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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] From the NEW YORKER: A Look at CCD
  • Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 01:53:33 -0400


Dept. of Entomology
Stung
Where have all the bees gone?
by Elizabeth Kolbert August 6, 2007


No one knew whether colony-collapse disorder was
caused by disease, mites, toxins, or cell phones,
but some keepers had reportedly lost seventy per
cent of their bees.

Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge
of a field with a bear and thirty or forty
thousand very angry bees. The bear was there
because of the bees. The bees were there because
of me, and why I was there was a question I found
myself unable to answer precisely.

In a roundabout sort of way, the encounter had
been set in motion several months earlier, in
late February, when the Times ran a story about a
new ailment afflicting honeybees. It had been
given a name-colony-collapse disorder-but no one
had any idea what was causing it; beekeepers
would open their hives only to discover that they
were suddenly and mysteriously empty. According
to the article, some keepers had lost seventy per
cent of their colonies, and these losses, in
turn, were likely to reduce the yields of crops
ranging from kiwis to avocados. All this
information struck me as disturbing, and
therefore interesting. I thought that at some
point I might want to write about it myself, and
so I began to read up on bees.

The literature of apiculture is vast and
seductive; I learned one amazing thing after
another. Honeybees are the only animals besides
humans known to have a representational language:
they convey to one another the location of food
by dancing. When the queen lays an egg, she is
able to choose its sex. Males, known as drones,
perform no useful function except to mate. They
are loutish and filthy, and the workers-sterile
females-tolerate their presence for a few months
a year, then systematically murder them. A single
pound of clover honey represents the distilled
nectar of some 8.7 million flowers. In a week, a
productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey
to its stores. Pretty soon, I had moved on to
beekeeping manuals. I learned about different
"races" of honeybees, each with its own "dialect"
and disposition: Italians, which are golden and
laid-back but can have trouble producing enough
honey for winter; Carniolans, which are darker
and hardier but prone to swarm; and Russians,
which build up slowly but are the hardiest of
all. I also learned about honeybee diseases:
varroa mites, tiny parasites that attach
themselves to bees and feed on their blood;
tracheal mites, even tinier parasites, which
attack bees' breathing tubes; American foulbrood,
bacteria that turn bee larvae into stringy goo;
and sac brood, a virus that leaves larvae
swimming in bubbles of muck. Finally, and, I
suppose, predictably, I began leafing through
beekeeping catalogues, weighing the advantages of
wooden frames versus plastic ones and full-body
"English-style" bee suits versus simpler (and
cheaper) veils. By the time I ordered my hive,
the initial reason for having one-to learn about
colony-collapse disorder-had dissipated. The
disease (or whatever it was) hadn't turned up in
the region where I live, which is western
Massachusetts. But by that point I wasn't sure
whether I was writing the story to keep bees or
keeping bees to write the story.

Bees, which are descended from predatory wasps,
turned from eating other insects to feeding on
flowers some hundred million years ago. Not
coincidentally, this was shortly after flowers
first appeared. Since then, it's been one long
evolutionary tango. Some bees have evolved to
feed on the nectar of a single type of flower;
for example, Andrena florea, a small European
bee, relies exclusively on the delicate white
blossoms of bryony plants. Conversely, some
flowers, like the showy, fragrant orchid
Stanhopea embreei, native to Ecuador, are
pollinated only by a single species of bee, in
this case Eulaema bomboides. Worldwide, nearly
twenty thousand species of bees have been
identified. Out of these, only perhaps two dozen
have been successfully raised by humans, and only
one-Apis mellifera, commonly known as the western
honeybee-accounts for nearly all the bees
maintained by beekeepers in Europe and North
America.

Apis mellifera is a floral generalist-the
technical term is "polylectic"-meaning that it
will feed on just about anything that is
blooming. This trait makes honeybees essential to
modern agriculture, which has itself evolved to
depend on their services. In a five-hundred-acre
apple orchard, for example, there simply aren't
enough indigenous pollinators to produce a
commercial crop: either the yield will be too low
or the fruit will be small or stunted. (An apple
has ten ovules, each of which can produce a seed;
unless at least six are pollinated, the apple
will be misshapen.) Apple growers, therefore,
bring additional pollinators into their fields,
and honeybees are the only ones that can be
delivered in sufficient numbers. Other commercial
crops that have come to rely on honeybees include
blueberries, cranberries, cherries, cucumbers,
watermelons, cantaloupes, and pumpkins.

