Bad Winter Deepens Disappearing Bee Crisis‏

By GARANCE BURKE and SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press Writers

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 12:12 a.m.

/ AP

In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, Zac Browning, owner of Browning's Honey Co. Inc, shows a queen bee at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif. Browning keeps his hives in Idaho Falls, Idaho, through the winter, then brings them to California each year for the almond crop pollination. He said so many of his bees died in recent months in Idaho but weren't discovered dead until they arrived in California that he resorted to calling friends and colleagues on the East Coast and begged them to replenish his stocks so he could meet growers' demands in California. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

- AP

In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, Zac Browning, owner of Browning's Honey Co. Inc., inspects a hive containing queen bees in an almond orchard at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif. Browning keeps his hives in Idaho Falls, Idaho, through the winter, then brings them to California each year for the almond crop pollination. He said so many of his bees died in recent months in Idaho but weren't discovered dead until they arrived in California that he resorted to calling friends and colleagues on the East Coast and begged them to replenish his stocks so he could meet growers' demands in California. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

- AP

In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, Scavenger bees hover around a dead hive at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif. The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides. Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides already in use. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

- AP

In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010 Scavenger bees look for nourishment over a dead hive at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif. The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides. Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides already in use. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

MERCED, Calif. — The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides.

Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides used in fields and orchards. Federal courts are even weighing in this month, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overlooked a requirement when allowing a pesticide on the market.

And on Thursday, chemists at a scientific conference in San Francisco will tackle the issue of chemicals and dwindling bees in response to the new study.

Scientists are concerned because of the vital role bees play in our food supply. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini.

Bees have been declining over decades from various causes. But in 2006 a new concern, "colony collapse disorder," was blamed for large, inexplicable die-offs. The disorder, which causes adult bees to abandon their hives and fly off to die, is likely a combination of many causes, including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition and pesticides, experts say.

"It's just gotten so much worse in the past four years," said Jeff Pettis, research leader of the Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. "We're just not keeping bees alive that long."

This year bees seem to be in bigger trouble than normal after a bad winter, according to an informal survey of commercial bee brokers cited in an internal USDA document. One-third of those surveyed had trouble finding enough hives to pollinate California's blossoming nut trees, which grow the bulk of the world's almonds. A more formal survey will be done in April.

"There were a lot of beekeepers scrambling to fill their orders and that implies that mortality was high," said Penn State University bee researcher Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who worked on the USDA snapshot survey.

Beekeeper Zac Browning shipped his hives from Idaho to California to pollinate the blossoming almond groves. He got a shock when he checked on them, finding hundreds of the hives empty, abandoned by the worker bees.

The losses were extreme, three times higher than the previous year.

"It wasn't one load or two loads, but every load we were pulling out that was dead. It got extremely depressing to see a third of my livestock gone," Browning said, standing next to stacks of dead bee colonies in a clearing near Merced, at the center of California's fertile San Joaquin Valley.

Among all the stresses to bee health, it's the pesticides that are attracting scrutiny now. A study published Friday in the scientific journal PLOS (Public Library of Science) One found about three out of five pollen and wax samples from 23 states had at least one systemic pesticide - a chemical designed to spread throughout all parts of a plant.

EPA officials said they are aware of problems involving pesticides and bees and the agency is "very seriously concerned."

The pesticides are not a risk to honey sold to consumers, federal officials say. And the pollen that people eat is probably safe because it is usually from remote areas where pesticides are not used, Pettis said. But the PLOS study found 121 different types of pesticides within 887 wax, pollen, bee and hive samples.

"The pollen is not in good shape," said Chris Mullin of Penn State University, lead author.

None of the chemicals themselves were at high enough levels to kill bees, he said, but it was the combination and variety of them that is worrisome.

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum called the results "kind of alarming."

Despite EPA assurances, environmental groups don't think the EPA is doing enough on pesticides.

