PEAK BEE POPULATION - COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER

[basserdan]

The Blight of the Honey Bee

They’re dying of stress, which is stressing us out. But we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

By David Wallace-Wells
June 17, 2015 8:00 a.m.

The American honeybee is in peril, you might have heard, if you are the sort of person who likes a ghost story. In the last year, beekeepers lost 42 percent of their colonies, another peak in a string of mass die-offs on the scale of plagues: In the last five years, die-offs have hit 34 percent, 46 percent, 29 percent, and 36 percent. That’s more than one in every three colonies each year — whole impeccably networked societies, as big as small cities. In many areas, the figures were worse, and it was hard not to wonder how a species in crisis could possibly sustain annual regional losses as high as 60 percent without fast approaching extinction. “What are we doing on bees?” the president has been said to interject at the end of Oval Office meetings. “Are we doing enough?”

It’s been a long decade for bees. We’ve been panicking about them nonstop since 2006, when beekeeper Dave Hackenberg inspected 2,400 hives wintering in Florida and found 400 of them abandoned — totally empty. American beekeepers had experienced dramatic die-offs before, as recently as the previous winter in California and in regular bouts with a deadly bug called the varroa mite since the 1980s. But those die-offs would at least produce bodies pathologists could study. Here, the bees had just disappeared. In the U.K., they called it Mary Celeste syndrome, after the merchant ship discovered off the Azores in 1872 with not a single passenger aboard. The bees hadn’t even scrawled CROATOAN in honey on the door on their way out of the hive.

Hackenberg is 66, a self-described farm boy, and not just the public face but the Edward Snowden of bee death — an avid yawpy monologuist with a long Freeman Dyson nose who runs a one-man ad hoc bee-advocacy speakers circuit (Sierra Clubs, farmers associations, Katie Couric). I’d come to find him in Maine, where he was working for a couple of weeks helping to manage someone else’s bees. Sitting in the farm office, he told me about what happened in 2006. “It’s kind of an airy, breezy day — 70-some degrees, but there’s no bees flying. There’s something wrong here. Nobody sticking their heads out the door. I started jerking covers, and then I was really jerking covers — I mean, I’m going right down the line pulling covers up and there’s nobody home. I’m so stunned I can’t even talk. I’m on my hands and knees crawling around looking for dead bees in among the stones, and there wasn’t any. I mean, there was no dead bees. Three weeks ago, these bees are fine,” he says. Now? “You got a murder scene, and nobody knows what happened. There are no weapons, there are no corpses.

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