Almonds, in particular, have extremely high
pollination requirements-nearly all the flowers
in an orchard must be cross-pollinated to produce
a commercial crop-and so California's
increasingly large (and lucrative) almond
industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent;
it is estimated that to service the state's two
billion dollars' worth of almonds next year will
require nearly 1.5 million hives, or roughly
two-thirds of all the colonies that existed in
this country before colony-collapse disorder.
(The price of renting a hive during the almond
bloom, which starts in late February, rose from
fifty-five dollars three years ago to a hundred
and thirty-five dollars this year, and next year
will likely reach a hundred and seventy dollars.)
Five years from now, as more acreage goes into
production, it is expected that almonds will
require 2.1 million colonies, or nearly all the
hives that are currently being kept, both by
commercial beekeepers and by hobbyists.

Typically, commercial beekeepers ship their hives
by flatbed truck; the hives are stacked on
pallets, then unloaded with a forklift. The
process is efficient-two men can easily move ten
million bees into an orchard in a single day-and
also profitable, or at least more profitable than
selling honey to a world drenched in corn syrup.
But it is hard on the bees. One keeper told me
that every time he loads up his hives he expects
to lose ten per cent of his queens simply as a
result of the jostling. Insecticides are also a
problem; even assuming that farmers are careful
to avoid spraying when bees are in their
fields-something that beekeepers complain is not
always the case-there are residues. Finally, the
mass movement of honeybees spreads parasites and
disease. (Truck 1.5 million hives in to pollinate
almonds, and some sixty billion bees will be
buzzing around the same trees.) The blood-sucking
varroa mite was first reported here in 1987;
within a few years, practically every managed
colony in the United States had been infected.
Since the early eighties, the number of hives has
dropped by almost half. Wild honeybees,
meanwhile, which were once common across the
country, have nearly disappeared.

The first person to notice that there was
something seriously wrong with his bees-or maybe
just the first person to admit it-was David
Hackenberg. Hackenberg, who is fifty-eight, is
the owner, founder, and chief source of labor for
Hackenberg Apiaries, which is based in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania. He has a weathered face,
grayish-brown eyes, and legs that seem to take up
three-quarters of his body. He has been keeping
honeybees for forty-five years.

"I started with one hive for a Vo-Ag project,"
Hackenberg told me not long ago. We were standing
in a field somewhere near Lake Ontario, and a few
yards away his oldest son, Davey, was collecting
boxes of honey. There were so many bees in the
air that it seemed to be vibrating. "I thought
there was money in it. And there is. I keep
putting it there." By the time Hackenberg
graduated from high school, he had a hundred and
fifty hives. That figure kept on growing until it
reached nearly three thousand.

Last year, as usual, Hackenberg spent the spring
ferrying his hives from Pennsylvania, where the
bees pollinated apples, to Maine, where they
worked lowbush blueberries, to upstate New York,
where they fed on clover, and finally back to
Pennsylvania, where they pollinated pumpkins. In
October, Hackenberg and his son trucked the bees
down to Florida for the winter. They left four
hundred hives on a lot south of Tampa, so that
the bees could feed off an invasive weed,
Brazilian pepper, that was blooming nearby. In
mid-November, they returned to pick up the hives,
because the owner of the lot-a man who rents out
carnival rides-needed it to store equipment. At
that point, they did what they always do-put on
their protective gear and lit a smoker. (For
reasons that are not entirely clear, bees respond
to the smell of burning wood or straw by becoming
more docile, so beekeepers usually smoke hives
before handling them.)

"After I smoked about five pallets, I realized
I'm not smoking anything," Hackenberg recalled.
"I started jerking covers off, and the hives are
empty." Increasingly frantic, he began pulling
the frames out of the hives. The more he saw, the
weirder the situation looked. The frames all had
honey in them, indicating that there had been
plenty of food. They were filled with young
larvae, or brood, meaning that the bees, usually
fiercely maternal, had abandoned their young.
There were no signs of moths or other pests that
normally invade sick colonies. And Hackenberg
couldn't find any dead bees.

