Story Photos
 Photo by Roger Werth Beekeepers in the past few months have lost 1/4 of their colonies, or about five time the normal winter losses. The problem has struck at least 27 states and parts of Canada, Brazil and Europe |
Local beekeepers, scientists sound off about disappearing honeybees
Saturday, June 9, 2007 11:17 PM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleAnother acronym, another puzzle, another flurry of apocalyptic predictions.
Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is the newest environmental malady to grab headlines. CCD refers to the phenomenon of beehives turning up empty all over the world, with no clear explanation.
Since October 2006, 35 percent of the U.S. population of the Western honeybee (Apis millefera) has disappeared. There are thousands of other kinds of bees, but the honeybee -- which was imported from Europe -- is the one that's disappearing.
" ... This may well become the biggest issue of 2007," reports a British Web site on agriculture and the environment called Celsias.
"Things are getting dire on the U.S. agricultural front, and there are similar reports beginning to filter through from countries in Europe," the report says.
"The sad mystery surrounding the humble honeybee --- which is a vital component in $14 billion worth of U.S. agriculture -- is beginning to worry even the highest strata of the political class in Washington ..."
Local beekeepers and experts say the problem is not new. Still, they're concerned about its swift progression and effect on the pollinators that support U.S. food supplies.
There's a certain degree of media hype, said one Yakima bee expert.
"Publicity generates more study," said Jim Bach. "The CCD group has gotten money from the National Honey Board," Bach said, "and the USDA's Agricultural Research Service is lobbying Congress for money to study what's happening."
Bach, who has raised bees for more than 40 years and worked for several decades as chief apiary inspector and specialist in insect diseases for Washington State's Department of Agriculture, said research is "critically important to Washington State. We need so many bees for pollination, and some bee colonies are dying off here.
"This spring in California, a Washington beekeeper who was down there said the average losses seemed to be around 30 to 40 percent."
In comparison, Bach said, annual losses hovered at one percent when he started beekeeping in the 1960s.
Although the East Coast and Midwest report empty hives, local beekeepers do not.
"I haven't had any problems," said Longview beekeeper Eva Davis. "My bees are doing great this year."
Known as the "bee lady" at the Cowlitz Community Farmers Market, Davis is approaching 80, so she has downsized from 37 hives to a dozen. She reads everything she can about CCD, Davis said.
"Nobody knows for sure what's causing it," she said. Mites have always been a problem with bees, she said, but diseases seem more intense and clustered now.
"They started noticing it in Europe in the year 2000," she said. "They 're losing a lot of bees over there."
Some theories suggest that unknown factors are suppressing the immune system of Western bees. A pest afflicts bees all over Japan and China, Davis said. "But their bees seem to be used to it; their bees survive. Our bees don't."
Davis suspects that pesticides may play a role.
"Where they are using pesticides that go into the plant, and then the insects eat the plant and die, they're having more losses," she said. "We didn't think bees were affected; they seemed to be fine." But perhaps that type of pesticide "causes stress, and the bees can't fight other diseases. ..
"Pollination is so important, yet there's hardly any money to do research."
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Dr. Louis LaPierre, biology instructor at Lower Columbia College, agrees with Davis that pesticides may be part of the answer.
LaPierre, who focuses on insect ecology, said the collapse of honeybee colonies probably has a slew of causes, including our heavy reliance on pollinators that are not native to North America, our use of pesticides and other chemicals, maybe even global climate change.
"Honeybees are an introduced species from Europe," LaPierre said. "They've been managed by humans for centuries. And they're inbred -- all the workers are female, and they're produced from within the colony, so they're related by 75 percent.
"They share a lot of genes," he added. "That's going to make them fairly susceptible" to disease. "Even moreso when they're managed by humans. Honeybees are a domesticated organism."
If any species is going to feel the impact of environmental disruptions, the honeybees are a good bet, LaPierre said, ticking off a list of likely disruptions: "fungal pathogens, bacteria, viruses, synthetic chemicals, transgenic crops -- they all get into bees and perhaps mess them up."
