wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  PlanetArk 27 Apr 07
Taiwan Stung by Millions of Missing Bees

PlanetArk 23 Apr 07
Vanishing Honeybees Mystify Scientists
Story by Deborah Zabarenko

Channel NewsAsia 7 Apr 07
Mysterious disappearance of US bees creating a buzz

BBC 11 Mar 07
Vanishing bees threaten US crops
By Matt Wells BBC News, Florida, USA

It is officially called Colony Collapse Disorder, but a more pithy way of describing it would be Vanishing Bee Syndrome.

All over America, beekeepers are opening up their hives in preparation for the spring pollination season, only to find that their bees are dead or have disappeared. Nobody, so far, knows why.

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 publicise 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.

"It's not just affecting the beekeepers, it's affecting the farmers that produce the food, and in the end it's going to affect the consumer," he added, sighing deeply.

What makes our interview slightly surreal is that we are standing next to an orange grove, in rural Florida, while about 70 hives of bees buzz angrily behind us, as if to emphasise their predicament.

Mr Hackenberg is suffering along with his bees. Like many in his rather neglected profession, he and his son spend the summer and autumn in the north of the country, driving their bees down south during the winter, to kick-start the early fruit and vegetable crops.

In a matter of weeks, he lost just over 2,000 of his 3,000 hives. The yard of his small honey farm near Tampa Bay, is littered with empty boxes, which normally would be full of worker bees, doing what they do best.

As we speak, his mobile phone chirps constantly, with yet more beekeepers across the US, reporting losses of up to 95%.

Pesticides?

Federal scientists, the National Beekeepers Association and state researchers have come together to form an emergency working group to try and halt the disastrous trend.

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.

In the old days, crops would be pollinated by bees living in the woods around the fertile fields, but housing developers have gobbled up much of the natural habitat, according to Carl Grooms, who runs Fancy Farms Inc.

"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."

Back at the Buffy Bee honey farm - the Hackenberg's Florida base - two members from the working group checked in to pay their respects, and take some bee samples on their way back to Washington.

Crazy theories

Dennis van Engelsdorp, a Pennsylvania-based beekeeper and leading researcher, walks over to an isolated group of hives, and pulls out two different wooden frames that would normally be covered in bees, busy making honey. The difference is obvious. While one is teeming with insects, the other is virtually uninhabited.

"The adult population totally disappears," he said. He shakes his head in frustration. He runs through the long list of possible causes, ranging from new mite infestation to new chemicals, but he 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...There's stronger evidence for some other things really," he said.

He points to the fact that the Colony Collapse Disorder is inconsistent even within localised regions. Some beekeepers have managed to retain completely healthy hives.

His caution is backed up by Nathan Rice, from the Department of Agriculture's bee research laboratory. "While there is a lot of this crazy guessing going on, people get kind of concerned," he said. "We're here to try to figure out why it's happening."

Future fears

The sensitivity of the beekeepers themselves is easy to understand. For the Hackenbergs, their livelihood is at stake, not to mention the millions of bees that have died.

David Hackenberg's son, Davey, 35, is angry and frustrated that there are no answers yet. "We're working hard at it every day, and we're going to keep working hard until the bank comes and says, 'hey, we're taking the place,'" he says with a defiant edge.

As a father of four, he thinks that the time may have come to get out of the bee business. Tales abound around the Hackenberg breakfast table of beekeepers who have already given up after a calamitous few months trying to pollinate the huge almond crop in California.

Some bankrupt beekeepers do not have the money to get themselves home, let alone their equipment.

A bumper-sticker on one of the family trucks shows support for the Bush-Cheney ticket in the 2004 election, but Davey is now wondering whether anywhere near enough has been done by governments - and everybody else - to keep his fragile industry and environment going.

Channel NewsAsia 7 Apr 07
Mysterious disappearance of US bees creating a buzz

WASHINGTON: US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.

Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent. According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.

"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.

It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.

There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s. And the number of beekeepers has halved.

The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.

Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.

"The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California," Brandi said.

California's almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.

The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.

The usual suspects to which bees are known to be vulnerable such as the varroa mite, an external parasite which attacks honey bees and which can wipe out a hive, appear not to be the main cause.

"CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill," entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told the Congress committee.

In cases of colony collapse disorder, flourishing hives are suddenly depopulated leaving few, if any, surviving bees behind. The queen bee, which is the only one in the hive allowed to reproduce, is found with just a handful of young worker bees and a reserve of food.