"I got down on my hands and knees looking," he
told me. "They weren't there. It's like somebody
swept the boxes out. There were just no bees."
Every time he came across a dead hive-what
beekeepers refer to as a deadout-he flipped it on
its side. By the time he had gone through the
four hundred hives on the lot, only forty were
still standing. Hackenberg had shipped
twenty-nine hundred hives to Florida. When he
finally went through all of them, he found that
two thousand had been wiped out.

Hackenberg likes to talk. (Davey told me that one
month this spring his father had a cell-phone
bill for fifty-three hundred minutes.) He began
calling around-to fellow-beekeepers, to officials
at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to
entomologists he knew at Penn State. He told them
that some strange new ailment was killing his
bees; they told him he had probably just screwed
up. "Them mites'll get you," one of Hackenberg's
closest friends said. But Hackenberg persisted.
Within a week, other beekeepers-people he didn't
even know-began calling him to tell him that
their bees, too, had disappeared. "I became an
expert all of a sudden on something I don't know
anything about," Hackenberg said.

All sorts of theories were soon proposed. The
mysterious ailment was a new disease, or it was a
response to drought, or to stress, or to toxins.
According to one widely reported hypothesis,
cell-phone transmissions were disrupting the
bees' navigational abilities. (Few experts took
the cell-phone conjecture seriously; as one
scientist said to me, "If that were the case,
Dave Hackenberg's hives would have been dead a
long time ago.")

For his part, Hackenberg decided that the culprit
was a new class of insecticides, called
neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoids are neurotoxins
that, as the name implies, chemically resemble
nicotine. They are considered safer for humans
than many other classes of pesticides, because
they interfere with neural pathways that are more
common in insects than in mammals, but from a
bee's perspective that obviously isn't much of a
recommendation. (The most commonly used
neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, is considered
"highly toxic" to bees, and therefore is not
supposed to be applied while they are around.) In
March, Hackenberg sent a letter to growers,
asking that they "please try to use something
beside these products" on their crops.

Meanwhile, he and Davey began to rebuild. They
ordered new bees, which they had air-freighted
from Australia, and new queens, which were flown
in from Hawaii. They split any colony that seemed
to be healthy into two and persuaded a firm that
usually sterilizes contact-lens solution to blast
several truckloads of beekeeping equipment with
radiation. By the spring, they had managed to
restock some two thousand hives. They had also
spent more than three hundred thousand dollars.

"Last year, we had just enough to keep going, but
not enough to survive on," Davey told me. "It's,
like, give us a sign: either wipe the damn things
out or tell us what we're supposed to do here.
We're just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.
If we go through this another year, we'll be
flat-broke out of business."

On a sunny Saturday this spring, I drove to
Betterbee, an apiary-supply store in Greenwich,
New York, about forty miles north of Albany. When
I arrived, the place was crowded with beekeepers
and aspiring beekeepers, some from as far away as
Maryland, who were queued up in the parking lot.
On reaching the front of the line, I was handed a
package, much the way you would be handed a loaf
of bread, or a pizza. It gave off a slight,
insistent buzz.

A package-in beekeeping, this is a precise rather
than a generic term-is a container about the size
of a shoebox, with wooden sides and wire mesh
covering the front and back. It holds about
fourteen thousand worker bees and a single queen,
who is housed, along with a few devoted
attendants, in a tiny cage. The workers and the
queen are not from the same original colony, and
the queen is kept secluded to give the other bees
time to grow accustomed to her odor. The queen
cage has a special stopper on one end, made out
of a substance called "queen candy." The hope is
that by the time the workers are able to eat
their way through the candy and liberate the
queen they will have accepted her as their leader
and not try to kill her.

Left to their own devices, honeybees construct
their hives in cavities, usually in trees and
preferably with small openings that face south.
They attach their wax combs to the top of the
cavity, and build downward in parallel sheets
lined on both sides with hexagonal cells. These
cells are used for all the bees' various needs-to
house the young, to store pollen and nectar, and
to preserve honey. (To make honey from nectar,
bees combine it with special enzymes in their
"honey stomachs" and then evaporate out the
water.) The key to beekeeping is to persuade a
colony to construct its combs where people can
get at them. The ancient Egyptians fashioned
conical hives out of hardened mud. Since then,
hives have been made out of practically every
substance imaginable, including clay, stone,
logs, bark, wicker, cork, and bamboo.
Skeps-bell-shaped straw hives of the sort still
popular in cartoons-were widely used in
seventeenth-century Europe and were brought to
the New World by some of the earliest colonists.
(Before the colonists arrived, there were no
honeybees anywhere in the Americas.)

