As honeybees vanish, agriculture may get stung

(from: http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/16863431.htm)

Jimmy Odom of Charlotte got a big surprise recently when about 30 percent of his 25 carefully tended colonies of honeybees vanished.

They left no trail to follow. No dead bodies for pathologists to examine. No witnesses.

They just disappeared. And honeybees are disappearing across the nation.

Odom and other beekeepers are baffled. Because no one is sure what causes the problem, honeybee scholars created a name for it in January — Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, and are searching for a cause.

“Nobody knows but the bees,” Odom said. “It’s just a mystery.”

So what if bees disappeared?

Bees pollinate crops in gardens, farms and orchards. Officials say bees are essential to the cucumber, blueberry, strawberry, apple, melon and squash crops, adding an average of $88 million annually to the value of the crops in North Carolina alone. Counting their value to other crops such as cotton, peanuts and soybeans, they increase the total value by $154 million a year.

In South Carolina, bees also pollinate millions of dollars worth of crops including apples, blueberries, cucumbers, strawberries, squash, and melons.

“The honeybee is, by far, the most beneficial insect,” says Charles Heatherly, president of the N.C. State Beekeepers Association. “It pollinates one-third of the food we eat.”

The disorder has been confirmed in two dozen states, but is presumed to affect honeybees across the continent.

Cornell University estimates honeybees pollinate more than $14 billion worth of crops in the United States. Florida, which has about 200,000 of the country’s 2 million commercial hives, may have lost 30 percent to 40 percent of its hives in the past six months.

Entomologist David Tarby of N.C. State University said no one knows whether the cause of CCD is a virus, bacteria, parasitic mites, environmental stress or something else.

Entomologist Mike Hood of Clemson University calls it “a fast-moving mystery,” but a small problem so far. The Carolinas each have about 2,000 beekeepers, the bulk of them hobbyists whose bees make honey as well as pollinate crops.

“The symptoms that the beekeepers reported on CCD seems to be that the adult population is suddenly gone,” Tarby said. Unlike a killing by pesticides, it leaves no dead bees behind, he said.

Lack of food is not the problem. A brood of very young bees is often left with a queen, signifying that collapse of the colony was rapid, said Tarby, one in a group of scientists from several states and the U.S. Department of Agriculture working on the mystery.

A lucky event, he said, would be finding a colony collapse in progress, which would allow a detailed study of the bees and their behavior.

With fewer honeybees likely to be seen this summer, gardeners should use care with insecticides such as Sevin that are lethal to bees.

Without honeybees or bumblebees to pollinate such crops as cucumbers, squash and melons, gardeners may have to resort to hand pollination. That means using cotton swabs to move pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers, which ensures development of the fruit.

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