Honeybees
Post
01/03/07, Michael McCarthy, Honey, who shrunk the bee population?, (Source).
22/03/07, Gunther Latsch, Are GM Crops Killing Bees?, (Source).
02/04/07, John Partridge, Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths, (Source).
18/04/07, Geoffrey Lean & Harriet Shawcross, Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?, (Source).
18/04/07, Holger Dambeck, Debunking a New Myth - Mobile Phones and Dying Bees, (Source).
24/04/07, Alexei Barrionuevo, Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons, (Source).
01/03/07, Michael McCarthy, Honey, who shrunk the bee population?, (Back).
Across America, millions of honey bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving beekeepers facing ruin and US agriculture under threat. And to date, no one knows why.
It has echoes of a murder mystery in polite society. There could hardly be a more sedate and unruffled world than beekeeping, but the beekeepers of the United States have suddenly encountered affliction, calamity and death on a massive scale. And they have not got a clue why it is happening.
Across the country, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, honey bee colonies have started to die off, abruptly and decisively. Millions of bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die (they cannot survive as a colony without the queen, who is always left behind).
Some beekeepers, especially those with big portable apiaries, or bee farms, which are used for large-scale pollination of fruit and vegetable crops, are facing commercial ruin - and there is a growing threat that America's agriculture may be struck a mortal blow by the loss of the pollinators. Yet scientists investigating the problem have no idea what is causing it.
The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.
It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a "tremendous pathogen load", the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.
The condition has been recorded in at least 24 states. It is having a major effect on the mobile apiaries which are transported across the US to pollinate large-scale crops, such as oranges in Florida or almonds in California. Some have lost up to 90 per cent of their bees.
A reliable estimate of the true extent of the problem will not be possible for another month or so, until winter comes to an end and the hibernating bee colonies in the northern American states wake up. But scientists are very worried, not least because, as there is no obvious cause for the disease as yet, there is no way of tackling it.
"We are extremely alarmed," said Diana Cox-Foster, the professor of Entomology at Penn States University and one of the leading members of a specially convened colony-collapse disorder working group.
"It is one of the most alarming insect diseases ever to hit the US and it has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry. In some ways it may be to the insect world what foot-and-mouth disease was to livestock in England."
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera, the honey bee, and the value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6bn (£8bn) annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops - a colony usually being the group of bees in a hive.
California's almond crop, which is the biggest in the world, stretching over more than half a million acres over the state's central valley, now draws more than half of the mobile bee colonies in America at pollinating time - which is now. Some big commercial beekeeping operations which have been hit hard by the current disease have had to import millions of bees from Australia to enable the almond trees to be pollinated.
Some of these mobile apiaries have been losing 60 or 70 per cent of their insects, or even more. "A honey producer in Pennsylvania doing local pollination, Larry Curtis, has gone from 1,000 bee colonies to fewer than eight," said Professor Cox-Foster. The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist.
One was that the bees left the hive and flew away to die elsewhere, over about a week. Another was that the few bees left inside the hive were carrying "a tremendous number of pathogens" - virtually every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees' immune systems were being suppressed in some way.
Professor Cox-Foster went on: "And another unusual symptom that we're are seeing, which makes this very different, is that normally when a bee colony gets weak and its numbers are decreasing, other neighbouring bees will come and steal the resources - they will take away the honey and the pollen.
"Other insects like to take advantage too, such as the wax moth or the hive beetle. But none of this is happening. These insects are not coming in.
"This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them."
The scientists involved in the working group were surveying the dead colonies but did not think the cause of the deaths was anything brought in by beekeepers, such as pesticides, she said.
Another of the researchers studying the collapses, Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the State of Pennsylvania, said it was still difficult to gauge their full extent. It was possible that the bees were fleeing the colonies because they sensed they themselves were diseased or affected in some way, he said. This behaviour has been recorded in other social insects, such as ants.
The introduction of the parasitic bee mite Varroa in 1987 and the invasion of the Africanised honey bee in 1990 have threatened honey bee colonies in the US and in other parts of the world, but although serious, they were easily comprehensible; colony collapse disorder is a deep mystery.
One theory is that the bees may be suffering from stress as beekeepers increasingly transport them around the country, the hives stacked on top of each other on the backs of trucks, to carry out pollination contracts in orchard after orchard, in different states.
Tens of billions of bees are now involved in this "migratory" pollination. An operator might go from pollinating oranges in Florida, to apples in Pennsylvania, to blueberries in Maine, then back to Massachusetts to pollinate cranberries.
The business is so big that pollination is replacing honey-making as the main money earner at the top end of the beekeeping market, not least because in recent years the US has been flooded with cheap honey imports, mainly from Argentina and China.
A typical bee colony, which might be anything from 15,000 to 30,000 bees, would be rented out to a fruit grower for about $135 - a price that is up from $55 only three years ago. To keep the bees' energy up while they are pollinating, beekeepers feed them protein supplements and syrup carried around in large tanks.
It is in these migratory colonies where the biggest losses have been seen. But the stress theory is as much speculation as anything else. At the moment, the disappearance of America's bees is as big a mystery as the disappearance of London's sparrows.
22/03/07, Gunther Latsch, Are GM Crops Killing Bees?, (Back).
A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.
Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist's trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that "the very existence of beekeeping is at stake."
The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.
As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.
Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers' association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When "bee populations disappear without a trace," says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because "most bees don't die in the beehive." There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.
Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that "a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar," is killing the bees.
Politicians, until now, have shown little concern for such warnings or the woes of beekeepers. Although apiarists have been given a chance to make their case -- for example in the run-up to the German cabinet's approval of a genetic engineering policy document by Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer in February -- their complaints are still largely ignored.
Even when beekeepers actually go to court, as they recently did in a joint effort with the German chapter of the organic farming organization Demeter International and other groups to oppose the use of genetically modified corn plants, they can only dream of the sort of media attention environmental organizations like Greenpeace attract with their protests at test sites.
But that could soon change. Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.
In an article in its business section in late February, the New York Times calculated the damage US agriculture would suffer if bees died out. Experts at Cornell University in upstate New York have estimated the value bees generate -- by pollinating fruit and vegetable plants, almond trees and animal feed like clover -- at more than $14 billion.
Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential "AIDS for the bee industry."
One thing is certain: Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that's left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found -- neither in nor anywhere close to the hives. Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Working Group, told The Independent that researchers were "extremely alarmed," adding that the crisis "has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry."
It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms "which does not seem to match anything in the literature."
In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed.
The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. "This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them," says Cox-Foster.
Walter Haefeker, the German beekeeping official, speculates that "besides a number of other factors," the fact that genetically modified, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the United States could be playing a role. The figure is much lower in Germany -- only 0.06 percent -- and most of that occurs in the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. Haefeker recently sent a researcher at the CCD Working Group some data from a bee study that he has long felt shows a possible connection between genetic engineering and diseases in bees.
The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.
According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."
Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period.
Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. "Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research," says the professor, "and those who are interested don't have the money."
02/04/07, John Partridge, Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths, (Back).
Die-offs raise chance devastating disease has migrated north from United States.
Honeybees in southwestern Ontario have been dropping like flies this winter -- potentially threatening honey production and some of the estimated $5-billion in fruit and other crops across Canada that depend on the insects for pollination.
There also is talk in beekeeping circles of suspiciously high honeybee losses in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
However, commercial beekeepers and government officials in Ontario are not yet ready to concede that the unusually high winter mortality rate -- nearly three times the average -- may stem from the same mysterious syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) that is devastating honeybee populations in 24 U.S. states, with some losses running as high as 90 per cent.
"We don't think it has anything to do with colony collapse disorder," said Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association and proprietor of Halsall's Honey in Greeley, near Ottawa.
"I don't know of anyone yet reporting [CCD] from Canada, but we are certainly watching it with concern," Heather Clay, the Calgary-based national co-ordinator of the Canadian Honey Council, said.
In the United States, honeybee pollination activities are estimated to add about $15-billion (U.S.) a year in value to crops, especially almonds, berries and other fruits and vegetables, and expert witnesses at a congressional committee hearing in Washington last Thursday warned that lower crop yields and higher prices could result if a way to combat CCD is not found.
"It's an absolute catastrophe in the U.S.," said Peter Kevan, a professor who specializes in bees in the department of environmental biology at Ontario's Guelph University.
Among the most northerly affected states are Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has estimated that the value of honeybee pollination in this country is more than $1-billion a year and represents 21 per cent of the value of about 26 selected crops.
Winter losses of honeybees in Ontario have averaged about 18 per cent a year over the past 10 to 15 years, according to provincial apiarist Douglas McRory of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
However, as they start preparing their colonies for the 2007 honey and pollination season, commercial beekeepers in an area of southwestern Ontario have been reporting "exceptional" mortality levels.
"Most of them are about 50 per cent, but there's one person at about 90 per cent," Mr. McRory said when reached at his office in Guelph, west of Toronto.
"I personally don't think that we have what they're seeing in the States," Mr. McRory said. "There, they think it's the result of several things that aren't happening here."
He cited U.S. findings of the buildup of residues in honeycombs of certain chemicals used by U.S. beekeepers that have not been used as long or as widely in Canada, along with predations by so-called small hive beetles, which are not yet found in this country.
As well, U.S. beekeepers truck hundreds of thousands of colonies from state to state as particular crops require pollination. This makes for a much more intense and stressful life than most Ontario honeybees endure. "We move ours maybe once [a season], out east to pollinate blueberries, and then we bring them back," Mr. McRory said.
Instead, he and other experts are pointing to unusual weather patterns that led to reduced production of late-season honey on which the bees and their offspring live during the winter, and to the fact that frigid winter temperatures did not arrive until mid-January, the start of a critical period for bee reproduction.
The bees form clusters inside the hives to maintain the temperature at 21 degrees during most of the winter, but the lengthening of the days after Jan. 15 is a signal for them to raise this to the 35 degrees their nascent offspring or "brood" require. "Once they do that, they won't leave [the cluster] and they can literally starve to death even with honey on the sides of the hive," Mr. McRory said.
Meanwhile, Tim Wendell, president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association, figures several unusually high losses that he has heard about in the province this year -- 60 per cent in one case, 80 per cent in another --may have more to do with poor management than anything else.
Still, Mr. Wendell also said he has not yet heard from a lot of other beekeepers in the province, and nobody appears willing to rule out the possibility that CCD may, in fact, have spread to Canada.
"I think it is certainly safe to say that we have suspicious losses across Canada, but at the moment, nobody is actually attributing them officially to colony collapse disorder," Prof. Kevan said yesterday. "The jury is still out."
