Bee's Dying at record pace
- Thread starter GTS
- Start date
Yes, they sting more than once (hornets and wasps), but LOL@a nest falling on your shoulder!
I have nests all around here, but I let them grow unless they become a problem. One time however I watched ants raid the wasp nest and destroy it, and another time I watched a Blue Jay snatch one and fly away with it. The tripped out thing about the ants taking over the nest is the wasps usually lay down a chemical that prevents the ants from climbing on the nest or going near it.
I have nests all around here, but I let them grow unless they become a problem. One time however I watched ants raid the wasp nest and destroy it, and another time I watched a Blue Jay snatch one and fly away with it. The tripped out thing about the ants taking over the nest is the wasps usually lay down a chemical that prevents the ants from climbing on the nest or going near it.
You should have put a gang of those praying mantis's in the mix.
Yeah, the entire nest landed on my shoulder. I looked at my shoulder and there were HUNDREDS of those bastards!! That was probably the scariest moment of my life. My dad grabbed me and luckily we were next to a river so he just yanked me and tossed me the fuck in the water. lol, I didn't know wtf was going on. My t-shirt, literally had dozens of holes in the shoulder area from their big ass stingers. Fucking camping trips.
My dad's best friend from Chicago was visiting seattle for the first time, never been camping before, he was standing behind me when that shit fell on me. He just yelled, "BEEHIVE! BEEHIVE!" and took the fuck off running. We didn't find him till three hours later, he straight ran to the nearest town, lol.
Yeah, the entire nest landed on my shoulder. I looked at my shoulder and there were HUNDREDS of those bastards!! That was probably the scariest moment of my life. My dad grabbed me and luckily we were next to a river so he just yanked me and tossed me the fuck in the water. lol, I didn't know wtf was going on. My t-shirt, literally had dozens of holes in the shoulder area from their big ass stingers. Fucking camping trips.
My dad's best friend from Chicago was visiting seattle for the first time, never been camping before, he was standing behind me when that shit fell on me. He just yelled, "BEEHIVE! BEEHIVE!" and took the fuck off running. We didn't find him till three hours later, he straight ran to the nearest town, lol.
^^damn man, good thinkin by your dad to toss you into the river....
my mom use to be a beekeeper...she was going into the rankings of like master beekeeper and shit, i dont' remember what it's called, but you have to take tests and shit...she use to get a ton of honey, she won some awards at the Puyallup fair, 1st-3rd, a few years in a row...then she sold it all....now there's like 1 jar of honey left...there is NOTHING like fresh honey WITHOUT all the shit you would get in stores in it....
LOL @ dude yellin BEEHIVE BEEHIVE and running away...i've been stung multiple times, once in the face...didn't even swell up that much.
my mom use to be a beekeeper...she was going into the rankings of like master beekeeper and shit, i dont' remember what it's called, but you have to take tests and shit...she use to get a ton of honey, she won some awards at the Puyallup fair, 1st-3rd, a few years in a row...then she sold it all....now there's like 1 jar of honey left...there is NOTHING like fresh honey WITHOUT all the shit you would get in stores in it....
LOL @ dude yellin BEEHIVE BEEHIVE and running away...i've been stung multiple times, once in the face...didn't even swell up that much.
Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross
Published: 15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross
Published: 15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
the cell phone story is probably not true becasue it seems that bees populations have been decreasing for the last 25 years and it is just now that more attention is paid to the problem
I can't imagine how bees will be affected by cell phones because cell phones are used in areas where there are hardly any bees...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
I can't imagine how bees will be affected by cell phones because cell phones are used in areas where there are hardly any bees...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_kolbert
Stung
Where have all the bees gone?
by Elizabeth Kolbert
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 s
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.
Where have all the bees gone?
by Elizabeth Kolbert
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 s
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.