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Honeybees Dying Off in US and Parts of Europe


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US News & World Report has an article on the potential economic impact. It is a pretty lame article, but at least it is in the news:

U.S.News & World Report

Bee Crisis May Drive Up Food Costs

Monday April 16, 3:46 pm ET

By Kimberly Palmer

Late last year, beekeepers across the country began reporting that their honeybees were not returning to their hives, as they usually do. Some large commercial beekeepers have reported losing from 50 to 90 percent of their colonies, according to Pennsylvania State University's Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium. While scientists are still investigating, possible explanations include chemical contamination, lack of genetic diversity among bees, and parasites.

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Meanwhile, economists are looking into the impact of the honeybee disappearance on the country's food prices. Honeybees not only make honey, but they pollinate fruit, vegetables, and nuts. Their disappearance could start to affect prices that are already inflated from unusually cold weather in parts of the country. Here's what shoppers need to know.

Why are honeybees important to the economy?

Honeybee pollination of fruits, vegetables, and nuts is worth $15 billion a year, according to a March report from the Congressional Research Service. Almonds, apples, avocados, and blueberries are among the crops that depend on the bees. Each year, producers of those crops rent honeybee hives for pollination purposes. "It's extremely important they have honeybees available," says Suzanne Thornsbury, assistant professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University.

Will food prices be affected by the bee disappearance?

While the long-term impact on food prices will depend on the extent of the problem, agricultural economists say that consumers will most likely see small increases in prices of crops that are dependent on honeybees this year. Almonds, for example, require honeybee pollination. Walter Thurman, an agricultural economist at North Carolina State University, estimates that the price of almonds at the supermarket will rise 1 percent this year based on the increased cost of renting honeybees for pollination because they are in short supply. In other words, it will add a few cents to a $3 package of almonds.

Will honey be more expensive this year?

It depends on the kind of honey. People who prefer local honey and live in an affected area might end up paying about 25 cents more for a 12-ounce jar of honey, which typically retails for around $4. Sharon Schwahn, a beekeeper and honey seller in Hettinger, N.D., says she'll be forced to sell her bear-shaped honey jars for that much more because her costs have risen.

On the other hand, people who buy imported honey will be less affected. According to Bruce Boynton, chief executive officer of the National Honey Board, 70 percent of honey purchased in the United States is imported, which will mitigate the overall effect on honey prices. But, he adds, if beekeepers are unable to rebuild their colonies?which has not yet been determined?then honey prices will probably increase more down the road.

Edited by J Larsen
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No idea if it is true, but saw a small blurb that some researchers think that pervasive signals from wireless technology (towers for cell phones) is playing a role. That would suck, since if given a choice between bees and cell phones, Americans would choose to keep their cell phones.

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No idea if it is true, but saw a small blurb that some researchers think that pervasive signals from wireless technology (towers for cell phones) is playing a role. That would suck, since if given a choice between bees and cell phones, Americans would choose to keep their cell phones.

Yup, here's one of several links about it.

Don't blame me, I don't have one!

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I started my first honeybee hive this year for the first time- been wanting to do it for a few years now. I sold a Mosaic set to finance it- big start-up cost. I have one hive I started last Friday- got my 3 lbs of bees and the queen and transferred them to their new home. I'm feeding them sugar water until there's more flowers.....they eat a quart every three days. On Wednesday I'll check to see if the queen has been released from her cage. They will build the honeycomb and eventually start rearing young and polinating everything and collect nectar within 1-2 miles.

About May 3 I'm getting a nuc (nuclear) colony- one that's already established with queen, workers, brood, honey and pollen so I'll have 2 to work with.

I have 12 acres- half open field and no nearby neighbors so I believe they will do well. It's been fun so far!

I have friends who are already placing their honey orders for the fall.....hopefully I'll have some to sell.

I'm concerned also about the plight of the honeybees- we haven't seen much problem with the hives in the Richmond area- except for the crazy winter and spring weather where some hives died off.

