variables and dengue risk.

The results showed that for the period 2001 to 2009, an increase of one degree in the minimum temperature in a given month led to an increase of 45 percent in reported dengue cases in the following month in Rio de Janeiro.

An increase of 10 millimetres in rainfall was associated with a lower rise of six percent in dengue virus infections in the following month.

“The relationship between rainfall, heat and tropical diseases is partly common sense. In our study we tried to provide a scientific explanation and a theoretical model to quantify this relationship,” Adriana Fagundes Gomes, one of the authors of the study at the School of Public Health, part of the private Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), told IPS.

“The hypothesis was proven by mathematical methods,” said Gomes, who is currently a researcher in the epidemiology department of the Paulo de Góes Institute of Microbiology at the state Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

Analysis of the data led to the conclusion that the risk of dengue increases when temperatures are above 26 degrees Celsius, as higher temperatures favour the development of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits the dengue virus.

Average annual precipitation in Rio de Janeiro is about 1,000 millimetres, with the heaviest rainfall from December to March – the southern hemisphere summer – contributing to the proliferation of the mosquito vectors.

“It’s important to point out that the findings of this research paper have been known for a  long time: the mosquito needs clean water and high temperatures to reproduce, which is why summertime is the period of highest incidence of dengue fever,” Dr. Alberto Chebabo, a specialist in infectious diseases, told IPS.

“The only new result in this study was the measurement of how many new dengue cases per degree Celsius or per millimetre of rainfall there were during the epidemic years,” said Chebabo, head of the department of infectious and parasitic diseases at the Clementino Fraga Filho Hospital at UFRJ.

The study cross-compared data for: notifications of dengue cases from the Rio de Janeiro Secretaria Municipal de Saúde (SMS, Health Department); temperature from the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE, National Space Research Institute); and rainfall from the Secretaria Nacional de Obras Públicas (Municipal Department of Public Works).

Given the lack of a vaccine against dengue fever, the study authors say that increasing knowledge about how the virus develops will boost prevention.

“Establishing an early intervention system based on variables that can indicate the onset of an epidemic would reduce the risk of disease,” said Gomes.

“Studies of climatic variables can improve knowledge and prediction of epidemic seasonality, because the vector-climate relationship is just as important as vector-human interaction,” the study says.

In Gomes’ view, the main discovery is that, in Rio de Janeiro, temperature (especially minimum temperature) “has a more significant correlation with the number of dengue cases than rainfall.”

The Aedes aegypti mosquito needs clean water, from rainwater or irrigation, to lay its eggs. But high temperatures “facilitate hatching of the eggs and reduce the time needed by larvae to develop into adults,” said Chebabo.

“In the hot, rainy season of the Rio de Janeiro summer, mosquito numbers increase, enabling transmission of the disease,” he said.

Analysis of the last decade shows that in southeastern Brazil, where Rio de Janeiro is located, dengue is prevalent between the months of December and April, precisely the hottest and wettest period. All the epidemics of dengue fever have occurred within this period of the year.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito transmits dengue fever by picking up the virus when it feeds on the blood of an infected person, and infecting other people when it bites them. The symptoms are fever, headache and muscle pain. But haemorrhagic dengue causes intense abdominal pain, nausea and bleeding under the skin and into mucous linings, which can be fatal.

In Chebabo’s view, traditional methods of prevention carried out by “the human vector” – the agency of humans – are still essential for combating dengue.

“Eliminating mosquito breeding sites is the most effective means of reducing incidence of the disease,” he said.

The government and the population must work together to get rid of water accumulated in flowerpots and disposable containers like plastic bottles, to cover water tanks and to collect and dispose properly of waste, he said.

The Brazilian health ministry included similar measures in its campaign for 2013 with the slogan “Dengue é fácil combater, só não pode esquecer” (Dengue is easy to fight, but must not be forgotten), launched at the start of the year.

The aim of the campaign is to reinforce educational messages underlining the need for mass mobilisation for prevention and early treatment of dengue. Every region of the country will undertake specific measures according to the needs of each municipality.

In a bulletin issued Jan. 4, the health ministry reported that in 2012, confirmed dengue cases fell by 64 percent compared with 2011.

Mortality from dengue also declined by 49 percent between these two years. From January to the first week of November 2012, the number of deaths from the disease was 247, while in the same period in 2011 the number was 481.

Estimates from the World Health Organisation indicate that some 2.5 billion people living in tropical and sub-tropical areas are at risk of contracting dengue, and that there are between 60 and 100 million actual cases a year, leading to between 12,000 and 15,000 fatalities annually.