Science
Overlooked No More: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born to a life of wealth, which she compounded through marriage, could have sat back and simply enjoyed the many advantages that flowed her way. Instead, she put her considerable fortune — matched by her considerable willfulness — into making life better for women.
An activist, philanthropist and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, most notably to underwrite the basic research that led to the development of the birth control pill in the late 1950s.
Before then, contraception in the United States was extremely limited, with bans on diaphragms and condoms. The advent of the pill made it easier for women to plan when and whether to have children, and it fueled the explosive sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill, despite some side effects, is the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the United States.
McCormick’s interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when she learned of Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger’s fervent belief that women should be able to chart their own biological destinies.
The two met in 1917 and soon hatched an elaborate scheme to smuggle diaphragms into the United States.
Diaphragms had been banned under the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal crime to send or deliver through the mail “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material — including pornography, contraceptives and items used for abortions. (The law, which still prohibits mailing items related to abortions, has received renewed attention since the federal right to abortion was overturned in 2022.)
McCormick, who was fluent in French and German, traveled to Europe, where diaphragms were in common use. She had studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was able to pose as a scientist in meetings with diaphragm manufacturers. “She purchased hundreds of the devices and hired local seamstresses to sew them into dresses, evening gowns and coats,” according to a 2011 article in M.I.T. Technology Review. “Then she had the garments wrapped and packed neatly into trunks for shipment.”
She and her steamer trunks made it through customs. If the authorities had stopped her, the article said, they would have found “nothing but slightly puffy dresses in the possession of a bossy socialite, a woman oozing such self-importance and tipping her porters so grandly that no one suspected a thing.”
From 1922 to 1925, McCormick smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms into Sanger’s clinics.
After her husband died in 1947, she inherited a considerable amount of money, and she asked Sanger for advice on how to put it to use advancing research into contraception. In 1953, Sanger introduced her to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chueh Chang, researchers at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop a safe, reliable oral contraceptive.
She was excited by their work and provided almost all the funding — $2 million (about $23 million today) — required to develop the pill. She even moved to Worcester to monitor and encourage their research. Pincus’s wife, Elizabeth, described McCormick as a warrior: “Little old woman she was not. She was a grenadier.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for birth control in 1960.
Katharine Moore Dexter was born into an affluent, socially activist family on Aug. 27, 1875, in Dexter, Mich., west of Detroit. The town was named for her grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter, who founded it in 1824 and maintained an Underground Railroad stop in his home, where Katharine was born; her great-grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was Treasury secretary under President John Adams.
Katharine and her older brother, Samuel T. Dexter, grew up in Chicago. Their mother, Josephine (Moore) Dexter, was a Boston Brahmin who supported women’s rights. Their father, Wirt Dexter, was a high-powered lawyer who served as president of the Chicago Bar Association and as a director of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He also headed the relief committee after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and was a major real estate developer.
He died when Katharine was 14. A few years later, her brother died of meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. Those early deaths pointed her toward a career in medicine.
She attended M.I.T. and majored in biology, rare achievements for a woman of that era. She arrived with a mind of her own, and successfully challenged a rule that female students had to wear hats at all times, arguing that they posed a fire hazard in the science labs. She graduated in 1904 and planned to attend medical school.
But by then, she had started dating the dashing Stanley Robert McCormick, whom she had known in Chicago and who was an heir to an immense fortune built on a mechanical harvesting machine that his father had invented. As a young lawyer, he helped negotiate a merger that made his family a major owner of International Harvester; by 1909, it was the fourth largest industrial company in America, measured in assets.
McCormick persuaded Katharine to marry him instead of going to medical school. They wed at her mother’s château in Switzerland and settled in Brookline, Mass.
But even before they married, he had showed signs of mental instability, and he began experiencing violent, paranoid delusions. He was hospitalized with what was later determined to be schizophrenia, and remained under psychiatric care — mostly at Riven Rock, the McCormick family estate in Montecito, Calif. — until his death. She never divorced him and never remarried. They had no children.
