Bee check up

Just making sure we still have them and are trying to save them.

In early June, Germany halted the sale of seven insecticides linked to the deaths of honeybees in 11,500 colonies. The main culprit was Bayer AG's corn seed treatment clothianidine (trade name Poncho), which the German crop research institute determined killed the bees. Bayer said improper seed handling caused particles containing the insecticide to blow away during the sowing of corn to nearby areas where it was ingested by the bees.

[snip]

Treating corn seeds with these chemicals is arguably safer than spraying the stuff. And apparently the insects they combat are serious corn pests. Still, when bees and other pollinators are in such dire straits as it is, use of these chemicals seems like a risky proposition, particularly with the increased acreage being devoted to corn for ethanol. I'm not an agronomist, but which is worse: reduced corn crops due to insect infestation, or failure of many crops due to a loss in their pollinators?

Interesting to note that I just recently posted about Bayer with another pesticide.

And here:

Michael Schacker’s “A Spring without Bees” speculates that pesticides are to blame for these bee losses.

But most beekeepers and researchers say that pesticides may just be one of several causes, including multiple suspicious viruses, working together to form a lethal combination that kills off bees. Since there are so many variables at play — and some of those variables actually change based on certain conditions — the equation is complicated at best. Beekeepers say it’s not unsolvable, though –- that it requires attention from people with the resources and the power to find the answers. That attention, they say, is exactly what CCD is not getting.

CCD took a turn for the worse this year, killing off 1.1 million bee colonies across the country -– that’s 35 percent of the nation’s colonies, more than ever before. Some commercial beekeepers struggling to survive say the federal government has failed the beekeeping industry and endangered food crops. With the new farm bill about to survive a presidential veto, that could change. The bill includes a provision that would give about $75 million over five years to bee research. But it could be too late for many beekeepers who will be forced to shut down within five year’s time. And, some point out, the legislation promises billions in farm subsidy policies that could be harming the bees in the first place.

CCD puts about $15 billion of vegetable, fruit and nut crops in jeopardy. Apples, cucumbers, blueberries, strawberries, soybeans, almonds, avocados, melons and pumpkins are just a few of the crops that depend on honey bee pollination. Honey bees are also needed to pollinate seeds for a number of crops, including cabbage, broccoli and herbs.

The frustration is evident in this beekeeper's post:

While waiting for those initial scientific reports on Colony Collapse Disorder to get published so whatever information they contain can be officially released to the beekeepers who can use it (and those who actually provided the samples to produce the results), and for new research to get started (and those results to be released in the distant future), much peripheral knowledge has been collected that is beneficial for general colony management.

Advances in Varroa control, Nosema management and nutrition enhancement have been, and will continue to be made as a result of the CCD research going on. Moreover, an unprecedented amount of cooperation (and focused competition) has already resulted between government and university bee researchers, beekeepers and non-honey bee researchers, than has ever been accomplished. Add to this the phenomenal amount of exposure bees, beekeepers, beekeeping, pollination and honey production have received from the general and even not-so-general press to the non-beekeeping world. There’s no way we could have ever engineered that, or paid for it or made it happen. And if you don’t think it has been important, consider this – CCD has made prime time TV and the Primary Elections haven’t moved it off the top 10 topics in the news.

So whether you believe this is a real phenomena of not, believe in what it has done for the industry in terms of understanding and support. And then, find some way to help support the research studying and the beekeepers suffering from this mystery.

Some think, however, that this attention to a critical food production sector of agriculture is so long overdue that who ever is managing honey bee research has not been paying attention.

A friend, one who’s leading the pack at full speed on this feels the industry has been fundamentally short changed on what research has been carried out for the past 20 years. His argument isn’t so much pointing at what has been done, but what hasn’t been done. And, if funding hasn’t been available to do the multi-state, long term studies needed to solve problems - why the heck not?

The much ballyhooed Five Year Plan just released to improve the health of honey bees should have been in place 20 or more years ago so the industry wouldn’t have crashed in the first place, he says. What the heck were they doing while Rome burned and bees died is the question beekeepers, and my friends, keep asking.