Honeybee blight
Beekeepers in Ontario are reporting about three times the average mortality rate for honeybees. Such high winter death rates raise the possibility that a syndrome devastating bee populations in the United States and Europe, called colony collapse disorder, has moved into Canada. Canadian officials are unwilling to say the death rate is a result of CCD. They are pointing to the unusual winter weather instead. The cause of CCD, which can affect an entire beehive or colony, remains unknown.
Western honeybee
There are only seven species of honeybee, all of which produce and store liquefied sugar in the form of honey and construct colonial nests out of wax secreted by the workers in the colony. The Western honeybee is the subspecies that has been domesticated for commercial production in North America.
What's causing colony collapse?
The cause of the syndrome is not yet well understood and its existence remains disputed. Theories include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified crops.
PATHOGENS
Varroa mites prey on developing bees by infecting the chambers where larvae are developing and feeding on their blood. However, Canadian authorities do not believe they are the cause of the recent die-offs.
PESTICIDES
A number of destroyed colonies in the U.S. have been found to have build-ups of certain nicotine-based insecticides. However, these chemicals are not in wide use in Canada and are not thought to be the cause of Canadian deaths.
WEATHER
The relatively warm temperatures in January may have wreaked havoc with the bees' finely tuned breeding cycle, causing them to accelerate the development of larvae just before dangerously cold temperatures struck.
TRANSPORTATION
U.S. commercial beekeepers truck colonies between states as seasonal crops require pollination and this is known to cause considerable stress to the bees. In Canada, this practice is limited by the shorter growing season.
Four Canadian provinces have reported sudden, massive and unexplained die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies. Spokespeople for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs say they are not convinced the die-offs in Canada are happening for the same reasons they are happening in the United States and are reluctant to apply the term colony collapse disorder to the Canadian cases.
18/04/07, Geoffrey Lean & Harriet Shawcross, Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?, (Back).
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees.
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".
No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.
German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."
The case against handsets
Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.
Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.
Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.
18/04/07, Holger Dambeck, Debunking a New Myth - Mobile Phones and Dying Bees, (Back).
Bee colonies have been dying in Europe and America for years. Scientists have studied the usual suspects -- climate change, genetic engineering -- but a new theory is even more bizarre. Maybe mobile phones are to blame.
Is your phone fatally confusing to bees?
Journalists as well as technophobes have wondered for years if there was something wrong with mobile phones. A nagging suspicion that they just can't be healthy has twisted more than one finding about their effects into popular myths. Last January, for example, a German newspaper cited a new study in a breathless article on the supposed higher risk of brain tumors from mobile-phone use -- something the authors of the study never found.
Now the British Independent has reported -- to scandalous effect -- about mobile-phone radiation and its effect on bees. "A limited study ... has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby," wrote The Independent on Saturday, suggesting that mobile phones may therefore be responsible -- at least a little -- for the massive death of bees.
No one doubts the phenomenon: Bees really are dying en masse. Populations have collapsed by up to 70 percent in the last several months on the American east coast. Beekeepers and scientists even have a name for the phenomenon -- "Colony Collapse Disorder." The German Beekeepers Association (Berufs und Erwerbs Imkerbunds, or DBIB) estimates the collapse across Germany at about 25 percent. But why is it happening? The Independent based its mobile-phone theory on a paper by German researchers at the University of Koblenz-Landau.
Physicist Jochen Kuhn and his colleagues in Landau have studied the influence of high-frequency radiation on bee populations for years. In two pilot studies -- the latest one came out in 2006 -- the researchers just wanted to learn if there was any potentially bad effect at all. They arrived at a cautious conclusion, namely that bees exposed to strong radiation had a harder time flying back to their hives than unexposed bees. "Honeycomb area and mass showed a disadvantageous trend for the radiated bees," said Kuhn in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, "with no statistical significance."
Mobile vs. cordless phones
High-frequency radiation? Electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile-phone towers are high-frequency radiation. But that alone can't explain the bee deaths, because Kuhn's team used a base station for DECT telephones as a radiation source -- and DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) signals are used for cordless phones at home, not for mobile phones. "DECT and GSM (for mobile phones) use a number of different frequencies and a number of different modulation- and pulse-processes," Kuhn says. "We still don't know whether these (signals) have even a potential effect on bees. And, if they do, we don't know which ones."
Other signal protocols like GSM and UMTS still have to be studied. DECT was just easy to use for the pilot studies because a broadcast station was easy to find and inexpensive. "Our intention wasn't to explain the massive bee deaths, which in any case started after our research started," says Kuhn. The pilot studies only looked at the fundamental question of whether high-frequency fields could influence bees' learning behavior.
Even the setup of the experiment should discourage hasty conclusions: The experimental DECT base station was placed in the beehive, and the insects received an extreme dose of radiation that would be nearly impossible to find in nature. "We started with maximum strength to see if there would be any effect at all," said Kuhn.
The debate over the causes of bee deaths on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on a number of suspects:
The American "Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group" has discussed something called "the AIDS of the bee industry." But it's not clear to anyone whether the busy insects might be suffering from a new, unknown sexual infection or a known one.
Bacteria from genetically modified crops could affect the bees' intestinal surfaces and make them vulnerable, according to Hans Hinrich Kaatz from the University of Halle, in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Manfred Hederer, President of the German Beekeepers Association, told SPIEGEL that he believed the bees were dying from "some kind of poison, a certain active agent, which we have not discovered."
Climate change is also on the list. Global warming has changed growth and blossoming periods of plants in many parts of the world, which in turn can influence animals.
