Dave Hackenberg, an apiarist from West Milton, Pennsylvania, began lifting the lids off hives at his winter yard in Tampa Bay, Florida, last Nov. and was stunned by what he found: most adult bees had vanished.
"They were good-looking bees on Oct. 1," a still bemused Hackenberg said.
"But by Nov. 12 they were totally gone. And no one's figured out where they went," he said.
As he inspected the yard, he found that the missing bees, foragers who roam for pollen, had left their queen and brood. Just as mysteriously, the dead hives contained honey, usually plundered quickly from abandoned hives by other bees, wax moths or hive beetles.
Out of 400 hives in the Florida yard, only about 40 housed live bees. Most were empty of adults. Hackenberg, who has spent 45 of his 58 years as a beekeeper, hauling insects from state to state to pollinate crops, had never seen the like.
Gathering dead bees, he ferried the samples to researchers in Pennsylvania.
In the past, hives succumbed to varroa or tracheal mites and amoebic infection. But when researchers examined Hackenberg's bees they found blackened and swollen organs.
"We found many abnormalities," said Dennis van Engelsdorp, Pennsylvania's state apiarist. "Scarring on the digestive tract, kidneys swollen and scarred. Even the sting gland had evidence of a fungal or yeast infection."
The dramatic scene in Florida was the first reported instance of an alarming phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder. According to Bee Alert Technologies of Montana, CCD has hit 35 states, and van Engelsdorp estimates that 25 percent of apiarists suffered losses, with up to 875,000 out of 2.4 million hives infected. Collapse within each hive ranges from 35 percent to 90 percent of the bee population.
vanishing
Bees have vanished in Canada, Brazil, India and Europe, although CCD remains unconfirmed. Barry Gardiner, parliamentary undersecretary at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told parliament this month that the National Bee Unit had received reports of isolated UK cases.
"However, overall percentage losses are similar to previous years, albeit reflecting the gradual increase seen in the last five years," he said.
Faced with a dramatic die-off among Apis mellifera, the non-native honeybees that pollinate a third of US crops, scientists are working flat out to isolate the cause and find a remedy. Without bees, pollination is dramatically reduced and crops are put at risk. Fewer bees have already triggered higher US pollination fees.
As bees pollinate 90 crops worldwide, the threat to food supplies is grave. Next week, two new bills will be tabled in the US Congress, to raise the alert about the threat and to appropriate desperately needed research funds.
Vanishing bees are not entirely new. The earliest known instance dates from the 18th century. Disappearances in the US were noted in 1869, 1923, 1965 and the 1970s. Since then, Pennsylvania's bee colonies have dwindled from 80,000 to 38,500. Unusual deaths surfaced in some eastern states in 2004, but last winter's hive collapses eclipsed any mite infestations.
So why would socially sophisticated insects abandon their young and their queen? Theories abound, ranging from an al-Qaeda plot to wreck US agriculture to wireless waves from cell phones.
Bees found in hives with CCD were "infected with an extremely high number of different disease organisms," Penn state entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told Congress in March.
Did this indicate catastrophic immune collapse, perhaps destroying foragers' navigational systems? The same Congress also heard that the economic worth of the honeybee in the US is valued at more than US$14.6 billion a year.
The absence of pests such as varroa suggested the presence of some toxin, perhaps from fungi known to be pathogenic since the 1930s.
In April, Californian investigators said a single-celled parasite, Nosema ceranae, might be to blame, but cautioned that their findings were "preliminary." Other researchers say the fungus indicated a suppressed immune system.
"Nosema may be a player," van Engelsdorp said, "but not the smoking gun." US researchers, he said, are focusing on three broad possibilities: a viral disease caused by a new or mutated pathogen; environmental contaminants, such as pesticides applied in the field, or used to control mites in hives; and nutritional stress, perhaps linked to drought conditions last summer. Or the disappearances might be caused by a combination of some or all these factors in a "perfect storm," with fungi executing the coup de grace.
The pathogen angle is being pursued by Cox-Foster.
"We have found some new organisms that appear to be correlated with CCD," she said. "They may potentially be a cause."
Her research, shared with Columbia University's Ian Lipkin, is due to be published shortly in the journal Science. Still, this remains a grey area.
"There are places this pathogen is found that have not reported CCD, so we do expect to find additional triggers," Cox-Foster said.
When I spoke with Hackenberg, he was in Maine getting ready to load hives used to pollinate the blueberry crop and then truck them south to New York for the cranberry crop. To date, CCD has cost him US$460,000.
"We went from 2,950 to less than 800 hives," he said -- and he has restocked with Australian bees.
He is leaning towards an environmental culprit.
memory loss
"I think something causes memory loss in bees," he said, a possible explanation for navigational failure.
He lays the blame on pesticides called neonicotinoids, which, Cox-Foster told Congress, are "known to be highly toxic to honeybee and other pollinators."
Have neonicotinoid concentrations accumulated in plants, with fatal consequences for bees? Hackenberg cites anecdotal evidence of bees that vanished after foraging in corn, sunflowers, lawns or golf courses sprayed with neonicotinoids. Yet how do scientists explain the CCD outbreak in France, which banned the pesticide in 1999?
Others have blamed genetically modified crops, although entomologist May Berenbaum, who will address a congressional committee next week, notes that CCD is officially absent in Illinois, which grows GM corn.
Intriguingly, she said the honey-bee genome, published last October, shows the species has half the enzymes other insects use to fight poison.
The nutritional theory, perhaps precipitated by severe drought, evokes climate change -- as does the possibility that global warming opened a window for a new pathogen, although this, too, remains little more than theory.
And while climate change is linked to die-offs in species unable to adapt fast enough to changing conditions, van Engelsdorp suggests bees are unlikely candidates because they can survive in a whole range of temperatures. At the same time, he said much remains unknown about bee pathology.
There is even debate about whether we can regard a single bee as a living organism, or as part of a super organism in which individuals survive as members of a collective.
Then there are management issues with commercial bee operations, notably trucking hives thousands of kilometers to pollinate commercial crops.
As apiarists such as Hackenberg haul hives around the US, maybe bees are declining due to the stress induced by having to pollinate ever more crops, even as natural ecosystems are wiped out by urban growth.
Researchers talk about breeding new bees. But as bees disappear around the globe, there are fears that CCD is evidence of the deadly fallout visited on societies out of kilter with nature.
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