Katharine McCormick spent decades mired in personal, medical and legal disputes with her husband’s siblings. They battled over his treatment, his guardianship and eventually his estate, as detailed in a 2007 article in Prologue Magazine, a publication of the National Archives. She was his sole beneficiary, inheriting about $40 million ($563 million in today’s dollars). Combined with the $10 million (more than $222 million today) she had inherited from her mother, that made her one of the wealthiest women in America.
As her husband’s illness consumed her personal life, McCormick threw herself into social causes. She contributed financially to the suffrage movement, gave speeches and rose in leadership to become treasurer and vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After women won the right to vote in 1920, the association evolved into the League of Women Voters; McCormick became its vice president.
In 1927, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, believing that a malfunctioning adrenal gland was responsible for her husband’s schizophrenia. She provided funding for two decades and acquired an expertise in endocrinology that later informed her interest in the development of an oral contraceptive.
After the F.D.A. approved the pill, McCormick turned her attention to funding the first on-campus residence for women at M.I.T. When she studied there, women had no housing, one of several factors that discouraged them from applying. “I believe if we can get them properly housed,” she said, “that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently.”
McCormick Hall, named for her husband, opened on the institute’s Cambridge campus in 1963. At the time, women made up about 3 percent of the school’s undergraduates; today, they make up about 50 percent.
By the time she died of a stroke on Dec. 28, 1967, at her home in Boston, McCormick had played a major role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. She was 92.
Apart from a short article in The Boston Globe, her death drew little notice. The later obituaries of the birth-control researchers she had supported did not mention her role in their achievement.
In her will, she left $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation (more than $46 million today) and $1 million to Pincus’s laboratories (more than $9 million today). Earlier, she had donated her inherited property in Switzerland to the U.S. government for use by its diplomatic mission in Geneva. She left most of the rest of her estate to M.I.T.
With evacuation shelters reaching capacity as more than 40,000 people were asked to leave their homes, officials laboring to prevent an explosion at a crippled chemical tank in Garden Grove reported tentative progress Sunday in ending the crisis.
TJ McGovern, interim fire chief for the Orange County Fire Authority, said firefighters had discovered what appeared to be a potential crack on the tank’s surface that could be alleviating some of the pressure resulting from the chemical reaction inside.
If they are right, it would make a catastrophic explosion or an uncontrollable leak less likely.
“With this new information, it could change our trajectory and our strategy to this event,” McGovern said. “This was a step in a right direction, and there’s going to be a lot more coming shortly.”
Enzo Soriano, 7, left, Vitto Soriano, 11, center, and Santiago Soriano, 16, right, look at their phones while camping outside the Freedom Hall shelter on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Lee Zeldin, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said the new development was promising.
“I’m being told this morning that the most likely scenario is one of a low volume release, where the local authorities are going to be able to monitor, neutralize and contain the threat,” he said during a Sunday morning appearance on CNN‘s “State of the Union.”
McGovern gave no indication as to when the 40,000 people who had been forced from their homes — many into shelters — due to evacuation orders would be allowed to return.
“We know you’re out of your homes. We want to get you back,” he said. “But we cannot do that until it’s deemed safe.”
The positive note was a welcome development in a situation that has left much of Orange County on edge since Thursday.
The crisis began when the Orange County Fire Authority responded to reports of a hazardous materials incident at GKN Aerospace on Western Avenue in Garden Grove. Officials found a tank containing 7,000 gallons of a toxic chemical called methyl methacrylate, or MMA, stored in liquid form that was in danger of exploding due to a buildup of pressure from a potential runaway chemical reaction.
Methyl methacrylate is used to make plastics. While the polymer itself isn’t toxic, its liquid MMA predecessor is. If it gets into the air, it can harm people at high concentrations and through chronic or extended exposure.
The primary solution would have been to pump a neutralizing agent into the problem tank, quenching it and making it no longer explosive, but the necessary valve clogged, leaving no way to get the neutralizing agent into the tank.
Officials feared that there were only two possible outcomes: a devastating explosion or a devastating leak.