Well, the answer may be closer than you want to think. Industry group legislative committees have spent thousands, probably many thousands of dollars visiting Washington to lobby for some kinds of favorable honey import legislation during that same 20 years. And still honey prices are in the crapper (See the Phipps article in this issue), because beekeeping is a global activity that no longer (and for a long time hasn’t) stops or starts at a border. The money was spent, it seems, on marginally useful goals when it could have funded long term, far reaching projects that looked down the road and saw....CCD? Pollination as the only business? Stress in a beehive? Foreign pests legally brought into the country? New pests? Missed pests? Technology that existed in other sciences that we could have been using? Better ways to use what we have? Other ways to use Byrd money? All of the above? But, alas, the money was spent on other things.

As a result there are still low honey prices, a single, solitary breeding program that works (that would be the Russians), a not very useful alternative to AFB control...and...and...a !!**NEW**!! Five Year Plan to help the health of honey bees. For 20 years bees have been dying and now there’s a NEW program?

So I take it we still haven't addressed the fact we are still losing bees that help put food on our tables and the Bush administration has yet to treat it as the crisis it is?

Why am I not surprised?

Bees: our canaries in the coal mine?

Via whig, a fascinating and very comprehensive report on the Colony Collapse Disorder and how important bees are to our lives... actually... to us staying alive.



In brief, the article talks about how quickly CCD has spread, noted first in the US, then Europe, Brazil, Canada, Taiwan, with losses of hives up to 70% in the US. Why should we care?

Bees are finely tuned machines, much more robot-like than your average species. They operate pretty much like the Borg of Star Trek fame. A honey bee cannot exist as an individual, and this is why some biologists speak of them as super-organisms. They are sensitive barometers of environmental pollution, quite useful for monitoring pesticide, radionuclide, and heavy metal contamination. They respond to a vide variety of pollutants by dying or markedly changing their behavior. Honeybees’ stores of pollen and honey are ideal for measuring contamination levels. Some pesticides are exceptionally harmful to honey bees, killing individuals before they can return to the hive.

When the bees are examined:

[The] autopsies of CCD bees showed higher than normal levels of fungi, bacteria and other pathogens, as well as weakened immune systems. It appears as if the bees have got the equivalent of AIDS.

An odd side effect, the usual pests that raid an empty hive delay attacking a CCD hive. One suggestion is that the honey is contaminated.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story noting the examined bees were suffering from a fungus and mentioned a commercial antibiotic. Beekeepers use a LOT of chemicals and antibiotics to keep their commercial hives going. They also have bred their stock to be bigger than normal:

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

A Michigan beekeeper thinks:

... CCD might stem from a mix of factors from climate change to breeding practices that put more emphasis on some qualities, like resistance to mites, at the expense of other qualities, like hardiness.

An organic beekeeper writes:

I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Varroa mites (vampire mites) come from (wait for it...) China. A report on varroa mites:

“Bee Mites Suppress Bee Immunity, Open Door for Viruses and Bacteria,” it explained research into levels of ‘deformed wing virus,’ a mutagenic pathogen that is believed to persist in bee populations because it makes guard bees more aggressive. Bees of a given hive normally carry low levels of this virus, but the Penn State researchers found that virus levels shot sky high during secondary infections if, and only if, the bees also had varroa mites. It should be clear why the varroa mite is on everyone’s list of things to examine in the fight against CCD.

Because of commercially bred and controlled hives, natural pollinators are forced out and some have become extinct:

We depend on managed honey bees because we are addicted to a monoculture-based managed agricultural sector.

And:

Surprise — it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. The long-term solution is a return to a more natural ecological order.

Commercial beekeeping is not a flourishing business, there are less beekeepers and the hives are overworked.

The politicians have been remarkably slow to recognize the dangers in losing our major pollinators. One refered to alfalfa. But the crops that bees pollinate:

This includes almonds, broccoli, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, and strawberries. Other insects, including other kinds of bees, may be used to pollinate some of these crops, but only bees are reliable on a commercial scale. If the bees go, we will see a change for the worse at our local supermarkets.

And:

...Mark Brady, president of the American Honey Producers Association, had informed the committee that “honey bees pollinate more than 90 food, fiber and seed crops. In particular, the fruits, vegetables and nuts that are cornerstones of a balanced and healthy diet are especially dependent on continued access to honey bee pollination.”

A sensible thing would be to write a nicely worded letter to your congressperson and ask that funds be allocated to combat CCD.

Because we all like to eat.....