Gone to fungus every one. But seriously, I bought some honey from my local farmer’s market that is putting some mall parking to an attractive, wholesome, and very tasty alternative use one day a week. The attendant bee keep muttered that the large bee keeps ("apiaries") had stressed their colonies by extracting too much honey, not leaving enough for hive needs as a cause of the nationwide die-off. I didn’t know there was a problem, had never heard of Colony Collapse Disorder, aka Autumn Fall-Off, and thought all honey came from plastic squeeze bears. So, I go back home and ponder the insects that directly affect $15 Billion agricultural production from almonds, to citrus, to many legumes, and watermelons. Turns out that about one quarter of honey bees died off over last winter (down from more than 1/3 of the hives in each of the two earlier years) and my local farmer’s theory of the cause is not well accepted. The results of my ponders after the jump.
The main symptom of CCD is simply no or a low number of adult honey bees present but with a live queen and no dead honey bees in the hive. Often there is still honey in the hive, and immature bees (brood) are present.
The number of managed honey bee colonies has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today. At the same time, the call for hives to supply pollination service has continued to climb. This means honey bee colonies are trucked farther and more often than ever before. Honey bee colony health has also been declining since the 1980s with the advent of new pathogens and pests. The spread into the United States of varroa and tracheal mites, in particular, created major new stresses on honey bees.
But, want to do something fun and a little geeky? Citizen scientists in are engaged in a nationwide Sunflower Study. Each participant reports how long it take one sunflower to be visited by five bees.
The study is here. Last week, the Apiary Inspectors of America reported that in their latest audit, 29 percent of beekeepers suffered some bee deaths from the still mysterious problem. Contrary to the homespun image of rural beekeepers and cottage idylls, honeybees in the U.S. are raised on an industrial scale and used to pollinate crops in areas where monoculture planting and pesticide use have killed off indigeneous pollinators. Moving away from monoculture, say scientists, and having something always flowering within bee-distance, would help natural pollinators. This would make crops less dependent on trucked-in bees, which have proved to be vulnerable to die-offs.
Häagen-Dazs recently presented gifts to Penn State and University of California - Davis to support entomology research and education on the honey bee crisis. Presser. The ice cream company has unveiled a new interactive website promoting honey bee education and research on colony collapse disorder.
Find it here.
All of this world-wide attention is leading to tentative results.
A new study published in the journal Environmental Microbiology Reports may clarify things, as a team of Spanish researchers report the cause of the colony collapse disorder, and also suggest a cure. The researchers isolated the parasitic fungi Nosema ceranae from a pair of Spanish apiaries, while finding none of the other proposed causes—Varroa destructor, IAPV, or pesticides. With the identification of the invading pathogen, the team treated other diseased colonies with fumagillin—an antibiotic—and observed a complete recovery of the colony.
BAKLAVA here I come.