I've been watching these stories with interest. So far, the honey bee colonies in 22 States have experienced an alarming amount of die-off of bees. Some beekeepers have reported a loss of up to 3/4 of their colonies. Without enough honey bees to polinate our agricultural crops, we could be in deep trouble.
I find myself wondering if they are being affected by some sort of genetically modified substance? Still, "authorities" don't know what's causing the deaths of the bees. Just that they seem to be dying with every known illness and affliction that has ever been known to affect bees -- that is, they seem to have caught some sort of AIDS disease for Bees.
http://www.aginfo.psu.edu/News/07Jan/HoneyBees.htmhttp://maarec.cas.psu.edu/index.html*********************************
Mystery killer is silencing honeybees
Keepers face a wave of die-offs, experts say.
By SANDY BAUERS
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA – Something is killing the nation's honeybees.
In labs across the nation, researchers have been stunned by the number of calls about the mysterious losses.
"Every day, you hear of another operator," said Dennis van Engelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. "It's just causing so much death so quickly that it's startling."
At stake is the work the honeybees do, pollinating more than $15 billion worth of U.S. crops, including Pennsylvania's apple harvest, the fourth-largest in the nation, worth $45 million, and New Jersey's cranberries and blueberries.
While a few crops, such as corn and wheat, are pollinated by the wind, most need bees. Without these insects, crop yields would fall dramatically. Agronomists estimate Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees.
The problem caps 20 years of honeybee woes, including two mites that killed the valuable insect and a predatory beetle that attacked weak or dead colonies.
"This is by far the most alarming," said Maryann Frazier, an apiculture – or beekeeping – expert at Pennsylvania State University's College of Agricultural Sciences.
One of the first to notice the latest die-off was Dave Hackenberg of Lewisburg, Pa., who estimates he's lost about 2,200 out of 3,000 hives.
He and his son normally truck about 3,000 hives up and down the East Coast each year as part of a large but little-known cross-continental migratory bee industry.
This season, Hackenberg hauled his hives to Florida by Oct. 10, just as he has done for 40 years. By November, some hives were empty; others had just sickly remains.
He made some calls and found out a beekeeper in Georgia had seen the same thing.
Since then, with concern mounting, experts have been investigating. A few months ago, they were referring to the die-off as "fall dwindle disease." Now, they call it "colony collapse disorder."
Last weekend, apiarist van Engelsdorp and other researchers headed to central California, where hundreds of acres of almond trees – the source of 80 percent of the world's almond harvest – are about to blossom.
Last fall, workers transported managed hives – about 450 per tractor-trailer – to California from colder areas such as the Great Lakes and the Dakotas. Now, hives are coming from Texas, Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In all, about half the country's managed hives are needed for the mass pollination.
As workers open the hives to check them, "the picture's not so good," said Jeffrey S. Pettis, a leader in bee research at a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Beltsville, Md.
Pettis said bees often had some winter loss, but this level of death was unprecedented.
As dead or dying insects are collected, dissected and tested, several possibilities are emerging.
The most recent mite problem – the varroa mite – compromises a bee's immune system, so a virus might be the new culprit. Or it could be a new fungal pathogen.
Frazier said researchers also were looking at a new group of pesticides that might impair the bees' ability to orient to their hives. So maybe they are dying only because they cannot find their way back home.
Neither entomologists nor growers can say what will happen when the 2007 growing season for most of the country's crops starts. "We're coming up onto the season where people are really going to be worried," Frazier said.