A crack in a tank containing a toxic chemical may not sound like a cause for hope, but Elias Picazo, an assistant professor of chemistry at USC, said it might be the best-case scenario.
“If the tank is going to fail, you want it to fail through a crack rather than fail through an explosion,” he said. “With a controlled leak, you can route liquid or gas out of the tank, relieving pressure and buying more time.”
He explained that as material leaks out of the tank, the pressure inside increases more slowly, potentially reaching a safe equilibrium. The leak also depletes the source for a chemical reaction, which is generating heat that, in turn, accelerates the reaction in a process called “thermal runaway.”
An aerial view shows water being sprayed on large storage tanks at the GKN Aerospace facility on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
But the situation remains uncertain, he said. Depending on the size of the crack and the speed of the chemical reaction, it’s possible that the growing pressure within the tank will exceed what can be released through the crack, leading the tank to explode.
“It’s a positive step, but it’s not over,” he said of the new development.
If the failing chemical tank in Orange County does explode, the aerospace plant where it sits and dozens of homes surrounding it could suffer severe damage, according to a map released by authorities Saturday.
Areas within roughly 1,100 feet of the tank would suffer the most severe damage; and beyond that, areas within about 0.3 miles, moderate damage; and beyond that, areas within about 0.4 miles, light damage, from the blast.
The severe blast zone represents “areas where we can expect severe structural damage and significant harm,” said Nick Freeman, an Orange County Fire Authority division chief. There are dozens of homes in that area in a neighborhood of the city of Stanton, including along Santa Rosalia Street, south of Laurelton Avenue and north of Lampson Avenue.
In the moderate blast zone, “we would expect again structural damage and harm to those within that zone,” Freeman said.
The light-damage zone includes Wakeham Elementary School and a Home Depot on the corner of Chapman Avenue and Beach Boulevard. “There, we might see some structural damage, but it would be a little bit more limited,” Freeman said.
Officials have also warned that in the event of an explosion, there could be fire or flash fire in some areas, as well as areas where the chemical cloud would be immediately dangerous to life and health, and a much larger area where the chemical would be smelled, but at nontoxic levels.
Evacuations around the failing tank in Garden Grove include tens of thousands of residents in six Orange County cities: Garden Grove, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster. Four of the five shelters that the county set up are full. As of Sunday afternoon, only Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley still had space.
On Saturday, three days into the crisis, a South Pasadena law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of two people residing in the evacuation zone. The X-Law Group and Presidio Law Firm are seeking class-action status.
The lawsuit says that residents were subjected to “evacuation orders, shelter-in-place directives, exposure concerns, noxious chemical odors, fear of contamination, interference with the use and enjoyment of their homes and properties, and other damages.”
The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleging that GKN Aerospace did not protect the community from the crisis.
The lawsuit is also asking for “accountability for residents facing evacuation orders, property disruption, potential health risks, loss of use of their homes, related expenses, and diminished property values.”
A man walks past the Freedom Hall shelter on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
“Clients are naturally very concerned,” said Carlos X. Colorado, an attorney at the X-Law Group. “It’s a scary situation, especially for those in the vicinity, and in addition to that. For a large number of people, it’s an inconvenience.”
GKN Aerospace didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a nod to the seriousness of the situation, three federal lawmakers representing California have appealed to the Trump administration to issue a disaster declaration over the incident.
U.S. Rep. Derek Tran (D-Orange) co-signed a letter with Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla requesting that the federal government provide additional resources in response to the event. Tran posted a copy of the letter on X.
“The severity of this disaster requires additional coordination and federal support. Therefore, we urge you to expeditiously approve California’s request for an Emergency Declaration and to provide emergency protective measures and direct federal assistance under the public assistance program for Orange County,” says the letter, dated May 24. “The safety and security, and well-being of evacuated residents and the surrounding communities remain our absolute highest priority.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar appeal to the president. The White House did not respond to a request from The Times.
In the meantime, officials have stressed that they are trying to keep the chemical inside the damaged tank at the aerospace facility as cool as possible. They said they have received help from experts nationally to come up with alternative plans. Nothing specific, however, has been mentioned.