Nowadays, nearly all beekeepers use hives of the
same basic design, developed a century and a half
ago by the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth,
a Congregational minister from Philadelphia.
Langstroth suffered from severe psychiatric
difficulties; attempting to preach his first
sermon, he came down with an acute case of what
might be called rector's block, and was unable to
speak. (He referred to this as the start of his
"head troubles.") He took up beekeeping in the
hope that the outdoor work would clear his mind.

Langstroth's crucial insight-"I could scarcely
refrain from shouting 'Eureka!' in the open
streets," he wrote of the moment of
revelation-was the concept of "bee space." He
realized that while honeybees will seal up
passageways that are either too large or too
small, they will leave open passages that are
just the right size to allow a bee to pass
through comfortably. Langstroth determined that
if frames were placed at this "bee-space"
interval of three-eighths of an inch, bees would
build honeycomb that could be lifted from the
hive, rather than, as was the practice up to that
point, sliced or hacked out of it. He patented L.
L. Langstroth's Movable Comb Hive in 1852.
Today's version consists of a number of
rectangular boxes-the number is supposed to grow
during the season-open at the top and at the
bottom. Each box is equipped with inner lips from
which frames can be hung, like folders in a
filing drawer, and each frame comes with special
tabs to preserve bee space.

I set up my hive at the edge of a small brook
that runs through the back yard. Within a day of
being installed, my bees-Italians-were hard at
work. They could be seen zipping out of the
little opening in the front and returning with
yellow wads of pollen stuffed into the baskets on
their legs. Even my teen-age son found the sight
of their proverbial busyness hard to resist. On
returning home from school, he would lounge
against a nearby tree and watch.

One of the people that David Hackenberg called to
tell about his dead hives was Pennsylvania's
state apiary inspector, Dennis van Engelsdorp.
Van Engelsdorp does not normally keep bees
himself, but at the time that I went to visit
him, a few weeks ago, he had eight hives in his
yard, arranged in a horseshoe. The hives' owner
had iden-tified them as suffering from C.C.D.,
and van Engelsdorp had brought them home because
he was interested in seeing how long it would
take for them to collapse entirely. He asked me
if I wanted to have a look. We both put on bee
gear-a sort of cross between a hazmat suit and a
fencing mask. Van Engelsdorp smoked the first
hive, then pulled out a frame. To me, it looked
perfectly ordinary, except that, as van
Engelsdorp pointed out, there were almost no bees
on it.

"If you look here, you can see eggs, so the
queen's trying," van Engelsdorp said, passing me
the frame. We had neglected to put gloves on, but
this didn't seem to matter, because the few bees
there were so listless. I could see eggs, which
resemble tiny grains of rice, at the bottom of
several dozen cells.

"She's cranking," he went on. "Those eggs are on
their side, so they're three days old. But this
colony's just not building. It's not a factor of
there not being enough young bees coming out, but
it seems to be a factor of the fact that the
adult population is disappearing. So this is an
indication where I think this colony will be
completely collapsed next week."

And so it went. In the second colony, van
Engelsdorp spotted what are known as
"supercedure" cells. These cells, which hang off
the honeycomb like misshapen peanuts, are a sign
that worker bees are trying to produce a new
queen. (An ordinary larva grows into a queen if
it is fed on a special high-calorie diet of royal
jelly.)

"This is another thing we're seeing," van
Engelsdorp told me. "The queens don't seem to
hold as long. It's sort of like bees coughing,
trying to get rid of some illness that they
associate with the queen." A third hive was
almost completely empty. Van Engelsdorp poked
around inside it, looking for signs of wax moths
or small hive beetles, insects that prey on weak
colonies, but found none. "So whatever is killing
the bees, is it also killing the moths or is it
just driving them out, or what?" he asked. After
going through the rest of the hives, van
Engelsdorp decided to conduct an anatomical
inspection. He picked up a worker, pinched the
end of her abdomen between his fingers, and
pulled. A slimy, cream-colored thread emerged.
This was the bee's rectum, its kidneys-or
Malpighian tubules-and its intestines. He tossed
the bee on the ground, and repeated the process
with another bee.

