Homebuilding for Bumblebees Under Way in Pa.

Homebuilding for Bumblebees Under Way in Pa.
Submitted by Editor on Fri, 04/04/2008 - 12:06pm.

New Information Emerging on CCD

Chris Torres
Staff Writer

“If you build it, they will come.”

At least that’s what Steve Bogash hopes will happen with native bumblebees and the artificial homes he helped build for them.

Earlier this week, Bogash, a Penn State Extension Agent in Franklin County, along with several others, placed several hundred newly constructed “bee homes” on farms and organic orchards throughout Franklin and Cumberland County.

The hope is that these homes will attract more native bumblebees to orchards and vegetable farms, where they can be used for pollination.

Last last year, Bogash received a $10,000 grant to carry out the experiment. He hired a research assistant as well as a Mennonite builder, who helped build 120 boxes in all.

Bumblebees, he said, have a lot of potential for pollination. For one thing, they tend to work a flower much more than a honeybee will, ensuring better pollination.

“Each individual bee kind of becomes a specialist in its own flower,” he said.
They will also pollinate anything in their sight. “What can’t they pollinate? They are substantially more variable. They will go after anything. There is very little in this area they can’t effectively pollinate,” he said.

About six bumblebee species are native to Pennsylvania, with more being found in Maryland. Many growers, he said, find it challenging to use them because they don’t reproduce as much as the honeybee does and they are hard to get established in a particular area.

Bumblebees also reproduce later than honeybees, meaning growers can’t use as many of them during pollination. They also nest in the ground, making them easy targets for rodents and ants.

Bogash hopes the experiment will at least show that creating homes for these native pollinators will increase their numbers, thus lowering the cost of getting honeybees to do it for them. In light of the recent struggles honeybees have had, it could be important.

“I just don’t think people were asking all of these questions when honeybees were safe,” he said.

CCD Progress
Meanwhile, scientists working on trying to uncover the clues behind Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) say they have made progress on trying to figure out what is causing large numbers of honeybees to die-off across the country.

Diana Cox-Foster, a lead researcher of a CCD working group at Penn State, said a lot has been learned since the group performed a controlled CCD experiment on healthy honeybees from Hawaii in January. Most importantly, the experiment showed a virus identified by the group as a “CCD marker” this past fall caused some of the same behaviors in bees known to have succumbed to the disorder. This could mark a breakthrough as scientists race to find an answer to dwindling honeybee numbers across the country.

According to Cox-Foster, she and a few other researchers attempted to simulate CCD in the healthy honeybees, which were brought to Pennsylvania from Hawaii in November, by feeding them Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) through some sugar water.

IAPV was identified as a marker for CCD by the working group last fall.
Cox-Foster said the bees were examined for diseases and disorders before they were included in the study and only the “clean” bees were used. After giving them about six weeks to populate a greenhouse, the bees were fed the virus through the sugar water during the first week of January.

By early February, Cox-Foster said most of the colony was gone.

“One would say that mirrors the way they can get it (CCD) in nature in contaminated food resources,” Cox-Foster said. There was little room for the bees to move around, so she said they couldn’t get a gauge on whether the bees exhibited the same type of behavior as bees found effected by CCD. “But it did mirror what we would see with CCD,” she said.

Along with studying IAPV, the group is also studying different strains of the virus to try and pinpoint where the virus originated and how it could have gotten here.

One strain, she said, appears to have been in the country since 2005, around the same time Australian imported honeybees were allowed in the country.

Another strain, which has been found predominantly on the East Coast, may have been in the country as early as 2002 and may have been brought over by the small hive beetle, which lives predominantly in Africa, but was first spotted in the U.S. in 1998.

Cox-Foster said chemicals from pesticides, herbicides and miticides have not been ruled out as possible causes of the disorder. She said another group working on this aspect of the investigation has found that bees that have succumbed to CCD also had high levels of these chemicals in them. “There is much more stress on these bees than we ever have anticipated,” which she said can make them even more susceptible to disease and pests.

More than a year after helping to sound the alarm on CCD, beekeeper David Hackenberg has seen no light at the end of the tunnel.

This fall, Hackenberg took 2,300 honeybees colonies to overwinter in Florida, something he has been doing for years.

Just like last year, without warning, his bees started disappearing. Adult bees left their hives and never returned.

At the height of it, Hackenberg lost 1,100 of the colonies he took to Florida. Many more colonies were too weak to be effective as pollinators.

