Where Are All The Honey Bees?

Imagine walking into the local grocery store and finding only processed food.  There is no fresh fruit, no vegetables, no nuts, almost no meat or milk.  Are you thinking this might be a market in some poverty-stricken Third World Country? 

Think again.

This grim scenario would happen right here in the U.S., if we had no honeybees.  And honeybees have been disappearing here, at an alarming rate.

Colony Collapse Disorder or Where Are All The Honey Bees?

It's called Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD.  CCD is the name given to a syndrome where entire colonies of bees vanish.  The die-offs began in late Fall of 2006.  A commercial beekeeper, David Hackenberg, was checking his hives when he noticed that many hives were empty.  The bees had just vanished.  Hackenberg finally persuaded entomologists at Penn State University's College of Agricultural Science, to investigate the mysterious disappearance.  A year later, by Spring of 2007, nearly a quarter of the U.S. honeybee population had also disappeared.

What on earth is going on?

A Very Scary Scenario

"How strange to live in a world where the very fecundity of the earth is in doubt.  We tend to think of our farms as burgeoning places, with fruits and vegetables almost spontaneously springing from the soil,  but we are creeping awfully close to a post fertile era...Twenty-five years ago, in her novel The Handmaids Tale, Margaret Atwood described a dystopian world where most of the population was barren and fertile young handmaids were purchased by families to provide reproduction.  An equally skewed arrangement has existed in our fields for decades.  But now, even the handmaids are dying."

There are about 25 or 30 of us sitting here in Book Passage, listening intently to author Rowan Jacobsen, read a passage from his latest book, Fruitless Fall- The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis.

Jacobsen writes about food and environmental issues, and as a long-time rural Vermont resident, he's deeply connected with the land.  His book's focus, the utterly grim scenario of what could happen if the bees keep disappearing, is the big draw this evening.   

Several bee keepers are in the audience.  After he finishes, he opens it up for questions.  Right off the bat one of them asks Jacobsen what does he think is the cause of CCD?-

"I think it's a combination of factors that is causing it," he replies. "The fungicide and insecticide combinations are very toxic.  That's on top of viruses that have been found in the bee populations, like Israeli Acute Paralysis."

Israeli Acute Paralysis?

Honey Bees Are The Work Horse Of The Agricultural Industry

Bees have a very short, yet highly productive life-span.  Most bees live for just a few weeks, although the Queen bee can live up to several years.  In the hive, bees are divided into three groups called castes; Queens, drones and workers.  the Queen's sole function is to lay eggs, and that she does, sometimes as many as a thousand or more in a single day. Drones are male bees whose sole function is to mate with the Queen. Other than that, they don't do much.  The real work horses are the worker, or female bees.  When they are young, they do chores inside the hive like tending to the young (brood), or the Queen.  As they get older, they leave the hive and those are the bees you see flying from flower to flower sampling nectar, and collecting the life-blood of agriculture; pollen.

Nearly 90 of the worldwide crops need bees to bear fruit...literally.  Without pollination, most fruits, vegetables and nuts would be missing from our diet.  Humans need a varied and produce-laden diet to maintain health.  The U.S. agricultural system is a multi-billion dollar industry.  We grow food for the entire nation, and a lot of the rest of the world, too. 

Honey bees are a huge part of that industry.  Commercial beekeepers truck their hives from place to place, pollinating a variety of crops.  For instance Hackenberg's bees would pollinate the pumpkins in Pennsylvania before moving up to New York.  There, they'd pollinate upstate apple trees.  Then they'd be trucked further North to Maine, for blueberries, and finally down to Florida for citrus crops.  It's a scenario repeated all over the U.S.  Honey production- which people associate bees with most- is just a fraction of their agricultural significance.

Honey Bees Going About Their Business

To see the bees at work, we're tagging along today, with Allen Larson.  Larson owns a small commercial bee keeping business, called GetBees.Net.  He's always worked with bees-

"I grew up in the bees," he says, "My mom was a beekeeper."

Larson's mom began working for another bee keeper in the 1970s.  He says on her first day at work she got stung twelve times.  She was back at work the next day, he adds.

Allen and his mom began their own bee keeping business in the 1990s.  They have a lot of their own hives for honey production and for local pollination.  But these days, Larson's big push, is to get hives into people's backyards.  Today, he's checking on one of those backyard hives in Novato.  While he dons the net head covering, we ask him if he's experienced any significant loss of bees-

"I've had no colony collapse, but it's wiping some guys out.  I'm lucky, all of my backyard hives are doing well."

Allen slowly opens the top of the hive, while smoking the bees. This is the way bee keepers calm the bees down.  He begins to pull the frames out, taking a look at the bees and honey production, and for any signs of the varroa mite, a dreaded pest.

The bees look fine, as he inspects several frames.  Very few fly out at first, but as he removes them one by one, more bees buzz about.  A typical healthy hive will have 50,000 to 60,000 bees in it.  When the hive gets too large, about half the bees will swarm and leave, looking for a new home.  This is how they propagate.

Allen thinks CCD might be due to several factors.  He points out that a healthy bee, has a varied diet-

"The problem is, bees are only getting the nutrients of the monoculture.  It weakens them and breaks down their immune systems making it harder to fight the mites or viruses."

Monoculture is the practice of growing only one crop, the way most large commercial growers operate. They only get one type of flower.  It would be like us having only bread to eat, for instance.  The bees in this backyard should be pretty happy, then.  The Novato yard is bursting with a profusion of flowers and trees, along with rows of vegetables. 

Allen finishes up checking the hives, while the bees go about their own business.   