Van Engelsdorp, who is thirty-seven, has a
bearish build, thinning blond hair, and deep-set
blue eyes. He lives in the woods about thirty
miles west of Harrisburg, in a one-room cabin
with an unheated porch that he sleeps on
year-round. Like many people who started to hear
from Hackenberg last fall, van Engelsdorp wasn't
initially very concerned. He figured that the
problem had to do with mites or-much the same
thing-with one of the many diseases, like
deformed-wing virus, that the mites transmit.
(The fact that Hackenberg hadn't found any dead
bees was odd, but sick honeybees often leave the
hive to expire.) What convinced him otherwise was
slicing up some bees that Hackenberg brought from
Florida.

Normally, if you cut open a bee its innards,
viewed under a microscope, will appear white.
Hackenberg's bees were filled with black scar
tissue. They seemed to be suffering not so much
from any particular ailment as from just about
every ailment. "There was just so much wrong with
them," van Engelsdorp recalled. "And there
weren't any mites."

After more beekeepers began reporting problems,
van Engelsdorp started travelling around the
country, collecting samples. Some he preserved in
alcohol, for his own lab; others he put on dry
ice, to be sent out for more sophisticated
molecular tests. (Soon, he was so overwhelmed by
samples that he had to hire an assistant, whose
job consists entirely of conducting bee
autopsies.) When the molecular tests were
performed, by entomologists at Penn State, they
con-firmed van Engelsdorp's initial impression.
The bees were infected with just about every bee
virus known, including deformed-wing virus,
sac-brood virus, and black-queen-cell virus, and
also by various fungi and bacteria. In addition,
genetic analysis revealed the presence of new
pathogens, never before sequenced. Such was the
level of infection that van Engelsdorp and other
researchers concluded that the bees' immune
systems had collapsed. It was as if an insect
version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.

One evening at around ten o'clock, in the middle
of a downpour, my husband heard an odd noise. It
sounded to him like clattering, and it seemed to
be coming from the general direction of our hive.
When he went outside to check, a bear was
standing where previously the boxes had been
stacked. The frames were scattered in the weeds.

The next morning, thousands of bees were
clustered against the base of a nearby tree.
Thousands more were lying dead on the ground. I
righted the hive and gathered up the frames.
Then, using a garden trowel, I spooned as many of
the survivors as I could back into the boxes.
That night, the bear attacked again. Do bees
suffer? I regret to say that I think they do.
Those who made it through the second attack spent
their days grumpily buzzing around, or huddled
pathetically together. Within two weeks, they,
too, were dead.

Most beekeeping manuals advise against trying to
raise bees on the basis of a manual. Instead,
they suggest find-ing a more experienced
beekeeper who lives nearby or joining a local
beekeeping organization. The nearest group I
could find was the Southern Vermont Beekeepers,
and one evening I attended a meeting in the back
of a Manchester bookstore. The guest speaker was
the Vermont state apiary inspector, and he spent
a while talking about colony-collapse disorder,
which hadn't been found in Vermont, and then
about varroa mites and tracheal mites and
American foulbrood and nosema and small hive
beetles, all of which had. When he called for
questions, the discussion quickly turned to
bears. Practically everyone had a story to tell.
Ordinary fences, it was agreed, were useless, and
even electric ones could be breached. One man
said that he draped his electric fence with
bacon; this enticed the bear to stick his nose
against the wires and get zapped. Another
recommended driving nails through plywood, then
laying the plywood around the hive, nail-side up.

"It definitely keeps the bears out," he said of the arrangement.

"It's not too good for the inspector who steps on a nail," the inspector said.

"Get a tetanus shot," a second man suggested.

On my return home, I relayed what I'd learned to
my husband. I told him I was opposed to the nail
approach, and he said he was opposed to an
electric fence. Ultimately, we settled on a third
option, not recommended by anyone. We ran a wire
cable between two trees, about twenty feet off
the ground, and attached a pulley to it. Then we
mounted the hive on a platform that could be
raised and lowered by rope. Since it was too late
in the season to get another package, we ordered
what's known as a nucleus hive, or nuc, which,
once again, I went to pick up at Betterbee. It
came in a plastic-foam container resembling a
cooler. Instead of Italians, the bees in the nuc
were Carniolans. The queen, who can be hard to
spot, because Carniolans are so dark, had been
marked with a tiny yellow dot.