And now "mobile phone radiation" should be added to the list, or -- as The Scotsman put it over the weekend -- "emissions from mobile phone towers."
One last theory: Overcultivation
Jürgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of Würzburg, is sceptical about the mobile-phone theory but still calls it "worth researching." It's known, he says, that honeybees are "react with extreme sensitivity to changes in the earth's magnetic field." Tautz plans to let a working group he's organized study the question of whether some unpleasant interaction might exist between radio networks and honeycombs.
But bees are in danger, Tautz said to SPIEGEL ONLINE. Their range of food has narrowed; in the meantime the climate has warmed and genetically modified foods have become part of their daily environment. Mobile-phone radiation could be one of the many new stress factors that bees have to contend with, he says. "But I'm sure mobile-phone signals would have no effect on a healthy, unstressed bee population."
But it's still a matter of debate whether the bees are healthy and unstressed. Professional beekeepers have warned for years about rising problems in their colonies:
Varroa mite disease, from Asia, with the discouraging Latin name varroa destructor, has threatened European bee populations for over 20 years.
Because farmers spray wildflowers as weeds and prefer monoculture -- planting the same crops year after year on a given plot of land -- the bees' range of nutritional food has shrunk.
Beekeepers also list the introduction of so-called green genetic engineering as a potential problem. But the actual acreage of these open-air experiments in Germany represents less than 0.1 percent of the nation's total cultivated area.
Another explanation -- one not unknown among apiarists -- may be even more important. Tautz believes that intensive beekeeping may itself be one of the main problems. Raising dense colonies of bees narrows the genetic pool for a population, and less genetic variation weakens any species. In Turkey, where bees haven't been cultivated as intensely as they have in Germany, for example, mass deaths like the ones observed now in Europe and the United States would be unimaginable.
24/04/07, Alexei Barrionuevo, Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons, (Back).
BELTSVILLE, Md., April 23 — What is happening to the bees?
SUSPECTS The volume of theories to explain the collapse of honeybee populations “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Penn State.
More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.
As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.
The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome.
“Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.”
Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.
About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers.
“There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said.
The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis.
So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses.
Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.
“That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials.
“There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.”
So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.
Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.
Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.
So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.
The scientists say that definitive answers for the colony collapses could be months away. But recent advances in biology and genetic sequencing are speeding the search.
Computers can decipher information from DNA and match pieces of genetic code with particular organisms. Luckily, a project to sequence some 11,000 genes of the honeybee was completed late last year at Baylor University, giving scientists a huge head start on identifying any unknown pathogens in the bee tissue.
“Otherwise, we would be looking for the needle in the haystack,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Large bee losses are not unheard of. They have been reported at several points in the past century. But researchers think they are dealing with something new — or at least with something previously unidentified.
“There could be a number of factors that are weakening the bees or speeding up things that shorten their lives,” said Dr. W. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University. “The answer may already be with us.”
Scientists first learned of the bee disappearances in November, when David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper, told Dr. Cox-Foster that more than 50 percent of his bee colonies had collapsed in Florida, where he had taken them for the winter.
Dr. Cox-Foster, a 20-year veteran of studying bees, soon teamed with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania apiary inspector, to look into the losses.
In December, she approached W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University, about doing genetic sequencing of tissue from bees in the colonies that experienced losses. The laboratory uses a recently developed technique for reading and amplifying short sequences of DNA that has revolutionized the science. Dr. Lipkin, who typically works on human diseases, agreed to do the analysis, despite not knowing who would ultimately pay for it. His laboratory is known for its work in finding the West Nile disease in the United States.
Dr. Cox-Foster ultimately sent samples of bee tissue to researchers at Columbia, to the Agriculture Department laboratory in Maryland, and to Gene Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. Fortuitously, she had frozen bee samples from healthy colonies dating to 2004 to use for comparison.
After receiving the first bee samples from Dr. Cox-Foster on March 6, Dr. Lipkin’s team amplified the genetic material and started sequencing to separate virus, fungus and parasite DNA from bee DNA.
“This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” Dr. Lipkin said. “It is painstaking, gumshoe detective work.”
Dr. Lipkin sent his first set of results to Dr. Cox-Foster, showing that several unknown micro-organisms were present in the bees from collapsing colonies. Meanwhile, Mr. vanEngelsdorp and researchers at the Agriculture Department lab here began an autopsy of bees from collapsing colonies in California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania to search for any known bee pathogens.
At the University of Illinois, using knowledge gained from the sequencing of the bee genome, Dr. Robinson’s team will try to find which genes in the collapsing colonies are particularly active, perhaps indicating stress from exposure to a toxin or pathogen.
The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse.
Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees.
“This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical.”
Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious.
Chris Mullin, a Pennsylvania State University professor and insect toxicologist, recently sent a set of samples to a federal laboratory in Raleigh, N.C., that will screen for 117 chemicals. Of greatest interest are the “systemic” chemicals that are able to pass through a plant’s circulatory system and move to the new leaves or the flowers, where they would come in contact with bees.
One such group of compounds is called neonicotinoids, commonly used pesticides that are used to treat corn and other seeds against pests. One of the neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, is commonly used in Europe and the United States to treat seeds, to protect residential foundations against termites and to help keep golf courses and home lawns green.