All told, he lost 45 percent of hives. At this time last year, Hackenberg was making national headlines after reporting he lost nearly 75 percent of his honeybee colonies to what was then a mysterious disappearing disorder, later identified as CCD.

His situation has improved slightly, because of things he has done to make his bees healthier. But now he has another challenge to deal with: rising prices.

In fact, rising prices for everything from the sugar he needs to feed his bees to the costs of shipping the bees around the country have made his situation “a dire one.”

“All of our costs are keeping going up and up and what we’re doing is not going the same direction,” he said. “We’re just trying to survive.”

It used to cost him less than $10 per hive to transport bees from their winter homes in Florida back up to Pennsylvania, where pollination of crops such as apples and blueberries will begin soon.

Now with diesel and gasoline prices skyrocketing, he estimates he could spend anywhere from $15 to $16 per hive to transport them.

“We barely break even,” he said.

He hopes the federal government will address the problem by shifting more money to researchers working on CCD. Cox-Foster said more money is needed to develop bees with better pest and chemical resistance.

“The USDA has basically turned a deaf ear on it,” he said. “If this was cows and chickens, there would be people lined up to fix up the problem. Unfortunately, this isn’t cows and chickens.”

Many of Hackenberg’s fellow beekeepers have folded since CCD became an issue. Hackenberg himself lost more than $350,000 last year as a result of the disorder. But his passion for breeding bees will keep going, at least for now.

“Whatever this thing is, it’s getting everybody,” he said. “The biggest reason I keep going is because I work for a lot of growers. They get me on the phone and they say, ‘we got to have you.’

“Unless you’re a beekeeper, I guess you can’t comprehend it.”

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Bees Pay High Price for Mounting Demand for Almonds
by Amy Levek
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I love almonds. In all their incarnations: raw, toasted, tamari-flavored, with wasabi or Maui onion. Whatever. They’re in that category of “perfect food,” and they taste awfully good.

But what I’ve learned about what it takes to grow them makes me a little queasy.

Agriculture today is anything other than the pastoral beauty of small fields and gently rolling farms we think of. That disappeared in the 1950s, along with Ozzie and Harriet and hula hoops. California’s Central Valley, where 80 percent of the world’s almonds are grown, epitomizes the transformation of agriculture in the 50s when “organophosphate pesticides liberated farmers, enabling them to increase the size of the farms, putting as much of the farms into crops as possible” according to Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining healthy native pollinator populations. “That’s also when we saw the need for honey bees come into the picture” since without habitat, native bees and feral bees declined, and with them went pollination services for their crops.

Now, miles and miles of Central Valley almond orchards stretch from horizon to horizon. A rolling white sea of their fragile petals emerges for two weeks each spring. Fragrant beyond description, strikingly elegant and unequalled in their promise, the emergence of today’s almond growing is the poster child for giant monocultures that now dominate American agriculture. Can are they sustainable?

Probably not.

Those effusive blooms, full of promise, represent a vast wasteland for the rest of the year, when the petals fall from the trees. The rows between the trees are typically cleared of vegetation so that the nut harvesting equipment can easily maneuver through the orchards. This leaves a deep swath of land barren and clean. Nothing growing.

It’s a very challenging environment for native bees, wild pollinators, birds and other wildlife, whose existence depends on a succession of blooming plants, flowers and nutrition throughout the growing season. More like a vast wasteland than a cornucopia.

For the commercially managed honey bee, however, the short span of time near the beginning of February is prime time. Half of all commercially managed honey bees in the United States, some 1.2 million hives or colonies (the boxes in which commercially managed honey bees live) each containing about 30,000 bees each, make the pilgrimage to the Central Valley each year to make sure the almonds are pollinated. That’s more than 36 billion bees.

The honey bee, introduced from Europe, is the only pollinator capable of servicing the almonds, also an introduced plant. Almonds arrived from Mediterranean and Middle East in 1850, firmly rooting in the Sacramento area, and then spreading into the Central Valley.

Introduced Crop Meets Introduced Pollinator

So, introduced crop meets introduced pollinator, and caravans of bees travel from all over the United States to make sure the almonds emerge. It’s a stunning example of ingenuity, and a classic case of something imminently unsustainable.

Blue Diamond, the well-known brand found in markets and groceries throughout the country, is actually a growers’ cooperative. Approximately 3,000 of California’s 5,500 growers link together to market and distribute their nuts. According to Blue Diamond’s website, “The crop is marketed to all 50 states and more than 90 foreign countries, making almonds California’s largest food export, and the sixth largest U.S. food export. The California crop is valued annually at over $1 billion dollars.”