For ten days, the aerial hive worked fine. On the
eleventh, I went out to check on it and found the
boxes on the ground. The frames had all tumbled
out, and the bees were buzzing around wildly. I
wasn't sure what had happened until I spotted a
small black bear a few yards away. Presumably, he
had climbed a tree and swatted at the hive until
it fell. I chased him away, put on my beekeeping
gear, and set the frames back in place. The
platform was dangling over my head. While I was
trying to figure out my next move, I got stung on
the chin. I retreated, and, when I looked up, the
bear had returned. He sidled over to one of the
boxes I had righted, and tried to tip it over.
Bees swarmed toward his face. He tumbled back. He
tried again. The same thing happened. He sat
down. For several minutes, we eyed each other
warily. Finally, a tractor came to mow a nearby
field and the sound of it drove him off.

I had lost one colony, and now it seemed that I
was about to lose another. My husband announced
that he had had enough of bees, but, both morally
and journalistically, I felt committed. I
persuaded him to restring the cable between two
trees that were farther apart, and we raised the
hive back up. Much to my amazement, this seemed
to work.

Dr. Ian Lipkin is the head of the Jerome L. and
Dawn Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public
Health. He is a slight man with sandy-colored
hair and a boyishly unlined face. When he was in
medical school, Lipkin intended to become an
internist, but then he became interested in
neurology, which, in turn, led him to molecular
biology. "The thing about molecular biology is,
it's like a magic trick," Lipkin told me when I
went to speak to him one day this summer in his
office, in upper Manhattan. "Once you know the
trick, you say, 'I should have seen that.' "

Last December, Lipkin received an e-mail from an
entomologist at Penn State. The e-mail asked for
his help in solving the mystery of C.C.D. This
was two months before C.C.D. began to make news,
and Lipkin had no idea what the entomologist was
talking about. He wondered whether the e-mail was
genuine. "I get a lot of kooks writing me," he
explained. Lipkin knew almost nothing about the
ailments of invertebrates, and even less about
bees, but his lab had done a lot of work on
zoonoses-diseases, like avian flu, that
originated in animals and have "jumped" species
to infect humans."I decided, Well, why not
diseases of insects? It's sort of a natural
extension," he told me. He agreed to help, and
soon was sent some of the bees that van
Engelsdorp had collected.

Lipkin subjected the bees to what is called
"metagenomic analysis." As he described it to me,
the goal of the process is to extract all the
genetic information available from a given
sample, in this case not just the bees themselves
but also the protozoa, bacteria, viruses, and
fungi that had been living in them. "It's like if
we took you, your shoes, your socks, your
sweater, and sequenced everything," Lipkin said.
"Then we need to figure out what was shoes, what
was socks, and what was you." (Just last year,
scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine, in
Houston, published the entire honeybee genome
sequence, consisting of some two hundred and
sixty million base pairs.) At various points,
Lipkin assigned more than a dozen researchers in
his lab to work on the project, sometimes seven
days a week.

The metagenomic analysis confirmed van
Engelsdorp's initial impression. Bees suffering
from C.C.D. were infected not with one pathogen
but with many, and the most economical
explanation was that their immune systems were
compromised. This left the central question still
to be answered: Why was this happening?

At the time that I spoke to him, Lipkin had just
sent off a paper on C.C.D. to a scientific
journal. He was reluctant to discuss its
contents, for fear of jeopardizing its
acceptance, but he did indicate that it contained
what he considered to be a breakthrough. One
patho-gen in particular was, in his words,
"highly associated" with C.C.D.

"My speculation would be that this particular
pathogen is a trigger that takes an otherwise
borderline population and throws it over the
edge," he told me. "I think that's what we're
seeing." Lipkin explained that the process of
finding the pathogen responsible for an outbreak
was "the same whether we're talking about
encephalitis or diarrheal disease or hemorrhagic
fevers or respiratory disease. You put up a
candidate and then try to tear it down. And, if
you can't tear it down, it's probably bona fide.
That's how we do science." He wouldn't tell me
what kind of pathogen he was talking about in the
case of C.C.D., but soon I learned that it was a
virus. I also learned that it was suspected that
the virus had entered the U.S. on imported bees.