If I can figure out how to upload pictures- I'll add a few showing my hive.

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No idea if it is true, but saw a small blurb that some researchers think that pervasive signals from wireless technology (towers for cell phones) is playing a role. That would suck, since if given a choice between bees and cell phones, Americans would choose to keep their cell phones.

Perhaps, but I think they'd rather have enough food.

Here's an update:

The New York Times

Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

April 24, 2007

Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

BELTSVILLE, Md., April 23 — What is happening to the bees?

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.

As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.

The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome.

“Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.”

Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.

About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers.

“There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said.

The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis.

So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses.

Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.

“That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.

Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials.

“There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.”

So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.

Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.

So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.

The scientists say that definitive answers for the colony collapses could be months away. But recent advances in biology and genetic sequencing are speeding the search.

Computers can decipher information from DNA and match pieces of genetic code with particular organisms. Luckily, a project to sequence some 11,000 genes of the honeybee was completed late last year at Baylor University, giving scientists a huge head start on identifying any unknown pathogens in the bee tissue.

“Otherwise, we would be looking for the needle in the haystack,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.

Large bee losses are not unheard of. They have been reported at several points in the past century. But researchers think they are dealing with something new — or at least with something previously unidentified.

“There could be a number of factors that are weakening the bees or speeding up things that shorten their lives,” said Dr. W. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University. “The answer may already be with us.”

Scientists first learned of the bee disappearances in November, when David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper, told Dr. Cox-Foster that more than 50 percent of his bee colonies had collapsed in Florida, where he had taken them for the winter.

Dr. Cox-Foster, a 20-year veteran of studying bees, soon teamed with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania apiary inspector, to look into the losses.

In December, she approached W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University, about doing genetic sequencing of tissue from bees in the colonies that experienced losses. The laboratory uses a recently developed technique for reading and amplifying short sequences of DNA that has revolutionized the science. Dr. Lipkin, who typically works on human diseases, agreed to do the analysis, despite not knowing who would ultimately pay for it. His laboratory is known for its work in finding the West Nile disease in the United States.

Dr. Cox-Foster ultimately sent samples of bee tissue to researchers at Columbia, to the Agriculture Department laboratory in Maryland, and to Gene Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. Fortuitously, she had frozen bee samples from healthy colonies dating to 2004 to use for comparison.

After receiving the first bee samples from Dr. Cox-Foster on March 6, Dr. Lipkin’s team amplified the genetic material and started sequencing to separate virus, fungus and parasite DNA from bee DNA.

“This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” Dr. Lipkin said. “It is painstaking, gumshoe detective work.”

Dr. Lipkin sent his first set of results to Dr. Cox-Foster, showing that several unknown micro-organisms were present in the bees from collapsing colonies. Meanwhile, Mr. vanEngelsdorp and researchers at the Agriculture Department lab here began an autopsy of bees from collapsing colonies in California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania to search for any known bee pathogens.

At the University of Illinois, using knowledge gained from the sequencing of the bee genome, Dr. Robinson’s team will try to find which genes in the collapsing colonies are particularly active, perhaps indicating stress from exposure to a toxin or pathogen.

The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse.

Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees.

“This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical.”

Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious.

Chris Mullin, a Pennsylvania State University professor and insect toxicologist, recently sent a set of samples to a federal laboratory in Raleigh, N.C., that will screen for 117 chemicals. Of greatest interest are the “systemic” chemicals that are able to pass through a plant’s circulatory system and move to the new leaves or the flowers, where they would come in contact with bees.

One such group of compounds is called neonicotinoids, commonly used pesticides that are used to treat corn and other seeds against pests. One of the neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, is commonly used in Europe and the United States to treat seeds, to protect residential foundations against termites and to help keep golf courses and home lawns green.

In the late 1990s, French beekeepers reported large losses of their bees and complained about the use of imidacloprid, sold under the brand name Gaucho. The chemical, while not killing the bees outright, was causing them to be disoriented and stay away from their hives, leading them to die of exposure to the cold, French researchers later found. The beekeepers labeled the syndrome “mad bee disease.”