Curiously though, no dead bees are found either inside or outside the hive. The fact that other bees or parasites seem to shun the emptied hives raises suspicions that some kind of toxin or chemical is keeping the insects away, Cox-Foster said.

Those bees found in such devastated colonies also all seem to be infected with multiple micro-organisms, many of which are known to be behind stress-related illness in bees.

Scientists working to unravel the mysteries behind CCD believe a new pathogen may be the cause, or a new kind of chemical product which could be weakening the insects' immune systems.

The finger of suspicion is being pointed at agriculture pesticides such as the widely- used neonicotinoides, which are already known to be poisonous to bees.

France saw a huge fall in its bee population in the 1990s, blamed on the insecticide Gaucho which has now been banned in the country. - AFP/so

PlanetArk 23 Apr 07
Vanishing Honeybees Mystify Scientists
Story by Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

Go to work, come home. Go to work -- and vanish without a trace. Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.

The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate US$15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees also have been reported in Europe and Brazil.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.

If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.

Since about one-third of the US diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the US Agricultural Research Service.

"They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming."

Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.

"It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.

Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder.

"What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said.

SMALL WORKERS IN A SUPERSIZE SOCIETY

The problem has prompted a congressional hearing, a report by the National Research Council and a National Pollinator Week set for June 24-30 in Washington, but so far no clear idea of what is causing it.

"The main hypotheses are based on the interpretation that the disappearances represent disruptions in orientation behavior and navigation," said May Berenbaum, an insect ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

There have been other fluctuations in the number of honeybees, going back to the 1880s, where there were "mysterious disappearances without bodies just as we're seeing now, but never at this magnitude," Berenbaum said in a telephone interview.

In some cases, beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder, with some suffering even higher losses. One beekeeper alone lost 40,000 bees, Pettis said.

Nationally, some 27 states have reported the disorder, with billions of bees simply gone. Some beekeepers supplement their stocks with bees imported from Australia, said beekeeper Jeff Anderson, whose business keeps him and his bees traveling between Minnesota and California.

Honeybee hives are rented out to growers to pollinate their crops, and beekeepers move around as the growing seasons change. Honeybees are not the only pollinators whose numbers are dropping.

Other animals that do this essential job -- non-honeybees, wasps, flies, beetles, birds and bats -- have decreasing populations as well. But honeybees are the big actors in commercial pollination efforts.

"One reason we're in this situation is this is a supersize society -- we tend to equate small with insignificant," Berenbaum said. "I'm sorry but that's not true in biology. You have to be small to get into the flower and deliver the pollen.

"Without that critical act, there's no fruit. And no technology has been invented that equals, much less surpasses, insect pollinators."

PlanetArk 27 Apr 07
Taiwan Stung by Millions of Missing Bees

TAIPEI - Taiwan's bee farmers are feeling the sting of lost business and possible crop danger after millions of the honey-making, plant-pollinating insects vanished during volatile weather, media and experts said on Thursday.

Over the past two months, farmers in three parts of Taiwan have reported most of their bees gone, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported. Taiwan's TVBS television station said about 10 million bees had vanished in Taiwan.

A beekeeper on Taiwan's northeastern coast reported 6 million insects missing "for no reason", and one in the south said 80 of his 200 bee boxes had been emptied, the paper said.

Beekeepers usually let their bees out of boxes to pollinate plants and the insects normally make their way back to their owners. However, many of the bees have not returned over the past couple of months.

Possible reasons include disease, pesticide poisoning and unusual weather, varying from less than 20 degrees celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) to more than 30 degrees celsius over a few days, experts say.

"You can see climate change really clearly these days in Taiwan," said Yang Ping-shih, entomology professor at the National Taiwan University.

He added that two kinds of pesticide can make bees turn "stupid" and lose their sense of direction.

As affected beekeepers lose business, fruit growers may lack a key pollination source and neighbours might get stung, he said.

Billions of bees have fled hives in the United States since late 2006, instead of helping pollinate US$15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees also have been reported in Europe and Brazil.

The mass buzz-offs are isolated cases so far, a Taiwan government Council of Agriculture official said. But the council may collect data to study the causes of the vanishing bees and gauge possible impacts, said Kao Ching-wen, a pesticides section chief at the council.

"We want to see what the reason is, and we definitely need some evidence," Kao said. "It's hard to say whether there will be an impact."
links
Related articles on Global issues: biodiversity loss
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com