World Food Crisis

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Bee Industry Losses Mount, As Keepers Puzzle Over Their Disappearance
Susan Salisbury
Palm Beach Post
April 29, 2010

It's been a rough winter for honeybees.

The nation's beekeepers are continuing to lose managed colonies, with losses totaling 33.8 percent from October 2009 to April this year, a survey released Thursday found.

While the causes vary, most beekeepers identified starvation, poor weather, pesticides and weak colonies as the top reasons for the bees dying.

Such losses threaten the future of the nation's crop pollination and honey industries, said Jerry Hayes, one of the survey's researchers, and the chief apiary inspector with Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Gainesville.

``We keep saying it is unsustainable, and it is,'' Hayes said. ``What is driving the market for beekeepers right now is almond pollination. Honey production doesn't pay the bills.''

The bee fallout is an increase from overall losses of 29 percent reported from a similar survey covering the winter of 2008-09, and similar to the 35.8 percent losses for the winter of 2007-08, according to a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

The mysterious disappearance of bees phenomenon has become known as Colony Collapse disorder. It was first reported by Florida beekeeper Dave Hackenberg in 2005. CCD is characterized by the disappearance of adult bees from a colony, leaving behind a box full of honey. No dead bees are found.

While the cause of CCD is still unknown, scientist are looking at four potential factors: pathogens; parasites; environmental stresses, which incudes pesticides; and management stresses, including nutrition problems. Most believe a combination are to blame.

The continued high rate of losses are worrying, especially considering losses over the summer were not being captured in the survey, said Jeffrey Pettis, research leader of ARS' Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Summer was excluded so the recent survey's time period would match the others taken the past two years.

As the latest survey was based on interviews, it was not possible to differentiate between verifiable cases of CCD and colonies lost as the result of other causes that share the ``absence of dead bees'' as a symptom.

The 28 percent of beekeeping operations that reported some of their colonies perished without dead bees present lost 44 percent of their colonies. This compares to 26 percent of beekeepers reporting such dead colonies in the 2008-09 winter and 32 percent in the 2007-08 winter. Beekeepers that did not report their colonies having CCD lost 25 percent of their colonies.

Hackenberg, a commercial beekeeper with operations in Dade City and Lewisburg, Pa., said, ``Our losses for total year were 62 percent. Our losses for the winter were 40 percent. We took a huge hit in Pennsylvania before we left to come to Florida the first of November.

``The guys who are out there producing honey cannot stay in business. There are guys already falling by the wayside. Consumers will be paying more for honey when they go to the grocery store.''

Hackenberg, some researchers and other beekeepers believe that increased use of multiple types of pesticides are a major reason for the losses.

Beekeepers scored a major win in December when a federal court in New York invalidated the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's approval of a pesticide called spirotetramat, sold under the trade names Movento and Ultor.

The EPA took it off the market, but the product that agricultural producers and others have already purchased is still out there, Hackenberg said.

``This stuff is in the soil and it is not going away. This is the first year in 44 years I did not put bees in a citrus grove because of all the spraying. They are spraying it every 20 days,'' Hackenberg said.

The survey checked on about 22.4 percent of the country's estimated 2.46 million colonies. A complete analysis of the survey data will be published later this year. The abstract can be found at http://ento.psu.edu/pollinators/news/losses-2009-10

More information about CCD can be found at www.ars.usda.gov/ccd.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/30/1605889/bee-industry-losses-mount-as-keepers.html#ixzz0mcRNrtNL

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/30/1605889/bee-industry-losses-mount-as-keepers.html