What's Up With The Bees?
Is the honeybee in danger of extinction? |
Since colony collapse disorder (CCD) broke out November 2007, as many as a quarter of our domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) have disappeared, abandoning hives full of food and larvae. Some beekeepers have lost up to 90% of their hives. Since the adult bees don’t return to the hive to die, it’s impossible to say what killed them; the few victims left behind display a confusing variety of pathological problems, such as a digestive tract clogged with undigested food, elevated numbers of normally harmless pathogens, and discolored tissues. Weirdest of all, opportunistic scavenger species and bees from other hives won’t touch the abandoned stores of honey. What do they know that we don’t?
From a agricultural perspective, it’s a pressing question. Not all crops require bee pollination, but over 100 do, including almonds and many fruits. The bulk of a beekeeper’s own income is derived from renting his or her hives for pollination services, not from honey production - the Oregon beekeeper I interviewed said with a smile that he barely makes any money on honey. California’s almond growers have begun outbidding other industries for the services of beehives, because there are simply not enough to go around - and that was before CCD kicked in, decimating the bee supply in some regions of the US.
• View a narrated slide show about CCD and the industrial side of beekeeping (NYT)
Depending who you ask, possible causes of CCD include GM crops; malnutrition (poor pollen quality/availability, or poor supplements provided by keepers); unusual numbers of common parasitic mites (varroa); a virus; funguses (a new, more infective strain of Nosema); poor genetic diversity in domestic bee strains; cell phones (or cordless phones - there seems to be some confusion); and pesticides (usually neonicotinoids). Whatever it is, it’s global - Canada and Europe also report losses. France, after serious hive losses several years ago, banned some neonicotinoid pesticides, but continue to lose bees anyway. Australia is largely ok; some US beekeepers have replenished their stocks with Australian bees.
• recent LA Times review of the situation (June 10, 2007)
One (somewhat) comforting hypothesis is that CCD is actually old news - a periodic disorder that has happened before, and will clear on its own. Intermittent seasonal losses have been reported since 1868, in both the US and Europe; the occurrences were given names like “dwindle disease”, “disappearing disease,” and “Isle of Wight disease.” In some cases, a putative cause, like fungus or unusual weather, was blamed; in other cases the problem simply went away without any likely cause being found (Underwood and van Engelsdorp, 2007). So will CCD just go away? Hopefully, but no one’s counting on it.
Agricultural practicalities aside, there’s something gut-wrenchingly wrong about CCD. A fundamental piece of the ecosystem is being leached away, and we have no idea why. I’m reminded of the epidemic of frog deformities a decade ago. Despite frantic experimentation by ecologists and developmental biologists, it was never solved (the most likely culprits are trematode parasites; but pesticides, habitat loss, and UV radiation probably contributed to the problem). Will a similar complex of interlocking causes be found for CCD? Will we be able to cure it, or will we just have to wait for it to diminish - as we did with the frogs?
More:
MAAREC Colony Collapse Disorder homepage
CCD Working Group Preliminary Report 
Here is an update to the brief bee story we did a few weeks ago. I've been keeping an eye on the Colony Collapse Disorder phenomenon that is causing a lot of furrowed brows in the U.S., as this may well become the biggest issue of 2007.
Things are getting dire on the U.S. agricultural front, and there are similar reports beginning to filter through from countries in Europe.
Disappearing by the billions, on a worker strike we do not know
how to negotiate |
The sad mystery surrounding the humble honeybee - which is a vital component in $14bn-worth of US agriculture - is beginning to worry even the highest strata of the political class in Washington.
"Hillary Clinton's got interested in this in the last week or so," said David Hackenberg, the beekeeper leading the drive to publicize their plight.
"And she's not alone," he said. "There's a lot of Congressmen have called...wanting to know what's going on. It's serious. - BBC
There's still no concrete evidence about what is killing the millions and billions of bees around the country, but there are a lot of guesses.
The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.
It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a "tremendous pathogen load", the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.
... The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist.
