When Dave Hackenberg jerked the lids off his hives one bright November morning in Florida in 2006 and found them empty, the stunned commercial beekeeper never thought that four years later his bees and millions more across the United State would still be mysteriously missing. Yet the man credited with discovering colony collapse disorder, a strange phenomenon in which workers bees suddenly desert the hive — that has wiped out more than a third of all honeybees in the US — says this winter could be the worst yet.
“It’s got bad real fast,” he said last week. “We had around 3,000 hives at the end of the summer, but they started shrinking early, so when we came to truck them to Florida there was only 2,000 of them left.”
Pennsylvanian-based Hackenberg, whose family-run apiaries provide pollination services for farmers all over the country, moves his hives to warmer climes before Thanksgiving each year to get them strong and healthy for the almond pollination in California in February. Almonds are the fi rst crop to need pollination by honeybees each year and because CCD — or “colony collapse disorder” — has destroyed so many bees each winter over the last few years, the preparations for transporting 1.2 million hives to the Golden State’s almond groves at this time of year represents the fi rst glimpse into the health of the US’s 2.5 million honeybee colonies.
Hackenberg says he wouldn’t be surprised if another fi fth of his bees died before the spring. “We’re hoping we can stop at 50% losses,” he said.
His warning comes as the baffl ing decline appeared to be on the wane. According to an Apiary Inspectors of America report earlier this year, deaths from CCD were below 30% for the fi rst time since the crisis began.
Other beekeepers say it is too early to call for spring 2010, but Hackenberg says in North Dakota he has heard of bees deserting hives by the thousands since September. With 70% of crops, including most fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and clover-type cattle feed, dependent on animal pollination, of which the honeybee is by far the most important, the demise of our master pollinator has made headlines around the world.
So what is causing bees to vanish?
Scientists still don’t have a definitive answer, but blood-sucking mites, viruses, new types of pesticides, malnutrition and stress caused by modern farming practices, as well as bacterial parasites, have all been implicated. In our book “A World Without Bees,” myself and co-author Brian McCallum concluded that honeybees were under attack from all these assailants and their immune system couldn’t cope. They were unable to fi ght off viruses that they would have brushed aside if they were rested, enjoyed a balanced diet and were free from so many environmental pollutants. But instead they are fed an artifi cial diet of corn syrup and imitation pollen, trucked thousands of miles each year to pollinate single-crops, which provide little nutrition, with no natural winter break, and are continually exposed to a cocktail of potentially lethal pesticides. And by breeding honeybees for their docile nature, high yields of honey and activity in the spring, we argued that their genetic health was compromised.
Latest research by a team at the University of Illinois and the US Department of griculture (published in August), shows that CCD bees have virus-overload. By comparing the whole genome of honeybees from hives that had CCD with hives that were healthy, it reveals that sick bees have severe genetic damage, indicating that they are suffering from three or four lethal viruses at the same time. But what caused the bees to become infected with so many pathogens has still not been scientifi cally proven.
Many beekeepers and environmentalists continue to point the fi nger at neonicitinoids, pesticides that attacks the nervous system of insects — which can work its way through the plant into the nectar and be highly toxic to bees. So concerned is the US National Honeybee Advisory Board that it has called on the Environmental Protection Agency to ban Imidacloprid, one of the more common neonicitinoids.
Last year, Italy, where 40% of its one million of its bee hives were estimated to have been wiped out, Germany, which lost two thirds of bees along the Rhine, and Slovenia, followed the lead of the French government by suspending the use of some of these bee-toxic chemicals.
And early in 2009, the European Union passed a law to phase out pesticides suspected of having harmful effects on honeybees. In the US, California could become the fi rst state to ban bee-toxic chemicals. It has started to reevaluate the registration of some 282 pesticide products following the discovery of Imidacloprid in trees 20 times higher than the lethal dose for honeybees.
Yet the inevitable backlash has begun. Bee death-deniers cite new academic research by Lawrence Harder, pollination professor at Calgary University, and Argentinian researcher Marcelo Aizen, which argues that despite largescale honeybee declines in the US and Europe, these have been more than offset by increases in Asia, Latin America and Africa which account for managed beehives worldwide increasing by about 45% in the past 50 years. That’s not much consolation, however, to American farmers, and it takes no account of the decline in wild honeybee populations over the same period.
As commercial beekeepers from all over the States get ready to truck their honeybees west for the most profi table three weeks work in the pollination calendar — where they can expect to earn around $150 per hive — they would do well to remember that they are putting neverending strains on their workforce.
Hackenberg says it’s the only reason he’s still in business. “If I could afford to I wouldn’t take them to California,” he has said every year since CCD struck. But the cost of restocking his increasingly empty hives, feeding his weak bees supplements, and using chemicals to control the varroa mites means he has to keep coming back. The question he needs to ask himself is, when will it be too late?
Alison Benjamin is the author, with Brian McCallum, of “A World without Bees” (Pegasus Books).