Posted on 05/04/2007 1:15:21 AM PDT by Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit
BELTSVILLE, Md. -- Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. 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, we 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 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.
A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our 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.
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 doesn't think a food crisis is looming.
Even though experts this year gave what's 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."
I was out fishing last week about 3 miles out in the gulf of Mexico a big ole honey bee was buzzing around for about 15 minutes before landing on the outboard it rested then took off heading west guess going to Mexico.
I live in South Central Pennsylvania (still mostly rural farm country) and I have not seen as many honeybees this year as in years past. I have a flowering apple tree right now, with some bees tending to it, but there is nothing else going on in my yard and garden, not a bee in sight.
No, I saw a report last week, that Taiwan or some other Asian country is experiencing bee die-offs as well. It’s global...
Yes. Much of it comes from pines but also from the flowers. ...like a yellow dust all over.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently. I've been trying to tell people this for a month now. And, FWIW, I've been seeing bees on the clover in my fields here in SE Tennessee.
…the wind blows a visible coat of pollen onto everything.
Yep - every morning my red car is a dull yellow/green.
Thanks for your post - it is the most informative that I’ve seen on this issue.
There was a dramatic photo either last Spring or in 2005, showing a huge yellow-green cloud of pollen over an area of Alaska.
I have three big spruce trees bordering the front of my property. I use those Swiffer dusters that retain the dust and the ones used on my three-season porch, which is closest to the pines, are full of yellow-green pollen all Spring. It will coat the windshields of the cars, as well.
We are both allergic to it.
Regarding the bee die-off, I was told a few days ago that some sort of fungus is also attacking the ubiquitous lady beetles. I wouldn’t mind seeing those particular invasive insects decline in numbers.
It reminds me of a definition I read once in a Probaility and Statistics textbook. It went like this, "and unbiased sample means that it is biased".
Carolyn
I live in South Central Pennsylvania...
I live in Lancaster County, just the other day as I was admiring my newly bloomed redbud tree I saw numerous small honeybees, something that would have escaped me in the past but which I’m watching for now...we’ll see what the summer has to bring...
There may be a new pathogen, but so far it is just guessing. There is little common with those who lost bees.
My slowly evolving concern is GM crops that have a pyrethrin-producing gene from marigold.
How do bees handle pyrethrins? Years ago, beekeepers were up in arms about Sevin™- Not a pyrethrin, a carbaryl, but bees seemed especially vulnerable.
We've recently moved my mother from her old house into a new one here on our property, and in trying to get the old house ready for sale we discovered an active hive in the board and batting above her dining room window. They appear healthy.
Carolyn
No, these are Asian Lady Beetles. They eat aphids. They are an invasive pest, as they seem to have no predators. I have been told, variously, that they came in on Chinese pallets, were released by the university ag services and I know that organic soybean producers released them in the past. They attempt to come indoors in the Fall, after swarming/mating and then they attempt to get out again in the late winter/early Spring. They die in the thousands in barns, attics, and windows of wherever they overwintered. When killed, they have an acrid stink and when disturbed, they bite, which is only a pinch, but annoying. Where they crawl mindlessly on windows, they leave a tenacious film.
My exterminator forecasts their swarming by the angle of the sun and it usually occurs in early October. Huge clouds of them will fill the air and crawl around windows and doors on the southern exposures of buildings. About all one can do is attempt to prevent them from entering by killing them on the perimeter. Still, a few get in even with application of a pesticide barrier. I know farmers who literally shovel trash bags full out of the barn and silos every Spring.
—remembering even farther back, in the early ˜fifties, the fire ant was the big agricultural danger and was going to devastate the food supply-—
Appears to be happening in europe too.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070426100117.htm
Another ping to # 7.
A voice of knowlege and reason! Thank you for speaking up.
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