Southern Nevada senator stands behind bee bill, says it is meant to stop Africanized bees

Senator Keith Pickard of southern Nevada, the man behind the hotly-debated bee bill, is standing behind his legislation in the face of controversy; however, he says, the Legislative Council Bureau of the Nevada State Legislature is at fault for not following his original intention. The bill's original intention was to stop the spread of Africanized Bees in Nevada, he says, which needs to be dealt with on a state level.

The bill faced both public and political debate, due to the fact that Carson City just became Nevada's first Bee City USA. A co-sponsor of the bill, Carson City Assemblyman Al Kramer, filed an amendment to have his name removed from the bill shortly after signing on.

The bill, said Senator Pickard, did not match the original intent he envisioned for it, and the fault lies with the LCB.

“This year, particularly this session, LCB are understaffed and half of those that are here are new, so they don’t have the ability to crank out the legislation that they have in years past,” said Senator Pickard. “On top of that, LCB was, at the beginning of session, dealing with a bunch of legal problems that some of our members had.”

The legal problems he refers to are those faced by Senate Majority Leader Kelvin Atkinson, who resigned after it came to light that he had misappropriated campaign funds for personal use, and Assemblyman Mike Sprinkle, after being accused of sexual harassment by several women.

“So it meant that they were very much behind schedule,” said Pickard, who is currently serving in his first legislative session as a freshman Senator. “In fact, we had to push the first deadline because LCB couldn’t get all the bills out. As as a result, the bills dropped, and they gave us until the end of the day to introduce them. So we had zero opportunity to go back and fix bills that were misdrafted. This was one of them. What it should have had was a population cap limiting this to counties with 100,000 or more, and the language that they used for the density requirements was a little confusing, most people didn’t understand it.”

As Senate Bill 389 is still currently written, it dictates: “A person shall not own or possess an apiary within any urban or suburban area of this State having a density of more than two residential units per acre in the urban or suburban area.”

The bill was introduced on March 20. Since then, Senator Pickard has drafted a “Conceptual Amendment” which would limit the regulation to areas designated a quarantine zone for Africanized bees on residential lots that are 12,000 square feet — about a quarter acre — in size or less.

However, the amendment has yet to be filed, and the bill still remains on record in its original form.

“The Nevada Department of Agriculture has said, there’s no bee colony collapse problem,” said Pickard. “There’s no evidence that we have a problem with bee populations in all of Nevada let alone Southern Nevada.”

He went on: “The reality is, this is narrowly tailored to a problem we have in Southern Nevada with Africanized Bees and this irrational propensity for people to want to increase the bee population, when we don’t need to in Nevada. And whenever I say Nevada, I mean Southern Nevada. The intent is southern Nevada. We have no problem with bee populations, we have no problem with pollinators.”

However, according to the Nevada Department of Agriculture themselves: “Pollinator health is a high priority national issue due to significant colony losses experienced by Nevada and U.S. beekeepers over the past decade, although there is data to suggest that honey bee numbers are improving in some locations,” a report from July 7, 2016 states. “The MP3 (Managed Pollinator Protection Plan) discusses voluntary measures that can be taken to increase pollinator populations and improve pollinator health.”

To learn more about the Pollinator Protection Plan, click here.

Senator Pickard pulled out a map of a satellite image of a residential neighborhood in Henderson, Nevada. It shows rooftops of a standard suburban neighborhood, with pools in some of the backyards, a couple parks, and a maze of streets.

“Here’s the example of the neighborhood that brought this to my attention,” he said, pointing to a section of the map. A circle is drawn around a particular house on the right hand side of the map. “We’ve got a beekeeper with as many as 12 hives here. There’s roughly 50,000 bees in a hive on average. So we’re talking about 600,000 bees. You’re going to be affecting all the homes in this area (surrounding the hives), around 10 to 12 homes. At least that’s what the experts are telling me.”

Pickard said that Henderson, where this whole issue seems to be originating from, just passed a new regulation that would allow two hives to be kept on a 1/6 of an acre lot, exacerbating the problem he is trying to corral.