... the few bees left inside the hive were carrying "a tremendous number of pathogens" - virtually every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees' immune systems were being suppressed in some way. - The Independent
There are as many theories as there are members of the panel, but Mr Hackenberg strongly suspects that new breeds of nicotine-based pesticides are to blame.
"It may be that the honeybee has become the victim of these insecticides that are meant for other pests," he said. "If we don't figure this out real quick, it's going to wipe out our food supply."
Just a few miles down the sunlit road, it is easy to find farmers prepared to agree with his gloomy assessment.
... Dennis van Engelsdorp, a Pennsylvania-based beekeeper and leading researcher... is adamant that it is too early to pin the blame on insecticides."We have no evidence to think that that theory is more right than any other..." - BBC
Urban sprawl and farming also have taken away fields of clover and wildflowers, as well as nesting trees.
Pesticides and herbicides used in farming and on suburban lawns can weaken or kill bees.
Caron said a new class of pesticides used on plants, called neonicotinoids, don’t kill bees but hamper their sense of direction. That leaves them unable to find their way back to their hives.
... Because these bees aren’t returning to their hives, researchers don’t have a lot of evidence to study.
Those dead bees that have been found nearby have only deepened the mystery.
"They are just dirty with parts and pieces of various diseases," said Jim Tew, a beekeeping expert with the OSU Extension campus in Wooster. "It looks like a general stress collapse."
Similar disappearances have occurred over time. Tew said he remembers a similar phenomenon in the 1960s. Then, it was called "disappearing disease."
"It was exactly the same thing," he said.
But this one, Caron said, apparently causes hives to collapse at a much quicker rate and is more widespread.
Cobey said it could be from too much of everything: bad weather, chemicals, parasites, viruses.
"If you give them one of these things at a time, they seem to deal with it," she said. "But all of these things, it’s too hard.
"I think the bees are just compromised. They’re stressed out." - Columbus Dispatch
Whatever the cause, some farmers are getting desperate, to the point of not bothering to plant their crops.
"The squash crops that we grow have a male and female bloom, and the bee has to visit...to make it pollinate and produce," he said.
"We're going to have a hard time finding rental bees to aid in this pollination and if it's as critical as it looks like it will be, I probably won't even plant anything this spring." - BBC
Huge monocrop farming systems and specializations, and the spread of suburbia across natural habitat, are removing natural diversity. Bees have been lumped together in the millions, in a factory farm type environment not so unlike that of our chickens and other livestock animals. Many of these bees are transported across several states to perform pollinations in orchards and farms around the country. Today they are in contact with substances they shouldn't have to deal with - pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and pollen from genetically modified crops. Researchers are scrambling to find answers, and as the spring season is upon us, time is running out.
Honey bees, which are not native to the U.S. incidentally (they were imported for crop pollination), are tasked with the pollination of approximately one third of all U.S. crops.
... scientists are very worried, not least because, as there is no obvious cause for the disease as yet, there is no way of tackling it. - The Independent
If some of our readers have more light to shed on this topic, please send it through.
Update I: European Bees also taking Nosedive - Perhaps GM Crops?
Update II: Colony Collapse Disorder - a Moment for Reflection?
Further Reading:
http://www.celsias.com/article/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-where-is-it-heading/
I know this won't come as a surprise to many of our readers, nor to the many organic beekeepers that have been commenting on our posts, but there have been several reports of organic bee colonies surviving where the 'industrial' bee colonies are collapsing. Here is the latest to come to my attention:
Pollination, as practiced for 1000s of years? |
Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island.... In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.
Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site , where Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:
Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.
 This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.
Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?
These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.
We've been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. And we're starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's all of the above... - Information Liberation
That's funny - that's just what I said...
Let's hear it for the natural/organic beekeepers out there! I hope this CCD incident will reinforce that natural systems respond far better to imitation and cooperation than reductionist arbitrary control. Work within the system, observe and learn. There's a lot more to nature than meets the eye, or the microscope.
Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder |
