permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Honeybee die-off threatens food supply
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/honeybee_die_off;_ylt=A0WTcUmIkjlGcIABrwFhr7sF>

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Wed May 2, 10:49 PM ET

BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious 
killer that is wiping out many of the
nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, 
perhaps even reducing us to a glorified
bread-and-water diet.
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Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest 
flowering crops we have. Among them:
apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and 
cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and
tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, 
blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and
other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated 
plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80
percent of that pollination, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we 
could end up being "stuck with grains
and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee 
and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee 
die-offs have happened before, this one
seems particularly baffling and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their 
colonies — or about five times the normal winter
losses — because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The 
problem started in November and seems to
have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada 
and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and 
early results of a key study this week point
to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their 
numbers were steadily shrinking, because
their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and 
because their gregarious nature exposes them
to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.

"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," 
Hackett said. "Do they have the
resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's 
bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent
weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. 
Congress has held hearings on the matter.

"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for 
pollination," Agriculture Secretary
Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to 
our food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for 
many reasons, the pollinator of choice for
most North American crops," a
National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types 
of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant,
and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee 
is nature's "workhorse — and we took it
for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: 
An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,"
told The Associated Press on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no 
workers, just newborn bees and the queen.
Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this 
time they just disappeared. The die-off
takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work 
on this die-off, has more suspected causes
than time, people and money to look into them.

The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, 
pesticides, or a one-two combination of the
top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem 
less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis
and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee 
colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated
hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease 
or parasite that was killed by radiation.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: 
A mite practically wiped out the wild
honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic 
fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of
dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe 
DeRisi, who isolated the human
SARS virus.

However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a 
factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The
fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on 
honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in
two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially 
America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse
because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank 
from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in
2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the 
insect did not have the normal complement of
genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting 
genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice
the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May 
Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable 
to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 
beekeepers and found that 38 percent of
them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was 
visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive
that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.

Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think 
a food crisis is looming.

Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this 
is a new type of die-off, it may have
happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat 
the same. There were reports of something
like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had 
something similar in 2004, said Peter
Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the 
problem.

"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not 
be a simple answer."

___

On the Net:

Colony Collapse Disorder Web page by the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and 
Extension Consortium:

http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/ColonyCollapseDisorder.html

National Academy of Sciences study on pollinators: 
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id11761