In the late 1990s, French beekeepers reported large losses of their bees and complained about the use of imidacloprid, sold under the brand name Gaucho. The chemical, while not killing the bees outright, was causing them to be disoriented and stay away from their hives, leading them to die of exposure to the cold, French researchers later found. The beekeepers labeled the syndrome “mad bee disease.”
The French government banned the pesticide in 1999 for use on sunflowers, and later for corn, despite protests by the German chemical giant Bayer, which has said its internal research showed the pesticide was not toxic to bees. Subsequent studies by independent French researchers have disagreed with Bayer. Alison Chalmers, an eco-toxicologist for Bayer CropScience, said at the meeting today that bee colonies had not recovered in France as beekeepers had expected. “These chemicals are not being used anymore,” she said of imidacloprid, “so they certainly were not the only cause.”
Among the pesticides being tested in the American bee investigation, the neonicotinoids group “is the number-one suspect,” Dr. Mullin said. He hoped results of the toxicology screening will be ready within a month.
(Back)
22/03/07, Gunther Latsch, Are GM Crops Killing Bees?, (Source).
02/04/07, John Partridge, Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths, (Source).
18/04/07, Geoffrey Lean & Harriet Shawcross, Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?, (Source).
18/04/07, Holger Dambeck, Debunking a New Myth - Mobile Phones and Dying Bees, (Source).
24/04/07, Alexei Barrionuevo, Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons, (Source).
01/03/07, Michael McCarthy, Honey, who shrunk the bee population?, (Back).
Across America, millions of honey bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving beekeepers facing ruin and US agriculture under threat. And to date, no one knows why.
It has echoes of a murder mystery in polite society. There could hardly be a more sedate and unruffled world than beekeeping, but the beekeepers of the United States have suddenly encountered affliction, calamity and death on a massive scale. And they have not got a clue why it is happening.
Across the country, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, honey bee colonies have started to die off, abruptly and decisively. Millions of bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die (they cannot survive as a colony without the queen, who is always left behind).
Some beekeepers, especially those with big portable apiaries, or bee farms, which are used for large-scale pollination of fruit and vegetable crops, are facing commercial ruin - and there is a growing threat that America's agriculture may be struck a mortal blow by the loss of the pollinators. Yet scientists investigating the problem have no idea what is causing it.
The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.
It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a "tremendous pathogen load", the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.
The condition has been recorded in at least 24 states. It is having a major effect on the mobile apiaries which are transported across the US to pollinate large-scale crops, such as oranges in Florida or almonds in California. Some have lost up to 90 per cent of their bees.
A reliable estimate of the true extent of the problem will not be possible for another month or so, until winter comes to an end and the hibernating bee colonies in the northern American states wake up. But scientists are very worried, not least because, as there is no obvious cause for the disease as yet, there is no way of tackling it.
"We are extremely alarmed," said Diana Cox-Foster, the professor of Entomology at Penn States University and one of the leading members of a specially convened colony-collapse disorder working group.
"It is one of the most alarming insect diseases ever to hit the US and it has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry. In some ways it may be to the insect world what foot-and-mouth disease was to livestock in England."
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera, the honey bee, and the value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6bn (£8bn) annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops - a colony usually being the group of bees in a hive.
California's almond crop, which is the biggest in the world, stretching over more than half a million acres over the state's central valley, now draws more than half of the mobile bee colonies in America at pollinating time - which is now. Some big commercial beekeeping operations which have been hit hard by the current disease have had to import millions of bees from Australia to enable the almond trees to be pollinated.
Some of these mobile apiaries have been losing 60 or 70 per cent of their insects, or even more. "A honey producer in Pennsylvania doing local pollination, Larry Curtis, has gone from 1,000 bee colonies to fewer than eight," said Professor Cox-Foster. The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist.
One was that the bees left the hive and flew away to die elsewhere, over about a week. Another was that the few bees left inside the hive were carrying "a tremendous number of pathogens" - virtually every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees' immune systems were being suppressed in some way.
Professor Cox-Foster went on: "And another unusual symptom that we're are seeing, which makes this very different, is that normally when a bee colony gets weak and its numbers are decreasing, other neighbouring bees will come and steal the resources - they will take away the honey and the pollen.
"Other insects like to take advantage too, such as the wax moth or the hive beetle. But none of this is happening. These insects are not coming in.
"This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them."
The scientists involved in the working group were surveying the dead colonies but did not think the cause of the deaths was anything brought in by beekeepers, such as pesticides, she said.
Another of the researchers studying the collapses, Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the State of Pennsylvania, said it was still difficult to gauge their full extent. It was possible that the bees were fleeing the colonies because they sensed they themselves were diseased or affected in some way, he said. This behaviour has been recorded in other social insects, such as ants.
The introduction of the parasitic bee mite Varroa in 1987 and the invasion of the Africanised honey bee in 1990 have threatened honey bee colonies in the US and in other parts of the world, but although serious, they were easily comprehensible; colony collapse disorder is a deep mystery.
One theory is that the bees may be suffering from stress as beekeepers increasingly transport them around the country, the hives stacked on top of each other on the backs of trucks, to carry out pollination contracts in orchard after orchard, in different states.
Tens of billions of bees are now involved in this "migratory" pollination. An operator might go from pollinating oranges in Florida, to apples in Pennsylvania, to blueberries in Maine, then back to Massachusetts to pollinate cranberries.
The business is so big that pollination is replacing honey-making as the main money earner at the top end of the beekeeping market, not least because in recent years the US has been flooded with cheap honey imports, mainly from Argentina and China.