So far, C.C.D. has been reported in thirty-six
states, including California, New York, Texas,
Florida, and New Jersey. There are no reliable
estimates of how many hives have been wiped out
by the disorder, but commercial beekeepers seem
to have been particularly hard hit, with some
reporting losses of up to ninety per cent. A
number of beekeeping businesses have already
failed; when I met up with David Hackenberg, he
showed me a stack of boxes he had bought from an
operation that had recently gone under. It's
impossible to predict how many businesses will be
left after this year. During the summer, when the
nectar is flowing, even weak colonies can appear
to be healthy. The test will come in the fall,
the season when C.C.D. was first discovered.

I asked several entomologists what could be done
if, in fact, C.C.D. did turn out to be caused or,
to use Lipkin's word, "triggered" by a virus, and
got back a wide range of answers. New, resistant
strains of honeybees could, at least in theory,
be bred. Bees could, once again in theory, be
treated with antiviral drugs or, alternatively,
the virus might burn itself out. (A recent paper
co-written by van Engelsdorp shows that
unexplained honeybee die-offs have occurred in
the U.S. fourteen times in the past hundred
years.) Finally, there is the possibility that
C.C.D. could keep spreading until people just
give up on raising honeybees.

Under this last, worst-case scenario, other
pollinators would have to be found to perform the
work that honeybees now do. There are thousands
of candidates-mostly other species of bees, but
perhaps also certain moths or thrips. For some
crops, alternative pollinators could well prove
more efficient than Apis mellifera; honeybees
don't particularly like squash or pumpkin
flowers, for example, while Peponapis pruinosa,
commonly known as the squash bee, does. But the
challenges are enormous. Only a fraction of
pollinators are generalists, and even fewer are
social. Meanwhile, wild pollinators are, by most
accounts, in the midst of a crisis of their own.

Last October, just a few weeks before Hackenberg
observed the strange symptoms of C.C.D., the
National Research Council issued a report titled
"The Status of Pollinators in North America."
Fifteen scientists from the U.S., Canada, and
Mexico had spent a year reviewing the available
literature and interviewing experts. They noted
that few systematic studies had been done; still,
there was plenty of evidence of decline. The
Franklin bumblebee, for instance-a mostly black
bee native to northwest California and southwest
Oregon-was abundant in 1998, but the following
year went into a steep and probably terminal
decline. None were seen in 2004 and 2005 and only
one was found last year. Similarly, the rusty
patched bumblebee, once common in New York,
hasn't been sighted since 2001. In Britain, where
better records have been kept, more than half the
native bumblebee species either have become
extinct or are facing extinction in the next few
decades. Among the many possible contributing
factors that the report cited are habitat loss,
pesticide use, climate change, and introduced
pathogens. May Berenbaum, a professor of
entomology at the University of Illinois, chaired
the National Research Council panel; she recently
characterized C.C.D. as "a crisis on top of a
crisis."

"We can't count on wild pollinators, because
we've so altered the landscape that many are no
longer viable," she said.

As the National Research Council report noted,
invertebrate extinctions don't tend to have much
"marquee appeal." Yet if it's a bad sign when an
ecosystem loses its large mammals, it is
proba-bly an even worse sign when it can no
longer support its insects. The report put it
this way: "Pollinator decline is one form of
global change that actually does have credible
potential to alter the shape and structure of the
terrestrial world."

As for my honeybees, they seem to be doing fine.
After their unfortunate fall, I was worried that
the queen might have been crushed or perhaps
suffocated by her nervous attendants, an accident
known as "balling." In that case, the colony
would have had to go through the risky exercise
of breeding a new queen and getting her mated.
But just the other day I lowered the hive, smoked
it, and opened the cover. When I pulled out a
frame, it was dripping with honey. I could see
lots of fat little larvae curled up in their
cells, proof that the queen was alive and laying.
To my fond, unpracticed eye, it all seemed
beautiful. I put the cover on and hoisted the
hive back up. As of this writing, it is still
there, swaying between the trees. ܶ






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