Continuing to pour cool water on the tank could allow the liquid chemical inside to cure at a slower rate — becoming a solid at a slower speed — and reduce the buildup of pressure inside the tank, said Craig Covey, an Orange County Fire Authority division chief.
“Like an ice cube that freezes from the outside in — this stuff cures, it heats up and cures from the outside in,” he said. “While it’s doing that process, it’s building that pressure.”
The tank has some capacity to hold some pressure. There is a gap between the MMA chemical surface and the tank ceiling.
“We’re hoping that that space can absorb a slower cure rate and not over-pressure and blow up,” Covey said.
Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy.
This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.
A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”
“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.”
But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants.
In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.”
“It feels like the beginning of a conversation, one that we welcome,” Dr. Wills said. She added, “It would be odd to have that conversation without psychiatrists at the table.”
Outside in the corridors, some rank-and-file attendees were less diplomatic.
Many providers took issue with Mr. Kennedy’s negative characterization of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I. s, the most widely prescribed class of psychiatric medications. Clinical trials have found that most patients’ depressive symptoms improved with S.S.R.I.s, and they are considered safe enough to be prescribed by general practitioners.
A 2026 study found that 16.6 percent of U.S. adults, or roughly one in six, reported currently taking an antidepressant.
“He just doesn’t like S.S.R.I.s,” said Dr. Sung Hyon, a psychiatrist from Pasadena, referring to Mr. Kennedy. Dr. Hyon said S.S.R.I.s had been “foundational” in his practice — “boring drugs that are well established, have good safety evidence and have zero chance to cause addiction.” He called them “God’s gift to psychiatry.”
And patients know it, he added. “So many millions” of Americans already take S.S.R.I.s, he said, and the vast majority are fully aware of their downside, like sexual side effects and withdrawal symptoms.
“And they say, ‘You know what? It’s worth it,’” Dr. Hyon said. “Because there are so many of them, it would be a pretty big political firestorm if he really tried to restrict access. And there is very, very little medical evidence to do so.”
Mr. Kennedy has long signaled that curbing the use of psychiatric drugs was a goal of his. Earlier this month he began taking steps in that direction, announcing guidelines and regulatory changes meant to provide an incentive for clinicians to help patients taper off psychiatric medications. The steps would not affect patients’ access to antidepressants.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency had had no discussions about banning S.S.R.I.s., “and any claims suggesting otherwise are false.” The aim of the new initiative, he said, is to “promote appropriate psychiatric prescribing and drive deprescribing when clinically indicated.”
Some psychiatrists said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s deprescribing initiative was the beginning of a wider effort that might, in later stages, discredit psychiatry more broadly and restrict access to care.
“I think it is actually putting more questions in people’s minds about whether psychiatric treatment is safe or effective,” said Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan, who chairs the A.P.A.’s caucus on the social determinants of health. “The data has not changed on S.S.R.I.s. It’s the narrative that has changed.”
He said the A.P.A. should be pushing back forcefully against Mr. Kennedy’s claims about psychiatric treatments, and should steer clear of seeming to endorse any part of the initiative.
“It’s a fine line between having a seat at the table and being used as a tool to legitimize their agenda,” he said.
‘Much Too Medicated’
At the same time, deprescribing seemed, at the meeting, to be on everyone’s lips. A new book, “Stahl’s Deprescriber’s Guide,” was selling like hot cakes in the exhibition hall. There were panels titled, “Deprescribing Antipsychotics,” “The Much Too Medicated Patient” and “Stimulants for A.D.H.D.: Did We Get It Wrong?”
Dr. Chris Aiken, who delivered an address about multidrug cocktails, said a generational change is moving through the psychiatric association, as a younger cohort of physicians, in their 30s and 40s, take a more prominent role.
Millennials were part of the first generation to be prescribed stimulants and antidepressants as children and teens, he said, and physicians in that group are more conscious of poor outcomes years later. “Meds are not the answer, and they have seen this in their own lives,” he said.
Some senior physicians had a similar message.
