It’s like a scene from a bee movie
It’s being called Colony Collapse Disorder and it’s something
you should be worried about, even if you never eat honey.
Across North America, colonies of honeybees are vanishing. Hives
are empty, or contain only a few young bees and a queen. No corpses
litter hive floors or entrances.
It’s like a scene from a bee movie
It’s being called Colony Collapse Disorder and it’s something you should be worried about, even if you never eat honey.
Across North America, colonies of honeybees are vanishing. Hives are empty, or contain only a few young bees and a queen. No corpses litter hive floors or entrances.
The bees are just disappearing and no one yet knows why.
The phenomenon was first noticed last year, when scientists and beekeepers encountered it in nearly half the states. Already, it’s taken as many as 90 percent of the hives in some areas.
Farm advisers Bill Coates and Sergio Garcia of the U.C. Cooperative Extension office in Hollister both report local occurrences of colonies suddenly collapsing in recent months.
Hollister beekeeping hobbyist Leon Bray reports all 12 of his hives are “doing fine,” even those in developed areas. But the issue still vexes him.
“They just don’t know what’s causing it,” he said. “It’s not like the winter die-off when you find dead bees around your boxes.”
Bee colony populations commonly shrink when cold, wet weather arrives.
“There are no solutions yet,” Bray said. “You just don’t know what to fight against.”
The lack of dead bees around colonies causes some researchers to guess that something is causing the insects famous for the navigational prowess to simply get lost while away from the hive, causing them to be unable to return. For a foraging bee devoted to service to the colony’s queen, that’s a death sentence.
Unchecked, Colony Collapse Disorder could impose a significant sentence on consumers.
More than one-third of the food we consume depends on honeybees for pollination. Agriculture’s dependence on bees extends far past the obvious – almonds, apples and the like.
Even carrots, which are harvested before they flower, depend on bees. To produce carrot seed, growers let carrots set seed, then harvest that rather than the colorful roots. The tiny carrot flowers depend on bees to pollinate.
“They can import all the honey they want,” Bray said. “But they can’t import pollination.”
It’s such a lynchpin to the agricultural economy that many beekeepers view honey as a byproduct, earning much of their income through leasing hives to fields and orchards coming into flower for the bulk of their earnings.
During Sunday’s balmy, calm weather, I took a look around our own garden. The natural magnet for bees right now is a 9-foot-tall rosemary plant in full flower.
Orchard mason bees buzzed over it, but in several minutes’ time, not a single honeybee stopped in.
Like most of us, honeybees are the descendants of imports from Europe. North America is home to many native bees, including the orchard masons that are abundant around our home this time of year.
But mason bees – named for the small mud nests they build – are only active for a short time each year. Honeybees fly reliably whenever weather permits and that’s most of the year.
As news accounts proliferate, it’s easy to forget that discovery of the disease came only four months ago, and that’s just an eye-blink to the people looking to come up with a solution to the insectivorous mystery.
Possible causes already eliminated include use of antibiotics, source of queens and supplemental feeding formulae.
What’s still being looked at are pathogens, chemical contamination, parasites, stress and nutrition.
Are bees the canary in the coalmine? Only research and time will unravel the source of a mystery that’s leaving a sour taste in the mouths of honey-producers.
