Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

I have been reading recently about this strange behavior (bee-hive err?!) of the bees. For the past couple of years, large colonies of bees have been leaving their hives and are not returning. The apiarists are puzzled and worried. Here are some excerpts from Fort Collins Weekly about this queer phenomenon.

Right now, that mystification is almost universal. Across the country, beekeepers are grappling with the bizarre disappearance of hundreds of thousands of honeybees that leave their hives and are never seen again. In many cases, all that is left is an empty hive, a handful of sick bees and a swarm of unanswered questions.

While scientists, academics and Congressional probes scramble to find out what’s happening to these vanishing bees, one thing is becoming clear: the impact of honeybees’ disappearance on the nation’s food supply could be significant. Commercial beekeepers like the Gilmores’ Colorado Pollination Co. are responsible for pollinating crops as diverse as almonds, cherries, squash and cucumbers. Crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by the wind, but 90 different flowering crops are pollinated by human-managed bee colonies that are trucked back and forth across the country purely for the sake of pollination. In fact, the Gilmores’ hives just returned from California, where two-thirds of the nation’s bees are employed every year to pollinate almond trees by the Almond Board of California.

Nationally, migratory honeybees are responsible for pollinating an estimated $14 billion worth of crops, making them a lynchpin in farmers’ harvests from coast to coast.

In addition to being critical to the food supply, honeybees are critical to those who raise them commercially, with beekeepers earning about $125 per hive for pollination contracts, according to Jerry Cochran, a former state bee inspector and the current nursery and seed management program director with the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

“If they don’t figure something out, there are beekeepers worried that the industry will collapse,” Cochran says.

Indeed, some beekeepers’ personal industries have already collapsed. A beekeeper in upstate New York recently reported having lost half of his 4,700 hive colony to CCD; in Colorado, a beekeeper in the San Luis Valley lost 5,000 of his 6,000 hive colony. CCD has been reported in 24 states, with many affected beekeepers reporting between half to almost all of their colonies vanishing on the wind.

While the phenomenon hasn’t yet been significant for Northern Colorado beekeepers, the lack of explanation for the bees’ disappearance has most of them on edge and wondering if their own colonies will be affected.

Theories as to CCD’s causes have covered a lot of territory. One theory is that the proliferation of cell phone towers, perhaps combined with the use of new nicotine-based pesticides, have been interfering with bees’ navigational abilities, making it impossible for them to find their way home. Others suspect a new virus or microscopic parasite infecting hives. Others suggest stress—particularly among hives that are transported long distances for pollination—or genetically modified crops, specifically those with a gene that produces the bacterial toxin Bt. Alone, Bt isn’t believed to affect healthy bees, but when introduced to bees infected with parasites, it could lead to infection, according to a German study recently cited by the Christian Science Monitor. Others believe high-fructose corn syrup used to supplement bees’ diets when they are pollinating crops with little nutritional benefit to bees, like canola, is to blame.

The nationwide CCD outbreak didn’t happen overnight—in fact, it’s been going on for nearly two years now—and initially, it was thought to only affect migratory hives like the Gilmores’, those that were placed on flatbed trucks and driven across the country as contract pollinators.

“The nature of migratory beekeeping is by nature very stressful on the bees,” Cochran says. “That’s the only thing that they could connect to them.”

But there have been reports of stationary beekeepers experiencing the same problems, leading to new theories that consider other factors in addition to hive stress.

“My guess is that it’s going to be an interaction of factors, stress being one factor,” Cochran says. “When they look inside the bees (that remain in a collapsed hive) they see a whole host of things (that point to fungal or parasitic infestation). Something is going on with these bees that makes them very susceptible to these things.”

The multiple-factor theory is one that’s widely held. The current bee population in the United States is maintained by a mere 600 queens that are keeping a bloodline alive that dates to the 1600s.

“Since then it’s kind of been a static gene pool,” Macpherson says. “There’s some real concern as to whether we have done a disservice here. We’re using all these chemicals and feeding them sugar syrup. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this and we should let the weak ones die off.”

Instead, bees are fortified with chemicals and supplemental diets to maintain their population as they pollinate flowering plants in a highly-managed environment, where they contend not only with genetically modified crops, but synthetic pesticides. CCD appears to many scientists to be an immune system disorder, with some theorizing that it is a natural reaction to being bred in a highly unnatural environment that suppresses evolutionary adaptation.

Perhaps the bigger question is how well the food chain will rebound in the wake of a substantial bee loss. According to a Cornell study, honeybees are responsible for having pollinated every third bite of food consumed by Americans. Almond trees pollinated by bees produce 60 percent more nuts than those that don’t use bees.

For years now, American and European scientists have tracked a decline in natural pollinators—wild bees, wasps, native butterflies and other insects—due to a host of reasons, including widespread pesticide use, lose of natural habitat and new diseases. As those populations have declined, farmers came to rely more and more on honeybees for pollination. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, honeybees provided an economic benefit to agriculture of between $1.6 billion and $5.7 billion in 1994—that figure has risen to $14 billion as reliance on honeybees has grown.

Post-post addition: An article on this subject in NY Times, courtesy, Raama. The moral I learned from this: If we try to fleece bees into doing our work*,bees flee!

* Using bees for our work - improve agriculture by carrying bee colonies across the country and using them for pollination.