While this is true, what he failed to mention was that more regulations were put in place alongside which would limit situations such as the Henderson resident who is keeping twelve beehives on a quarter acre lot.

Apiaries are limited to the following number of hive boxes, based upon the size of the lot:

- No hive boxes are permitted on lots less than 5,500 square feet.
- A lot that is between 5,500 square feet and half an acre are permitted a maximum of two hive boxes.
- A lot that is between a half acre and two acres may have a maximum of four hive boxes.
- A lot that is between two acres and five acres may have a maximum of six hive boxes.
- A lot that is larger than 5 acres may have a maximum of 25 hive boxes if the beekeeper can support the number of hive boxes with sufficient water, approximately one gallon per hive box per day, with available forage.

In addition, it also stipulates that both water and high pollen and nectar producing plants must be provided for the bees on the beekeepers own property at all times, that the hives must be located in specific areas away from both streets and property lines, and that barriers must be erected to encourage bees to stay on their own property.

It also stipulates that no “grandfathering rights” will be attached to any property under this section, so that enthusiastic neighborhood beekeeper he mentioned is going to have to relocate some of his buzzy pets.

The City of Henderson acted accordingly in what they believed was the most logical solution to the problem of excessive beekeeping in residential neighborhoods. However, with Pickard’s Bill, the City’s decision would be circumnavigated and overruled, as state law trumps county or city laws.

“One of the questions I get a lot is ‘Why isn’t this a local issue? Why does this have to be a state issue?’” said Pickard. “This includes multiple counties. All of Clark County, plus part of Lincoln County and part of Nye County. So, Clark County can pass all the ordinances it wants, but it can’t affect the other counties, so it has to be done at the state level.”

With the intended amendment, assuming Pickard will file it in it’s current conceptual form, it would only affect zones under quarantine for africanized populations, ruling out Northern Nevada.

Africanized Honey Bees are a hybrid created in a Brazilian lab in the 1950s between the African Honey Bee and the European Honey Bee, which escaped shortly after and have been slowly migrating into North America. The first reports of Africanized Honey Bees in Nevada came about in 1998.

The hybridization’s intent was to create a honey bee that was as docile as the European Bee but could withstand heat like the African Honey Bee. Now, we have a highly aggressive hybrid honey bee that can withstand the heat, but doesn’t seem to fare well in the cold of our Northern winters.

“This is not going to affect the beekeepers in Northern Nevada,” said Pickard. “They’re not under quarantine. So this doesn’t apply to them. Now, if the Africanized Bees become tolerant to cold weather, and invade Northern Nevada, then it would be a different story and we’ve got the rules in place to deal with it.”

“There’s plenty of bees in Southern Nevada,” he reiterated. “We’re gonna live with them, but we don’t have to exacerbate the problem. Everybody else can stand down, this doesn’t affect them.”

As far as the claim that the LCB thoroughly dropped the ball while drafting his bill, the LCB had no comment. Senator Pickard said he would not be filing any formal complaint against the LCB, as there is no process in place to do so.

“As a minority member, they don’t report to me,” he said. “They were swamped. They were distracted. They were under skilled or inexperienced. It took them longer to get it done. Its the nature of the beast.”

He went on to say that he believes there are a lot of problems with the current legislative session. They are behind 200 bills, he said, which could be due to the fact that the Majority won’t hear them. He is expecting to see that most of the bills that go unheard are Republican in either nature or origin.

“I’ll be interested to see what the statistical analysis says, but my guess is, the vast majority of bills this session will have amendments on them because they didn’t meet the initial intent,” he said.

While it may not affect Northern Nevada residents and bees — yet — the bill will have its affect on residents down south.

“Now, this is going to affect some people,” said Pickard. “There are probably a couple dozen people in Southern Nevada that are keeping bees in hives on R4 or R6 zoned lots. You know what? That’s a public health risk. We don’t allow people to grow marijuana wherever they want to, because it’s a public health risk. We don’t allow people to keep dangerous animals, except in rare instances, as pets in residential neighborhoods.”