Bayer Crop Science started petitioning the agency to approve a new pesticide for sale in 2006. After reviewing the company's studies of its effects on bees, the EPA gave Bayer conditional approval to sell the product two years later, but said it had to carry a label warning that it was "potentially toxic to honey bee larvae through residues in pollen and nectar."

The Natural Resources Defense Council sued, saying the agency failed to give the public timely notice for the new pesticide application. In December, a federal judge in New York agreed, banning the pesticide's sale and earlier this month, two more judges upheld the ruling.

"This court decision is obviously very painful for us right now, and for growers who don't have access to that product," said Jack Boyne, an entomologist and spokesman for Bayer Crop Science. "This product quite frankly is not harmful to honeybees."

Boyne said the pesticide was sold for only about a year and most sales were in California, Arizona and Florida. The product is intended to disrupt the mating patterns of insects that threaten citrus, lettuce and grapes, he said.

Berenbaum's research shows pesticides are not the only problem. She said multiple viruses also are attacking the bees, making it tough to propose a single solution.

"Things are still heading downhill," she said.

For Browning, one of the country's largest commercial beekeepers, the latest woes have led to a $1 million loss this year.

"It's just hard to get past this," he said, watching as workers cleaned honey from empty wooden hives Monday. "I'm going to rebuild, but I have plenty of friends who aren't going to make it."

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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein reported from Washington, D.C.

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Almond pollination season's officially here

It's pollination season again-time to get ready to transport bees. I think my bees are doing great but it took me a lot of effort. Supplemental feeding and more attention and I mean more visits to bee sites to take care of mites, nosema and wasps, undoubtedly contributed to better bees. I am not sure about future pollination outlook and the rental fees, but I know that beekeepers would eventually have to raise prices to stay in business, in spite of constant complaining from farmers to reduce prices while demanding stronger bees. Let's face it-IT'S RADICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE TO KEEP BEES HEALTHY and something has to be done about it because it can not be this way.
I hope the weather remains normal as I am trucking my bees in less then a week. Weather conditions were terrible last year: frosty winter and heavy rains in the beginning of season definitely didn't help. I am out, everyone have a great season!

Trying to Diagnose the Disappearing Bees

UCSD graduate student Daren Eiri tries to attract bees into a 26-foot-long tunnel used to train the insects to find a reliable food source. Photo: Sam Hodgson

By REBECCA TOLIN

Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009 | Witness the yellow- and black-striped swarm buzzing around Daren Eiri as he works, and you wouldn't think honeybees are in short supply. Dozens of fuzzy, winged insects blanket a grapefruit-sized glass dish in Eiri's hand one warm afternoon at UCSD's Biology Field Station.

"I used to hate doing this," said Eiri, a University of California, San Diego graduate student, who at the moment is a perch for honeybees occasionally landing to lick sugar from his skin. "When they're feeding I'm pretty sure they're only concerned with food." Eiri puts a squat cup of sweet liquid on top of the plate and sets the feeder inside a wooden tunnel.

But this bee-rich environment is deceptive: Eiri and the James Nieh Bee Lab at UCSD are researching a serious but poorly understood phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Despite the bees flying like popcorn up and down Eiri's carefully constructed passageway, these pollinators are perishing at an unprecedented rate in the United States and the world.

"[Bees] have a finely tuned and actually amazing navigation system," said Nieh, an associate biology professor at UCSD. "When you think about the size of a bee compared to a size of a human, it would be like you were to walk or run somewhere for hundreds of miles and yet be able to go back precisely to your house without any trouble at all.”

However, this navigation system appears to have gone haywire in an alarming number of European honeybees. They simply aren't returning to their nests, often leaving the queen, a few infants and a seemingly normal comb of honey. Since 2006, nearly a third of all hives worldwide have come up empty.

If the trend continues, we won't have enough bees to pollinate many of our most popular fruits, vegetables and nuts, researchers say. Some 85 commercial crops -- things like avocados and asparagus, peanuts and peaches -- depend on honeybee pollination.

