Death of the Honey Bee

 

Honeybees have been dying in unusually large numbers, and scientists have no clue as to why. For some reason, honeybees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply not returning to their colonies.   So why should you care?

Consider this: "One in every three bites of food you eat comes from a plant, or depends on a plant, that was pollinated by an insect, most likely a honeybee," this comment was recently made by Dennis van Engelsdorp of Penn State University's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Among other things he also said: "We're still managing to pollinate all the orchards, but we're really cutting it close out there."

This event has been going on for the past four years.  According to scientists who surveyed commercial beekeepers and brokers, in 2009 alone, almost 29 percent of the bee colonies in the United States collapsed. That number was a 36 percent loss in 2008 and a 32 percent were lost in 2007, an informal survey which finished recently suggests that the mass “die-off” continues.

Prior to the “die-off” each spring, as the weather warmed, a typical beekeeper would trucks the bees he had raised from as far south as Florida to Maine for the purpose of pollinating plants for blueberry farmers, and from there, he may continue on to Massachusetts to kick off the cranberry season. Today, that same beekeeper is more likely to be spending a lot more of his time trying to raise more bees instead; this is an expensive effort that has become necessary to make up for the ones he's recently lost. Some very recient numbers suggest that the bees have began to bounced back, but it's a lot of work and it costs each of us more money at the grocery.

You see it has become necessary to purchase commercial nutrients to keep the bee stock healthy; this is expense, and the beekeeper is forced to pass this new cost on to the farmers who hire him to help pollinate their crops. Peaches and pears; almonds and apples; corn and strawberries are but a few of the farm products that are affected.  All of these food products (and more) are likely to be a bit more expensive this year because of the ever increasing shortage of the honeybee; the  #1 assistant in the pollinating process.

A research study at Cornell University estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, of which are primarily fruits, vegetables and nuts.

So what's going on? Could is it a virus, a fungus, or a pesticide?  Researchers have even investigated the electromagnetic radiation transmitted by cell phones; they wanted to make sure that cell phone signals were not disturbing the bees. But most of the research scientists say there is probably no single answer. Honeybees are most often raised commercially, but scientists say pollinators that are considered “wild”, such as bumblebees, also seem to be having trouble.

Christopher Mullin of Penn State (an Agricultural Scientist) joined with several other colleagues to take samples from beekeepers across 23 states, and found a wide assortment of pesticides and other chemicals in the bee hives they examined. No single pesticide, they said, was strong enough to be lethal; but they did conclude that it is possible that some of these pesticides are combining in some unknown way, thus concocting a “potion” that may be responsible for the die-off.                                    

As researchers scramble to find answers to this syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry's ability to keep up with the ever growing demand for bees to pollinate crops.

Mites (a parasite that can be deadly to the hive if left untreated) are also damaging many bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are thought to be harming the ability of queen bee to spawn as many worker bees. The queens, these days, are living only half as long as they did just a few years ago.

Yet another conjecture is that the bees are really stressed out or in short: over worked. Today’s, bees are being raised to survive a much shorter off season than in years past; they are now required to be ready to pollinate when the California almond bloom begins in February. This, in turn has possibly lowered their immunity to viruses; so the long and short of this theory is that they simply drop dead from exhaustion.

Researchers have also argued that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to their stress factor, in turn, helping to spread viruses and mites and therefore accelerating whatever is afflicting the bees to start with.

According to the above referenced Dennis van Engelsdorp, of Penn State, beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, and there have been three recorded cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas.

 

Some folks claim that Albert Einstein said that “if honey bees died out, mankind only had four years left to live”; I have been unable to find evidence that he actually made that comment, but regardless of the authorship, the fact is that we are dependent upon honeybees for many of our food products in the agricultural industry. We also know that bees are dying, at a critically fast rate. By some estimates, 1/3 of the bee population has died off already; this is an observable fact and is known as the "Colony Collapse Disorder".

It’s not something we think a lot about, but how many honey bees have you seen today?  I’ll bet you can count them on one hand!  Just in case you have forgotten what a honeybee looks like:

    

Sources …                                                                     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee                                          http://crooksandliars.com/2007/10/29/where-are-the-honey-bees   http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/business/27bees.html?pagewanted=all   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_the_honey_bee                   http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/honey-bees-dying-scientists-suspect-pesticides-disease-worry/story?id=10191391