A typical bee colony, which might be anything from 15,000 to 30,000 bees, would be rented out to a fruit grower for about $135 - a price that is up from $55 only three years ago. To keep the bees' energy up while they are pollinating, beekeepers feed them protein supplements and syrup carried around in large tanks.
It is in these migratory colonies where the biggest losses have been seen. But the stress theory is as much speculation as anything else. At the moment, the disappearance of America's bees is as big a mystery as the disappearance of London's sparrows.
22/03/07, Gunther Latsch, Are GM Crops Killing Bees?, (Back).
A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.
Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist's trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that "the very existence of beekeeping is at stake."
The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.
As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.
Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers' association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When "bee populations disappear without a trace," says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because "most bees don't die in the beehive." There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.
Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that "a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar," is killing the bees.
Politicians, until now, have shown little concern for such warnings or the woes of beekeepers. Although apiarists have been given a chance to make their case -- for example in the run-up to the German cabinet's approval of a genetic engineering policy document by Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer in February -- their complaints are still largely ignored.
Even when beekeepers actually go to court, as they recently did in a joint effort with the German chapter of the organic farming organization Demeter International and other groups to oppose the use of genetically modified corn plants, they can only dream of the sort of media attention environmental organizations like Greenpeace attract with their protests at test sites.
But that could soon change. Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.
In an article in its business section in late February, the New York Times calculated the damage US agriculture would suffer if bees died out. Experts at Cornell University in upstate New York have estimated the value bees generate -- by pollinating fruit and vegetable plants, almond trees and animal feed like clover -- at more than $14 billion.
Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential "AIDS for the bee industry."
One thing is certain: Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that's left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found -- neither in nor anywhere close to the hives. Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Working Group, told The Independent that researchers were "extremely alarmed," adding that the crisis "has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry."
It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms "which does not seem to match anything in the literature."
In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed.
The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. "This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them," says Cox-Foster.
Walter Haefeker, the German beekeeping official, speculates that "besides a number of other factors," the fact that genetically modified, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the United States could be playing a role. The figure is much lower in Germany -- only 0.06 percent -- and most of that occurs in the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. Haefeker recently sent a researcher at the CCD Working Group some data from a bee study that he has long felt shows a possible connection between genetic engineering and diseases in bees.
The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.
According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."
Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period.
Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. "Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research," says the professor, "and those who are interested don't have the money."
02/04/07, John Partridge, Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths, (Back).
Die-offs raise chance devastating disease has migrated north from United States.
Honeybees in southwestern Ontario have been dropping like flies this winter -- potentially threatening honey production and some of the estimated $5-billion in fruit and other crops across Canada that depend on the insects for pollination.
There also is talk in beekeeping circles of suspiciously high honeybee losses in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
However, commercial beekeepers and government officials in Ontario are not yet ready to concede that the unusually high winter mortality rate -- nearly three times the average -- may stem from the same mysterious syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) that is devastating honeybee populations in 24 U.S. states, with some losses running as high as 90 per cent.
"We don't think it has anything to do with colony collapse disorder," said Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association and proprietor of Halsall's Honey in Greeley, near Ottawa.
"I don't know of anyone yet reporting [CCD] from Canada, but we are certainly watching it with concern," Heather Clay, the Calgary-based national co-ordinator of the Canadian Honey Council, said.
In the United States, honeybee pollination activities are estimated to add about $15-billion (U.S.) a year in value to crops, especially almonds, berries and other fruits and vegetables, and expert witnesses at a congressional committee hearing in Washington last Thursday warned that lower crop yields and higher prices could result if a way to combat CCD is not found.
"It's an absolute catastrophe in the U.S.," said Peter Kevan, a professor who specializes in bees in the department of environmental biology at Ontario's Guelph University.
Among the most northerly affected states are Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has estimated that the value of honeybee pollination in this country is more than $1-billion a year and represents 21 per cent of the value of about 26 selected crops.
Winter losses of honeybees in Ontario have averaged about 18 per cent a year over the past 10 to 15 years, according to provincial apiarist Douglas McRory of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
However, as they start preparing their colonies for the 2007 honey and pollination season, commercial beekeepers in an area of southwestern Ontario have been reporting "exceptional" mortality levels.
"Most of them are about 50 per cent, but there's one person at about 90 per cent," Mr. McRory said when reached at his office in Guelph, west of Toronto.
"I personally don't think that we have what they're seeing in the States," Mr. McRory said. "There, they think it's the result of several things that aren't happening here."
He cited U.S. findings of the buildup of residues in honeycombs of certain chemicals used by U.S. beekeepers that have not been used as long or as widely in Canada, along with predations by so-called small hive beetles, which are not yet found in this country.
As well, U.S. beekeepers truck hundreds of thousands of colonies from state to state as particular crops require pollination. This makes for a much more intense and stressful life than most Ontario honeybees endure. "We move ours maybe once [a season], out east to pollinate blueberries, and then we bring them back," Mr. McRory said.
Instead, he and other experts are pointing to unusual weather patterns that led to reduced production of late-season honey on which the bees and their offspring live during the winter, and to the fact that frigid winter temperatures did not arrive until mid-January, the start of a critical period for bee reproduction.
The bees form clusters inside the hives to maintain the temperature at 21 degrees during most of the winter, but the lengthening of the days after Jan. 15 is a signal for them to raise this to the 35 degrees their nascent offspring or "brood" require. "Once they do that, they won't leave [the cluster] and they can literally starve to death even with honey on the sides of the hive," Mr. McRory said.