The Nieh Bee Lab at UCSD is among the top research groups investigating possible causes of Colony Collapse Disorder. The key suspects so far are viruses, parasitic mites, poor nutrition, excessive travel and pesticides.

The lab is honing in on a chemical called Imidacloprid, one of the most common pesticides for produce like lettuce and strawberries. In 2007, farmers sprayed almost 340,000 pounds of the chemical on California crops -- twice as much as the year before.

Imidacloprid was banned in some European countries for harming honeybees, and is now under review by state and federal environmental regulators in the United States.

The UCSD lab is examining a new angle to the problem -- specifically how Imidacloprid affects bees' ability to navigate and ultimately find their way home. Nieh's team is feeding bees Imidacloprid in doses comparable to what they're ingesting in the field, then flying them through a marked tunnel to track their reaction.

Bees in Training
On a recent afternoon, Eiri -- who was once terrified of getting stung but has grown bold enough to ditch his bee suit -- attracts honeybees with a sugar and water mixture he's positioned in the 26-foot-long tunnel. Bees smell the sweet fragrance and fly into either side of the open-ended structure to feed.

What is lunch for the bees is actually a training exercise. The honeybees learn where to find a reliable food source, just as they do with blossoms in the wild.

With bare hands, Eiri reaches under a wire screen on top of the tunnel and paints yellow dots on the thorax of 20 bees. He uses a pipette to hand feed them a pesticide-laced tincture.

The next day Eiri releases the labeled bees, along with a control group, into a tunnel seemingly identical to the first one, except it's void of food. Bees use optical cues in their environment to calculate how far they've traveled -- in this case, black and white stripes lining the passageway's interior. Eiri documents how the two groups of bees navigate the barren tunnel on a quest for the sugary drink.

Early results show pesticide-fed bees act differently than their untouched counterparts. They're making critical errors, becoming disoriented and flying farther than they should in search of food.

"Bees that are fed pesticides are searching a much wider distance than normally treated bees," Eiri said. "Because they're using much more energy to find food they might not have enough energy to come back to the colony, which would lead to collapsed colonies." If the worker bees don't make it back to the nest, young bees waiting for nectar will starve.

Eiri's experiment is timely. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is getting an outpouring of complaints that Imidacloprid harms pollinators -- 12,000 objections last year alone. The EPA is gathering new data from manufacturers and scientists, like the Nieh Bee Lab, to reconsider the chemical's safety. The earliest it will make a decision on the pesticide, however, is 2014.

The chemical is also being reviewed by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation based on new evidence that residue levels actually increase over time. The current label warns users to spray only when bees aren't present, but recent data suggests leftover residue could kill bees long after the chemical has been sprayed.

"We have known since it was registered in the mid-1990s Imidacloprid was highly toxic if bees were exposed during treatment of the pesticide or residues were remaining on blooming crops or weeds," said Rick Keigwin, the U.S. EPA's director of pesticide re-evaluation.

Scientists say newer studies suggest Imidacloprid can also impair learning, memory and immune function in honeybees.

"We need to not only look at whether the bees are belly up," said Tim Lawrence, a research associate at Washington State University. "We need to look at: 'Is it impacting their ability to be efficient pollinators?' That's the important role they play."

No Easy Answers
Other bee experts caution against making Imidacloprid the lone culprit. Eric Mussen, an apiculturist with the UC Cooperative Extension, agrees that pesticides may knock down bees' immune function. But he counters that a ban in France and Germany didn't bring a resurgence of honeybees.

"There are people convinced that particular pesticide is the reason for colony collapse disorder," Mussen said. "I'm almost as convinced if you just took that pesticide away things would not suddenly get better. It didn't in Europe."

Jim Oakley, who has kept bees for four decades, defends insecticides as safe and vital for our food supply. The Ramona beekeeper has lost 600 of his 2,000 colonies this year alone. But Oakley chocks that up to the rigors of modern-day bee life and an artificial diet of corn syrup and imitation pollen -- not pesticides.

