Reprinted from a June 1, 2008 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
My wife has flower gardens scattered around our home, and starting right about now they begin to bloom and it continues all summer into fall. Someone once suggested that she must have a full time gardener, and I noted that she did. Me.
Truth is that I love working in the gardens, and although it is a bit more difficult for me of late, I still enjoy getting my hands dirty. But over the past five years, there is one noticeable difference in the flower gardens . . . no honey bees. While I once had to watch for those little rascals as I plucked weeds from the flowers, that is no longer an issue. There just aren’t many honey bees, and while some may think this is a good thing, I promise you the loss of honey bees is a major disaster in the making.
There are many species of honey bees, at least there used to be. Most are declining and some are gone forever. One source indicated that many United States beekeepers have lost 80 percent of their colonies. Another source noted that commercial beekeepers in 22 states have reported huge losses. Another source notes that today beekeepers are losing 25 percent of their hives each winter, and that loss should only be 5 percent or so.
Apparently beehives in North Carolina are down 45 percent and the number of bees is down 95 percent. True, weather plays a factor. For example, Hurricane Katrina destroyed most bee colonies on the Gulf Coast. But in other parts of the country something else is happening to our bees.
So what you say. What’s the big deal? There is a big deal and it’s called pollination. Bees pollinate $15 billion worth of farm crops every year. True, wind pollinates things like corn and wheat, but bees pollinate apples, citrus fruit, vegetables, nuts, etc. Add it all up. Cherries, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots, broccoli, soybeans, peaches, blueberries, and on and on.
Bees are hauled all over the country to pollinate. They are moved to Florida in the citrus season, to the Midwest for crop production, to Maine for apple production, to various Northeastern states for blueberries, to Wisconsin for cranberries, to California for almonds, etc., etc.
But since 2004, one-fourth of the nations beekeepers have reported high bee losses and this phenomenon has been given the name "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD). CCD is characterized by the sudden death of bees, actually the sudden disappearance of bees from a colony, because though the bees are gone, no dead bodies are found. At several colonies researchers found that if they sterilized the dead hive with radiation bees would repopulate the hive. What does this mean? Well, it could mean that there is some infectious disease or agent of some kind present that killed the bees, and when the radiation took out the infectious agent, the bees could return.
Indeed, other researchers found a virus, Israeli acute paralysis virus, in the hives of the major bee keeping operations that had suffered the biggest losses. Interestingly this latest surge of bee losses came in 2004, the year when we first allowed the import of honey bee colonies from Australia, and some of those bees had this virus. Though there is no proof that this virus is the villain, it appears to be so. However, pesticides, drought, and nutritional stress from the lack of flowers in the wild, and one particular mite species may also play a factor in CCD.
Researchers used genetic screening to identify pathogens from colonies that had CCD and those that did not. They found that when you combine data from CCD colonies and non-CCD colonies, bees had 81 fungi, eight bacterial groups, and seven different viruses. But the Israeli virus was the only pathogen found in most of the CCD colonies and none of the non-CCD colonies. And a species of mite was also found in 96 percent of the CCD colonies, suggesting that the mite may be a carrier for the virus.
Yes, honey bees are extremely important, and research is the key. Private citizens aren’t always thrilled about state or federal government money spent on research, probably because some of it appears frivolous and expensive. Sort of like spending money to do research that concludes that polluted water can lead to diseases. Hmmm. But in this case, research will be the key to whether the honey bees recover, and our nations beekeepers get back to a healthy condition.
I look forward to the day when getting stung by a honey bee in my wife’s flower gardens is again a "problem" of some concern. To learn more about CCD and bees, go to www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/.