Colony collapse disorder is a crisis, he said, "because we have set up a situation where the agricultural sector is dependent on the honeybee for pollination."
Because of the way we grow things, by clearing away natural areas and growing in managed monocultures, LaPierre said, "we have set ourselves up for an inevitable problem."
That played out in California's San Joaquin Valley this spring. The almond crop there contributes $3 billion to the nation's economy every year.
Those almond trees need "a million hives of bees, trucked in from nearly 40 U.S. states to move pollen from one tree to another ... in the largest managed pollination event on Earth," reported Cosmos magazine.
When almost half of the bees don't make the trip, that represents economic losses of more than $1 billion.
Another culprit in the honeybee crisis could be chemicals, LaPierre said.
"We spray pesticides on the lawn, we spray insecticides in our parks, and we really don't know what we're doing," the biologist said. "It works its way up through the food chain, and has synergistic effects with other chemicals."
"Chemicals act as synthetic hormones, feminizing male species of organisms, reducing sperm counts," he said. "It sounds alarmist, but perhaps it more realistic than we think. That's where the real focus needs to be."
Instead of blaming cell phones for the disappearance of bees, which LaPierre said is "illogical" from a scientific standpoint, "we should blame the wanton application of pesticides."
One thing that might remedy the situation is to strengthen native pollinators, including flies, beetles and bees other than honeybees.
"We have thousands of species of native bees in North America, several hundred in Washington State," LaPierre said. To promote native bees, "we need open spaces, diversity of habitat, places to nest and escape."
That's not to say Colony Collapse Disorder is not serious and complex, the biologist said. It could affect our food supply, but "it may be a dip, not a crash."
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Dip or crash, Yakima's Bach is intent on solving the puzzle of CCD.
"It's too early to say really what's happening," Bach said. "I read the national material, and the output from Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk at the University of Montana. I've known him for years, and he belongs to the national CCD working group."
Bach said a potential link to a virus and some fungi has been identified, but "as yet, no scientific data supports that. ... in most cases, these are anecdotal reports. Beekeepers call in and say, 'Yeah, I've got a lot of dying bees.' But there's not a lot of serious study" aside from "a few well observed reports in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Florida."
Like any scientist, Bach differentiates between proof and anecdote. And, like any scientist, he's engaged by the mystery.
"Bee colonies started dying in the fall as early as the late 1800s," he said. "I've observed it since 1980 and '81. Thousands of colonies have died across the state of Washington."
To understand why, Bach said, "we have to talk about what beekeepers did or didn't do that may have caused their death."
Many beekeepers don't survey hives for honeybee tracheal mites, Bach said, "so they don't know what the level is in their colonies. The same is true with varroa mites."
Left unchecked, pest levels can quickly get too high and a colony may not survive, Bach said.
"It's the same with human beings. It only takes a certain load of germs or bacteria before the body breaks down. If the disease levels in a bee colony get too high, the colony breaks down," he said.
Sometimes beekeepers know they've got a problem, but they don't treat it aggressively enough, or they wait too long, Bach said.
"The commercial guys say they're too busy," and because many barely turn a profit, they may avoid the expense of buying enough of the miticide that kills the mites, he said.
In another analogy to human behavior, "if they don't use the recommended amount of miticides, they undertreat the colony," Bach said, "which only breeds stronger mites."
He ticked off several other ideas.
"A lot of native fauna are going away," he said. "There's a decline in native pollinators, and nobody's studied that over the years. ...
"It might be a genetic problem," Bach said. "We don't have enough diversity. Sheppard at Washington State University (bee expert Dr. Steve Sheppard) wants to get genetic stock from Europe to diversify the gene pool" of bees.
Which harks back to what LaPierre, the LCC insect specialist, said.
"We all understand that we have to diversify our portfolios," he said, "that we shouldn't put all our money into one stock."
LaPierre said it makes no sense to rely on one fossil fuel like oil for energy, or on one kind of pollinator like the honeybee for agricultural needs.
"Why do we rely on one pollinator for all our citrus crops? The honeybee is primarily from European stock, but there are lots of native bees to compensate. We need to diversify."
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