Disease and Pestilence

All hives lose some bees. Normal is defined as the rate of attrition, or bee loss that all bee keepers experience, usually as a result of wintering hives.  It usually ranges from 5% to 10% of the hive. 

Then there are higher percentages attributed to disease and pests.  These include the varroa mite, which really hit U.S. bees hard in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Mites can decimate a hive, so bee keepers generally use insecticides in the hive to kill the mites.  If there is severe mite infestation, then hives can lose 15 to 25% of their bees.

But by 2007, bee keepers were reporting losses of 40%, 60%, 80% and even 100% excess of normal bee loss.  Another difference was instead of finding bee carcasses near the hives, as they did in cases of mites, the bee keepers weren't finding any bees, either in the hive or outside of it.  The bees had just never returned to the hive.

The entomologists at Penn State, and also at U.C. Davis, were working in earnest to figure out what was going on.  They looked at all kinds of possibilities for the colony collapses, including pesticide use.  In general, bees are pretty hardy creatures. But like any other living thing, they are susceptible to environmental toxins.  Pesticides allowed growers to get rid of crop-destroying bugs, but it also winds up in the honey bees, weakening their immune systems.  Even the pesticides used to kill mites is showing up in the bees.

As Jacobsen and Larson both mentioned, combination theories as a cause of CCD, are very popular.  The theory is that the multiple punch of pesticides, monoculture agricultural practices, mites and other pathogens combine to overwhelm the bees, and they can't handle it. 

But the fact is, no one knows for sure why the bees are leaving. 

What Do The Experts Think?

Dr. Eric Mussen, of U.C. Davis, is a honey bee expert.  We called him to ask what he thinks is the culprit-

"It's still a mystery.  the difficulty is that when bees die off for whatever reason, some...the stronger bees, survive.   Those bees may be able to resist the pathogen until a new one come along.  So we may never know what killed bees in the mid-60s or 1975 or now."

According to Mussen, bee colony die-offs aren't new.  There have been other instances of large amounts of bees dying, but not really to the extent of these past two years.  What about now, what is the news for 2008?

"It's still too early to tell.  We typically see CCD at the end of November or in December and January.  I'm just beginning to hear of the first indications of some bee die off up in North Dakota."

Mussen also believes that drought is a huge factor in CCD.  When there is drought, there are less plants, less flowers.  Less flowers equal less food, and malnourished bees are susceptible to disease. 

We tick off a laundry list of disease and pesticides; neonicotinoids, Kasmir bee virus, Israeli Acute Paralysis, Varroa mites, nosemema ceranae spores?   What about those?  He can't say for sure- 

"I harbor a strong feeling that it's an epidemic of a contagious pathogen, and I also believe we may never know for sure."

Doing The Bees Work

Picture hundreds of trees in fruit orchards or row upon row of vegetables lined out for miles in fields.  Now imagine yourself and others, hunched over those rows, or dangling up in those trees and and having to pollinate by hand, every single flower you can see, perhaps billions of them. 

Incredibly, this is exactly how it's done now, in some parts of the world as described in Fruitless Fall.

Beginning in the 1980s, heavy pesticide use on pear orchards in the Shichuan province of China, decimated the honey bee population.  Without honey bees, you don't get proper pollination, and without pollination, you don't get fruit.  Villagers now must carry so-called pollination sticks which they dip into pollen filled bottles, and then touch to each individual flower.

This isn't exactly a solution.

While researchers undertake large studies, and continue their search for a cause, other people are trying to bring awareness of the potential disaster to the rest of the country.  In addition to authors like Rowan Jacobsen, companies like the ice-cream makers, Haagen-Dazs, are jumping into the fight.  Bee aficionados like bee-keeper Allen Larson are doing their best to get bees back into backyards.

Honey And Hope

Larson is packing up his nets, bee hat and various other bee-gear into the back of his truck, but before he shuts the hatch, he fishes out a bottle of Raspberry honey.  It's from his own hives.  He dips a stick into the honey and hands it to us to taste. 

The flavor of- yes- raspberry, melts onto our tongues, the distillation of millions of flowers' nectar into this one small taste of heaven. 

"It's really good on toast," he says, giving us a jar to take with us.  Larson waves goodbye as he drives off.  We place our treasure in the back of the car, and drive home.

Let's hope the bees make it home as well.

Comments

[Paul]

Ms.Gould,
I enjoyed your article.
I am also a backyard beekeeper in N.California, and I had only problems with the city animal control people...
There is an ordinance in San Jose, for example, that says that no one may have bees(maximum 2 beehives) unless there are more than 50 feet from the closest neighbor's buildings.

A lot of uneducated reporters scarred people and exaggerated facts about Africanized bees...and very few individuals,...want to have bees ...
Few years ago, I tried to spread my beehives to some friends and neighbors, (giving them jars of honey to convince them.).... To get read of my bees, since the Animal Control officer was coming to check for compliance...
Perhaps you might want to write an article about the ignorance of the City Councils who are rigid in their ordinances, regardless of the importance of bees for pollination of trees and generally for agriculture...
Regards,
Paul

[MoreMarin]

Paul
Thanks for your comment! The points you raise are important. We intend to follow this story and we'll consider your suggestions.

Education is key in overcoming prejudices against bees and the benefits they provide.

Thanks again for contributing!

Pam Gould

[ron richardson]

paul

I have had bees in the pass in my back yard and have decided to raise them again,but I cant find a any one that does not want hives,can you help

[Bill Medlin]

I live towards Shingletown, Ca 1700 ft. I am considering a hive mainly for my own use and to polinate my trees, Garden etc. Last year was terrible for our plants, No bees! Any info on raising this wonderful creature would be appreciated, Thanks, Bill

[EMILYQu]

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