The French government banned the pesticide in 1999 for use on sunflowers, and later for corn, despite protests by the German chemical giant Bayer, which has said its internal research showed the pesticide was not toxic to bees. Subsequent studies by independent French researchers have disagreed with Bayer. Alison Chalmers, an eco-toxicologist for Bayer CropScience, said at the meeting today that bee colonies had not recovered in France as beekeepers had expected. “These chemicals are not being used anymore,” she said of imidacloprid, “so they certainly were not the only cause.”

Among the pesticides being tested in the American bee investigation, the neonicotinoids group “is the number-one suspect,” Dr. Mullin said. He hoped results of the toxicology screening will be ready within a month.

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No idea if it is true, but saw a small blurb that some researchers think that pervasive signals from wireless technology (towers for cell phones) is playing a role. That would suck, since if given a choice between bees and cell phones, Americans would choose to keep their cell phones.

Perhaps, but I think they'd rather have enough food.

Here's an update:

Well, it probably would be "better" if it did turn out to be a pesticide or something in a GM crop that could be more or less contained. If it is more directly human-related, like cell phones, industry lobbyists will delay and cause confusion and drag their feet and nothing will be done, and Americans will import their food from somewhere else. It will be the same story as global warming, where we have shown ourselves absolutely incapable of making the hard decisions that might solve the problem.

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Great to see this in the mainstream news at last - it was on CNN.com this morning as well.

As an outside observer, the cell phone theory doesn't wash for me - it does not explain the patterns that have been observed, and there is not clear reason why it would suddenly pose such a huge problem within the last nine months.

I'm betting it is one of these newer nicotine-based pesticides that have already been demonstrated to be toxic to bees. Granted I am not a biologist, but it seems plausible to me that low doses of a poison could lead to an immune system failure, which could explain the micro-organisms that have been found in the dead bees. If I am right, I only hope that the manufacturer(s) of the responsible agents will do the decent thing and not do everything possible to block the investigation and ultimately elimation of the products. However, I would not hold my breath.

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I think that one difference with this situation is that the effects will be immediately and profoundly felt across the board, so people are going to want action, like now. I also think that there is a lower tolerance of corporate bullshit these days (excluding the MSM), so in some cases the path of least resistance may be to just 'fess up and make things right, like with the pet food issues.

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  • 2 weeks later...

In the news again:

Mysterious honeybee killer could make dinner bland

• USDA official: "This is the biggest general threat to our food supply"

• One-quarter of U.S. colonies vanish, about five times the normal winter loss

• Honeybees pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops in U.S.

• Not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting prior large-scale bee die-offs

BELTSVILLE, Maryland (AP) -- Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of America's honeybees could have a devastating effect on the country's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing its people to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees do not just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops the country has.

Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, Americans could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies -- or about five times the normal winter losses -- because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder.

The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.

"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Dick Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.

"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

Taken for granted

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to the U.S. food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse -- and we took it for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.

The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.

Too dependent on honeybees?

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.

Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he does not think a food crisis is looming.

Even though experts this year gave what is happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.

"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/05/03...g.ap/index.html

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  • 1 year later...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/06/disappe...s.ap/index.html

More commercial bee colonies lost

* Story Highlights

* Survey: 36.1 percent of nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year

* New diseases, pesticide drift, old enemies like parasitic mite blamed

* Survey included 327 operators -- 19 percent of U.S. commercial beehives

* About 29 percent of deaths due to collapse disorder, in which bees abandon hives

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.

Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."

The survey included 327 operators who account for 19 percent of the country's approximately 2.44 million commercially managed beehives. The data is being prepared for submission to a journal.

About 29 percent of the deaths were due to colony collapse disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn't.

"What's frightening about CCD is that it's not predictable or understood," vanEngelsdorp said.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.

The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honeybees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.

Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Dazs' varieties flavor depend on honeybees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.

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