Meanwhile, Tim Wendell, president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association, figures several unusually high losses that he has heard about in the province this year -- 60 per cent in one case, 80 per cent in another --may have more to do with poor management than anything else.
Still, Mr. Wendell also said he has not yet heard from a lot of other beekeepers in the province, and nobody appears willing to rule out the possibility that CCD may, in fact, have spread to Canada.
"I think it is certainly safe to say that we have suspicious losses across Canada, but at the moment, nobody is actually attributing them officially to colony collapse disorder," Prof. Kevan said yesterday. "The jury is still out."
Honeybee blight
Beekeepers in Ontario are reporting about three times the average mortality rate for honeybees. Such high winter death rates raise the possibility that a syndrome devastating bee populations in the United States and Europe, called colony collapse disorder, has moved into Canada. Canadian officials are unwilling to say the death rate is a result of CCD. They are pointing to the unusual winter weather instead. The cause of CCD, which can affect an entire beehive or colony, remains unknown.
Western honeybee
There are only seven species of honeybee, all of which produce and store liquefied sugar in the form of honey and construct colonial nests out of wax secreted by the workers in the colony. The Western honeybee is the subspecies that has been domesticated for commercial production in North America.
What's causing colony collapse?
The cause of the syndrome is not yet well understood and its existence remains disputed. Theories include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified crops.
PATHOGENS
Varroa mites prey on developing bees by infecting the chambers where larvae are developing and feeding on their blood. However, Canadian authorities do not believe they are the cause of the recent die-offs.
PESTICIDES
A number of destroyed colonies in the U.S. have been found to have build-ups of certain nicotine-based insecticides. However, these chemicals are not in wide use in Canada and are not thought to be the cause of Canadian deaths.
WEATHER
The relatively warm temperatures in January may have wreaked havoc with the bees' finely tuned breeding cycle, causing them to accelerate the development of larvae just before dangerously cold temperatures struck.
TRANSPORTATION
U.S. commercial beekeepers truck colonies between states as seasonal crops require pollination and this is known to cause considerable stress to the bees. In Canada, this practice is limited by the shorter growing season.
Four Canadian provinces have reported sudden, massive and unexplained die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies. Spokespeople for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs say they are not convinced the die-offs in Canada are happening for the same reasons they are happening in the United States and are reluctant to apply the term colony collapse disorder to the Canadian cases.
18/04/07, Geoffrey Lean & Harriet Shawcross, Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?, (Back).
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees.
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".
No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.
German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."
The case against handsets
Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.
Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.
Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.
18/04/07, Holger Dambeck, Debunking a New Myth - Mobile Phones and Dying Bees, (Back).
Bee colonies have been dying in Europe and America for years. Scientists have studied the usual suspects -- climate change, genetic engineering -- but a new theory is even more bizarre. Maybe mobile phones are to blame.
Is your phone fatally confusing to bees?
Journalists as well as technophobes have wondered for years if there was something wrong with mobile phones. A nagging suspicion that they just can't be healthy has twisted more than one finding about their effects into popular myths. Last January, for example, a German newspaper cited a new study in a breathless article on the supposed higher risk of brain tumors from mobile-phone use -- something the authors of the study never found.
Now the British Independent has reported -- to scandalous effect -- about mobile-phone radiation and its effect on bees. "A limited study ... has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby," wrote The Independent on Saturday, suggesting that mobile phones may therefore be responsible -- at least a little -- for the massive death of bees.
No one doubts the phenomenon: Bees really are dying en masse. Populations have collapsed by up to 70 percent in the last several months on the American east coast. Beekeepers and scientists even have a name for the phenomenon -- "Colony Collapse Disorder." The German Beekeepers Association (Berufs und Erwerbs Imkerbunds, or DBIB) estimates the collapse across Germany at about 25 percent. But why is it happening? The Independent based its mobile-phone theory on a paper by German researchers at the University of Koblenz-Landau.
Physicist Jochen Kuhn and his colleagues in Landau have studied the influence of high-frequency radiation on bee populations for years. In two pilot studies -- the latest one came out in 2006 -- the researchers just wanted to learn if there was any potentially bad effect at all. They arrived at a cautious conclusion, namely that bees exposed to strong radiation had a harder time flying back to their hives than unexposed bees. "Honeycomb area and mass showed a disadvantageous trend for the radiated bees," said Kuhn in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, "with no statistical significance."
Mobile vs. cordless phones
High-frequency radiation? Electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile-phone towers are high-frequency radiation. But that alone can't explain the bee deaths, because Kuhn's team used a base station for DECT telephones as a radiation source -- and DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) signals are used for cordless phones at home, not for mobile phones. "DECT and GSM (for mobile phones) use a number of different frequencies and a number of different modulation- and pulse-processes," Kuhn says. "We still don't know whether these (signals) have even a potential effect on bees. And, if they do, we don't know which ones."
Other signal protocols like GSM and UMTS still have to be studied. DECT was just easy to use for the pilot studies because a broadcast station was easy to find and inexpensive. "Our intention wasn't to explain the massive bee deaths, which in any case started after our research started," says Kuhn. The pilot studies only looked at the fundamental question of whether high-frequency fields could influence bees' learning behavior.
Even the setup of the experiment should discourage hasty conclusions: The experimental DECT base station was placed in the beehive, and the insects received an extreme dose of radiation that would be nearly impossible to find in nature. "We started with maximum strength to see if there would be any effect at all," said Kuhn.