“If I have any regrets about my recommendations as a physician, it’s about the medications that I did not withdraw sooner,” said Dr. Ronald Winchel, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s medical school, at one panel.
He said a number of concerns had prevented him from doing so: Sometimes, patients were taking multiple medications and it was difficult to say which was effective. Sometimes, patients were doing well, and he was afraid of setting them back. And there was a dearth of research on how patients do after they quit medications.
“The fear of withdrawing medications has really complicated our work,” he said.
Dr. Winchel compared this year’s churning discussion to a watershed moment in the A.P.A.’s history: In 1973, sustained pressure from protesters caused the organization to reverse its century-old position and declare that homosexuality was not a mental disorder.
“Instead of getting into a defensive crouch, they looked at themselves and they made progress,” Dr. Winchel said. The same kind of advancement, he added, could result from a rigorous discussion about prescribing practices. “If some of this agitation is coming from outside,” he said, “what is wrong with that?”
In his presentation, Dr. Aiken urged colleagues not to dismiss the stories Mr. Kennedy has highlighted of patients who have encountered serious difficulties quitting antidepressants.
“I don’t really know how common it is, but I do know that when it does happen, it can be quite severe,” he said. “It may be rare, but let’s take it seriously, because it can really burn people when it happens.”
Others said working with Mr. Kennedy around mental health policies was a matter of simple pragmatism.
“There’s definitely a need for us to be talking to the people who are making decisions,” said Dr. Hammad Khan of Sacramento. “We can’t let Joe Rogan decide what the F.D.A. approves or doesn’t approve.”
An Inflection Point
Dr. Awais Aftab, the author of “Psychiatry at the Margins,” a popular mental health Substack, said he expects the H.H.S. effort to focus on raising awareness about tapering off medications. There are few pathways for the government to reduce the prescription of drugs like S.S.R.I.s, which have gone through F.D.A.-approval pathways and are widely used by the public, he said.
He described “a sense of alarm” among psychiatrists at the virulent critique of the field coming from Mr. Kennedy’s circle. Psychiatry, he said, has been late to acknowledge the complaints of patients like Laura Delano, an author and activist, who say they were overmedicated as children or teenagers and got little support from doctors when they wanted to reduce or stop the drugs.
“The mainstream psychiatric community has been fairly insulated, and suddenly they are hearing now about this issue,” said Dr. Aftab, a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University.
He added that he believes that the use of antidepressants in the United States may have reached a natural limit. “The demand is going to, at some point, go into an equilibrium with the reality of the lack of effectiveness and the reality of the tolerability issue,” he said.
But the experience of some other countries suggests that the demand for antidepressants may continue to rise, even amid warnings about overprescribing.
In 2017, Britain commissioned a major report on overprescribing and then followed up with a series of reforms, including updating clinical guidelines to require regular prescribing reviews and instituting a national audit program to monitor drug use.
But a study of prescribing in Britain found that the use of antidepressants continued its steady rise through 2023, the last year for which data was available. In contrast, recent years have seen a decline in the use of anxiety medications and hypnotics, which were also the subject of updated clinical guidelines.
The study’s authors said the rise was most likely driven by patient demand, reductions in stigma and the lower cost of antidepressant medications available in generic form.
Many psychiatrists at the conference in San Francisco said that they routinely urge patients to try therapy as an alternative or a complement to medications, but that many patients have no access to that care, because their insurance will not pay for it.
Dr. Michael Bostwick, a suicide researcher and professor of psychiatry at Mayo Medical School, in Rochester. Minn., said it remained unclear what alternative treatments Mr. Kennedy is recommending to patients who quit antidepressants.
“Toward what end?” he said. “Is he going to put more resources toward therapists? Is he going to tell us to eat more red meat, or work out more, or take psychedelics, like the president has advocated? There is no alternative plan.”
Spring is when honeybees are bringing in food, the hive is healthy and growing, and they simply … run out of space. That’s when they decide to split their overcrowded hives and send half swarming off in search of greener pastures.
But Southern California beekeepers saw that happen unusually early this year, which left many of them scrambling.
