The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Vale Ltd. has spent $10 million since 2006, revegetating mountains of ugly black slag, the waste from its Copper Cliff smelting operations, turning them into verdant hills along Big Nickel Road. It’s now up to one of nature’s smallest creatures to keeps those rolling hills green and to help enhance biodiversity.
Vale’s environmental team has started a program using honey bees to pollinate wildflowers planted as part of the company’s slag revegetation efforts. About 350,000 of the insects are living in seven hives contained inside a repurposed surplus trailer to protect them from the winter elements and from predators such as bears.
During three seasons, the honey bees leave the hives to forage on nectar and pollen, helping to keep the flowers planted on the hillsides thriving.
Glen Watson, Vale’s superintendent of decommissioning and reclamation, said the idea to use bees to continue the work started by people came to his team when it saw hills of slag blooming with wildflowers planted from seed.
It didn’t happen overnight. Revegetating the slag piles first involved breaking up hardened material that was molten when poured. Slag heaps that gave Sudbury an other-worldly look in that end of the city were regraded, and 18 inches of silty-clay, wildflower seed and fertilizer spread over 120 acres on the face of the slag piles.
The idea to use bees to pollinate the plants sown on slag piles occurred when blooming flowers would naturally have been attracting the flying insects.
Vale land reclamation supervisor Mark Palkovits, a geologist, called upon retired miner Wayne Tonelli, an amateur beekeeper, to get the project started and to oversee it.
Watson said parts of Sudbury’s landscape have been damaged by mining activity, and Vale is looking to reclaim areas that aren’t being actively used, “to try to reduce our footprint.”
Vale kick-started the wildflower population, including red clover, with a seed mix, but the environmental team is looking to bees, small mammals and birds to increase the mixture of flowers and to introduce indigenous plants.
Watson said Vale hadn’t heard of using bees in something like slag revegetation before, but the idea has captured the imagination of employees and neighbours.
Tonelli, a retired general foreman at Vale’s Garson Mine, has been beekeeping at his home near Wanup for 10 years. He worked for Inco and Vale for 40 years, never dreaming he would one day be the mining behemoth’s resident beekeeper.
Tonelli is fascinated with honey bee culture.
“I just think they’re an interesting little creature,” he said this week, carefully handling a frame full of bees to show off to visitors.
A man known for his sense of humour and for organizing Miners for Cancer hockey and golf events that have raised almost $1 million for the Northern Cancer Foundation, Tonelli proudly shows off his operation.
The appeal of bee culture for him, at the foot of regreened slag piles and at home, is that the insects are “very organized, everybody’s got a job and it gets me in the outdoors.”
Tonelli smokes a hive to calm its honey bee inhabitants before bringing them out. He rarely gets stung.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2014/10/03/sudbury-bees-enhancing-biodiversity-on-slag-piles