"Without insecticides most of our crops wouldn't be there either," Oakley said. "They can be wiped out overnight with bugs."

Also, Oakley said, hives that aren't directly exposed to pesticides collapse equally as often as those that pollinate avocados where fungicides are common.

But Jim Frazer, an insect physiologist at Pennsylvania State University, said with the lingering residue, we don't know which bees are ingesting Imidacloprid or when. Frazer adds this is not just about one pesticide; there's no scientific literature on the interaction of multiple chemicals sprayed on today's crops.

"Sometimes we've found as many as 33 pesticide samples in a given pollen sample," Frazer said of his research. "It's pretty alarming."

Researchers say the stew of pesticides could further pre-dispose bees to the deadly varroa destructor mite, a blood-sucking pest that has ravaged honeybee hives for the past 20 years.

The transient lifestyle of honeybees servicing agribusiness also gives mites an edge, said entomologist W. Steve Sheppard of Washington State University. Sheppard said bees that would naturally hunker down for a cold winter are trucked to temperate climates where mites thrive. Bees from around the country, for instance, are being shipped to California almond groves, which require more pollination than any other crop.

"There is additional stress brought about by this system," Sheppard said. "The fact that you load them on a truck and drive them a thousand miles, unload them and expect them to work for three weeks and load them on a truck and move them somewhere else."

Commercial agriculture is in jeopardy if the bee problem goes unabated, said Meg Eckles, a doctoral student in UCSD's Nieh Bee Lab. Pollinated crops are valued at $15 billion in the United States alone.

"So much of our economy is based on products that honeybees pollinate for very little money," Eckles said. "They're very inexpensive pollinators. If they were to disappear, it would have huge economic consequences that could be very devastating to the U.S."

Despite the nine stings he's suffered, Eiri has developed a deep appreciation for honeybees and hopes his research will ultimately help regulators safeguard the pollinators.

“We don't know the issue exactly of what's causing Colony Collapse Disorder,” said Eiri. “But it's frightening to know that if this can't be resolved the bees will disappear in the future.”

by Rebecca Tolin - San Diego-based freelance writer.

Local honey. Just how local?

If you dread the first spring blooms because of seasonal allergies, local honey may just be the solution. It prevents the symptoms of seasonal allergies. Consuming about 2 table spoons of local honey a day works exactly like an allergy shot. By exposing yourself to small amounts of allergens you help your body build immunity to them.

However to rip the most benefit you have to find out where it is coming from.
Some people ask me about how local the honey has to be to get the most allergy relief. It is great idea to consume raw, unprocessed local honeys that is no farther than 100 mile radius from where you live and work, because it is the local vegetation that is releasing the irritants into the atmosphere that are causing allergies. You have to get ready for the season months in advance by consuming honey to build up immunity.

Start out by taking small amount of honey and gradually increase doses to about 2 table spoons per day. Remember the honey should be raw, which means it has to be straight out of hives- unprocessed, unpasteurized and unheated. Excessive heating that honey goes through in the process called pasteurization removes many of the minerals and qualities of honey that make it HONEY.

But not only does honey cures from allergy it has many health benefits and medicinal qualities. Honey fights infection and aids tissue healing, it helps reduce inflammation and scarring. In addition, it is often used for treating digestive problems such as diarrhea, indigestion, stomach ulcers and gastroenteritis. What is more honey is much more affordable than buying over the counter medications which may have unknown side effects. As you see this amazing natural product not only has all the health benefits but tastes delicious and is perfect with tea.

What does apocalyptic 2012 have to do with vanishing bees?

Hilarious

How long have bees been around?

A piece of amber containing an insect bearing features of modern bees and wasps has been found, and scientists have dated it to be 100 million years old. But fossils of bees pretty well "indistinguishable" from modern bees have been found dating back to over 35 million years ago.
In a cave near Valencia, Spain there is a wall painting, which is around 15,000 years old, showing men collecting honey from wild bees. Beekeeping is believed to be the second oldest occupation. Second to prostitution.... huh?! lol

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