“Never before have I seen so many bees swarm in late February and March,” said Daniel Barkanov, a beekeeper with Bee Specialist who works primarily in the San Gabriel Valley. “Usually that happens between May and June,” he said.
“The shift this year was quite, quite dramatic in many areas, especially in Central and Southern California,” said Mateo Kaiser, a beekeeper and managing director at Swarmed, a network of 10,000 beekeepers focused on monitoring and safe hive relocation.
Beekeepers typically try to guide swarming so their their colonies can grow. They divide their own hives at the start of swarming season to prevent bees from flying off, and pick up unwanted ones that land in people’s attics and walls.
But this year, many were caught unprepared.
“They were scrambling to even just have the materials ready to catch the bees and get them into beehives,” Kaiser said.
Climate change is one likely culprit for the early takeoff.
“There’s substantive evidence that climate change alters bee reproductive cycles and colony dynamics,” said Boris Baer, co-director of the Center for Integrative Bee Research at UC Riverside.
Some beekeepers and scientists think the warm winter in the West and early flowering season this year led bees to go into their high-activity mode early, leading to earlier swarms.
That can pose a problem if they then run into food shortages with an unexpected cold snap or dry spring, like the one now in the West.
“If you give bees a kind of early signal here, like that spring has started, it’s warm, they jump into action,” Baer said. “Then you have drought, or you don’t have the normal amount of resources they can rely on, and the bees can run out of food during a very critical time of the year.”
Some bees are on the move at other times of year, but true swarm season kicks off when numbers cross a threshold after a period of warm, spring “growing degree days,” a term used by farmers to predict the growth of plants and insects.
Kaiser dated the start of Los Angeles County’s swarm season to March 12 this year, the earliest in the last five and probably the last 10 years. It’s also more than a month earlier than last year.
Barkanov thinks that one reason, besides the warm winter and spring, could be that the bees didn’t swarm enough last season. Air pollution and habitat loss are known to affect them, and last year was particularly difficult for hives here, with beekeepers reporting slow bee activity and losses from the January fires.
He said he was prepared for early swarms this year, but what he observed then was unexpected — a pause. “It doesn’t make sense why they started swarming, then stopped this year,” he said. “Bees are really, really confused on what’s going on.”
Many are reporting fewer bees on the move overall, which could mean fewer colonies are growing and splitting off this year in search of more space and food.
That could be a sign of poor health, said Barbara Baer-Imhoof, Baer’s co-director. “At this time of year, bees should be bringing in a lot of food, but we’ve been having to feed our bees constantly, throughout winter up until now,” she said.
U.S. honeybee declines have been making headlines since the early 2000s. Last year saw the largest die-off in recorded history, with beekeepers losing over 60% of their hives. Pesticides and environmental factors such as climate change and urban sprawl are known stressors. Research also links last year’s massive colony collapses to parasitic varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and transfer viruses to hives.
A shorter winter and earlier swarm can make bees more vulnerable to these pests.
Typically, bees stop laying eggs during the winter, or at least slow down activity, which represses mite activity. But warmer winters and “the spring season starting earlier means the mites have more prime time to reproduce and grow up in the colony,” Kaiser said.
San Fernando Valley-based beekeeper Nicole Palladino, who runs the relocation service Bee Catchers Inc, said she isn’t particularly concerned by a March start to swarming season.
“I think the bee population looks a lot better than it did last year,” she said. “Seeing the early swarm showed that a lot of the bees that we saw after the fires maybe became more stable and got stronger later in the season.
“If we were fully in peak swarm in January, that would terrify me,” she added.
Elina L. Niño, an apiculture professor at UC Davis, said many factors can contribute to earlier-than-usual swarm reports, as well as reports of fewer swarms, and an annual beekeeper survey out later in the year will provide a clearer picture of how the last year’s conditions have affected bees.
Kaiser agreed, but he said the survey will come out too late in the season for beekeepers to address shifts in swarming behavior and monitor for mites. “We chose to alert beekeepers to this now, and to have them keep an eye on this behavior,” he said.
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