Today there are over 600,000 acres of almonds in California, with new acres added every year. Each acre of almonds takes at least two hives of bees to ensure their pollination. It’s become a huge business. Four years ago, beekeepers got about $50-$60 per hive, but with the rise of Colony Collapse Disorder, those hives now fetch $150-$200 each for their short stint in the almond orchard.

Colony Collapse Disorder, according to Dr. Eric Mussen, extension apiculturist at University of California-Davis, is a condition where “adult worker bees unexpectedly get up, fly off and are gone. The brood are left but the workers are not feeding them.” Mussen acknowledges that so far, researchers don’t know what’s going on, although similar die-offs and disappearances have happened in the past.

About one-third of our food depends on honey bees for pollination and Mussen believes there are enough honey-bee colonies in the US to handle everything – except for almonds. “There are over 600,000 acres of almonds and the acreage continues to increase,” he explains. “The average use of bees is at least two colonies per acre. So that’s 1.2 million colonies needed now and that number’s going to go up to 1.5 million.” With about 2 1/4 commercial colonies of honey bees in the U.S. according to the United States Department of Agriculture, “so we need half of the nation’s bees here for almond pollination.”

Consider the implications of loading half of the nation’s managed hives onto semi trucks and shipping them across the country. The hives are loaded with forklifts, covered with netting. Trips have to be timed to avoid harsh or hot weather; the bees have to be fed. There’s always the possibility of an accident, like a recent semi jackknife near Sacramento that had swarms of angry bees forcing the Highway Patrol to close the road (about eight to twelve million bees had to rounded up).

The bees arrive prior to the almond bloom in February, with few other plants in bloom. Beekeepers have to feed them artificial formulas to maintain their vigor. With little to forage, the bees don’t always find the varied pollen and nectar sources that keep them strong.

Then there’s exposure to disease and deadly mites from other parts of the country. One beekeeper worried about his bees entering “the cesspool” resulting from so many bees brought together. “If I treat my bees and you don’t, now I have what you have,” explains Vacaville, Calif. beekeeper Rick Schubert.

Travel, poor nutrition, exposure to disease and mites can be very hard on the honey bees. “With over one million hives coming into California, it can be very stressful for them,” says Schubert.

Honey Bees ‘Don’t Like to Travel’

Arbuckle, Calif. almond grower Drew Scofield became so concerned about having healthy honey bees to pollinate his orchards that he got into the beekeeping business himself two years ago. His bees don’t travel; instead they forage on natural flora he’s gradually added by restoring land to native habitat near his orchards.

“They aren’t gypsies, traveling all over the state. I leave them in one location all summer,” he explains. “They don’t like to travel.” He also thinks bees struggle with pesticides and nutrition, further stressing them and making them susceptible to diseases and mites.

Then there’s bee rustling. Yes, that’s right. The price commanded by healthy hives put in the fields this almond pollination season has triggered a slew of crime. Hives have been stolen from the fields, secreted away and rented out again. National Public Radio recently reported on a series of incidents where beekeepers returned to find their hives had vanished.

So the next time you eat an almond, consider the source and the effort required to sustain the almond market in the U.S. Knowing how your food is produced can be an unsettling experience. I wish I could still see the huge expanses of almond orchards as a beautiful sight.

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Bee industry pays court to breeders
Orders for queens, starter hives jump as colony collapse threat hovers

Bob Krauter
Capital Press

Friday, April 04, 2008

Bob Krauter/Capital Press Barry Stayer, a foreman at Wooten痴 Golden Queens, a Palo Cedro-based bee breeder, checks frames for queen bees. Owners Shannon and Glenda Wooten sell queens and three-frame nucs to customers in the United States and Canada.
Bee breeder Shannon Wooten prepares a shipment of Italian queen bees from his Palo Cedro apiary. Wooten痴 Golden Queens ships bees to customers across the United States and Canada to help beekeepers build up their stocks and to replenish colonies that have succumbed to a variety of pest and disease problems.
PALO CEDRO - Beekeepers who have been bitten by colony collapse disorder and other maladies have come to rely on queen bee breeders for help.

Business is literally buzzing for California's 30 queen bee breeders, filling orders for queens and nucleus starter hives, known in the industry as "nucs," for customers across the nation.

Shasta County bee breeder Shannon Wooten of Wooten's Golden Queens was busy this week preparing nucs for a customer in North Dakota. A beekeeper since 1966 and a bee breeder for more than 30 years, Wooten said his business has grown 8 percent annually to about 30,000 queens and 5,000 nucs.

"Just about any state that has beehives, we ship there and Canada," he said. "Our area is isolated as far as trying to do what we do the best. We don't have the influence of other stock."

Wooten's business is part of a close-knit network of four major queen bee breeders in the Palo Cedro area that produces and ships Italian queens.

Wooten who operates the business with his wife, Glenda, said the area is remote and well suited to queen production. His father-in-law, the late Homer Park, started beekeeping more than 60 years ago in the area, which has proven to be fertile ground for producing high-quality queens.

"We're the farthest north in California that you can raise March and April queens," said Wooten who scatters his hives in a 10-mile radius of his base operation that includes a warehouse and covered barn stacked high with beehives at the end of a quiet country lane.

The rolling hills east of Redding are covered with grazing cattle and are not a desirable place for other beekeepers to produce honey because of a lack of forage. That makes for ideal breeding grounds for producing a pure line of Wooten's Italian honeybees.

His isolation has not insulated him from the problems that have beset other beekeepers. Last year, Wooten lost 1,000 colonies to disease problems.

The business of bee breeders has taken on added importance since the discovery of colony collapse disorder, a still unsolved mystery that is blamed for killing a quarter of the nation's 2.4 million commercial beehives in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Brad Pankratz, an Orland bee breeder and president of the California Bee Breeders Association, agrees there is greater demand on breeders, many of whom are located in Northern California.

"We're feeling a lot of pressure as queen breeders and also packaged bee producers to help all of these guys with huge losses and they look to Northern California to restock everything that they've lost throughout the season," Pankratz said. "We deal with a lot of these same problems that they deal with and we can't afford to have the losses because they are counting on us to restock everything."

Susan Cobey, who heads the University of California-Davis Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Biology Research Center, said bee breeders form the backbone of the nation's bee industry.

"It's huge. It is the base, the foundation of our industry and I think it hasn't gotten a lot of focus if you look at other plant and animal breeders. There's major institutions behind them," said Cobey, a 30-year bee breeder and geneticist.

The demands on bee breeders has become intense with the myriad pressures on their beekeeper customers who provide bees for pollinating one-third of the nation's food crops. An estimated 1 million colonies are needed to pollinate California's growing almond crop.

"It seems like every time we get a little bit comfortable with a new pest disease, we get whammed with another one. It has been really tough," Cobey said. "These guys (breeders) are the cream of the crop and when they start getting scared, it's really tough. I think we have a few hard years in here."

Cobey said colony collapse disorder is not easily understood. Bee experts believe it may involve a complex set of factors including parasitic mites, bee pathogens, viruses, chemicals, a lack of forage, poor nutrition or other problems. One of her key missions at the Laidlaw Bee Research Center is helping bee breeders build back the gene pool.

"We're losing some of our gene pool because of the high loss of colonies to tracheal mites, varroa mites, Nosema cerana (a dysentery disease), viruses and CCD," Cobey said. "And if you look at what's being replaced, we're bringing in Australian packages, which don't have a lot of resistance to varroa just because they haven't been exposed. We're also seeing the movement of African bees and if that's our choice, I think we are in big trouble."

Cobey is working with Steve Shepherd with the entomology department at Washington State University, in Pullman, Wash., to import bee semen from Europe to revitalize the honeybee gene pool.

"What we're proposing to do is to bring in some semen from some areas where these subspecies come from and then do instrumental, or artificial, insemination and then breed from these," Shepherd said. "Basically, we want to bring some new genes into the gene pool that will be available for queen breeders to use."

An 86-year-old U.S. ban prohibits the importation of European bee stock, but Shepherd and Cobey are hopeful they can convince USDA's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service to relent because of the massive die-off that has occurred in the nation's beehives. Those losses, said Shepherd, have caused a "genetic bottleneck" by reducing the genetic variation that is available for breeding.

"The idea is to bring in this semen to restore that and make it available for breeders," said Shepherd who added that of the 26 different subspecies of honeybees in Europe, Africa and Asia, only nine have been brought to the Northern Hemisphere.

"So there is still a lot of genetic variation potential that we could sample and bring over here," Shepherd said.

He noted that USDA allowed Russian bees to be imported to southern states under permit for breeding purposes about a decade ago. Australian packaged bees were allowed in because of a perceived shortage of bees to pollinate California's almond orchards.

Bees are not only essential to many California crops, but Shepherd said many in the Pacific Northwest depend on them for pollination, including apples, pears and cherries.