The debate over the causes of bee deaths on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on a number of suspects:
The American "Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group" has discussed something called "the AIDS of the bee industry." But it's not clear to anyone whether the busy insects might be suffering from a new, unknown sexual infection or a known one.
Bacteria from genetically modified crops could affect the bees' intestinal surfaces and make them vulnerable, according to Hans Hinrich Kaatz from the University of Halle, in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Manfred Hederer, President of the German Beekeepers Association, told SPIEGEL that he believed the bees were dying from "some kind of poison, a certain active agent, which we have not discovered."
Climate change is also on the list. Global warming has changed growth and blossoming periods of plants in many parts of the world, which in turn can influence animals.
And now "mobile phone radiation" should be added to the list, or -- as The Scotsman put it over the weekend -- "emissions from mobile phone towers."
One last theory: Overcultivation
Jürgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of Würzburg, is sceptical about the mobile-phone theory but still calls it "worth researching." It's known, he says, that honeybees are "react with extreme sensitivity to changes in the earth's magnetic field." Tautz plans to let a working group he's organized study the question of whether some unpleasant interaction might exist between radio networks and honeycombs.
But bees are in danger, Tautz said to SPIEGEL ONLINE. Their range of food has narrowed; in the meantime the climate has warmed and genetically modified foods have become part of their daily environment. Mobile-phone radiation could be one of the many new stress factors that bees have to contend with, he says. "But I'm sure mobile-phone signals would have no effect on a healthy, unstressed bee population."
But it's still a matter of debate whether the bees are healthy and unstressed. Professional beekeepers have warned for years about rising problems in their colonies:
Varroa mite disease, from Asia, with the discouraging Latin name varroa destructor, has threatened European bee populations for over 20 years.
Because farmers spray wildflowers as weeds and prefer monoculture -- planting the same crops year after year on a given plot of land -- the bees' range of nutritional food has shrunk.
Beekeepers also list the introduction of so-called green genetic engineering as a potential problem. But the actual acreage of these open-air experiments in Germany represents less than 0.1 percent of the nation's total cultivated area.
Another explanation -- one not unknown among apiarists -- may be even more important. Tautz believes that intensive beekeeping may itself be one of the main problems. Raising dense colonies of bees narrows the genetic pool for a population, and less genetic variation weakens any species. In Turkey, where bees haven't been cultivated as intensely as they have in Germany, for example, mass deaths like the ones observed now in Europe and the United States would be unimaginable.
24/04/07, Alexei Barrionuevo, Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons, (Back).
BELTSVILLE, Md., April 23 — What is happening to the bees?
SUSPECTS The volume of theories to explain the collapse of honeybee populations “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Penn State.
More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.
As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.
The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome.
“Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.”
Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.
About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers.
“There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said.
The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis.
So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses.
Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.
“That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials.
“There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.”
So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.
Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.
Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.
So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.
The scientists say that definitive answers for the colony collapses could be months away. But recent advances in biology and genetic sequencing are speeding the search.
Computers can decipher information from DNA and match pieces of genetic code with particular organisms. Luckily, a project to sequence some 11,000 genes of the honeybee was completed late last year at Baylor University, giving scientists a huge head start on identifying any unknown pathogens in the bee tissue.
“Otherwise, we would be looking for the needle in the haystack,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Large bee losses are not unheard of. They have been reported at several points in the past century. But researchers think they are dealing with something new — or at least with something previously unidentified.
“There could be a number of factors that are weakening the bees or speeding up things that shorten their lives,” said Dr. W. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University. “The answer may already be with us.”
Scientists first learned of the bee disappearances in November, when David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper, told Dr. Cox-Foster that more than 50 percent of his bee colonies had collapsed in Florida, where he had taken them for the winter.
Dr. Cox-Foster, a 20-year veteran of studying bees, soon teamed with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania apiary inspector, to look into the losses.
In December, she approached W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University, about doing genetic sequencing of tissue from bees in the colonies that experienced losses. The laboratory uses a recently developed technique for reading and amplifying short sequences of DNA that has revolutionized the science. Dr. Lipkin, who typically works on human diseases, agreed to do the analysis, despite not knowing who would ultimately pay for it. His laboratory is known for its work in finding the West Nile disease in the United States.
Dr. Cox-Foster ultimately sent samples of bee tissue to researchers at Columbia, to the Agriculture Department laboratory in Maryland, and to Gene Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. Fortuitously, she had frozen bee samples from healthy colonies dating to 2004 to use for comparison.
After receiving the first bee samples from Dr. Cox-Foster on March 6, Dr. Lipkin’s team amplified the genetic material and started sequencing to separate virus, fungus and parasite DNA from bee DNA.
“This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” Dr. Lipkin said. “It is painstaking, gumshoe detective work.”
Dr. Lipkin sent his first set of results to Dr. Cox-Foster, showing that several unknown micro-organisms were present in the bees from collapsing colonies. Meanwhile, Mr. vanEngelsdorp and researchers at the Agriculture Department lab here began an autopsy of bees from collapsing colonies in California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania to search for any known bee pathogens.
At the University of Illinois, using knowledge gained from the sequencing of the bee genome, Dr. Robinson’s team will try to find which genes in the collapsing colonies are particularly active, perhaps indicating stress from exposure to a toxin or pathogen.
The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse.
Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees.
“This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical.”
Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious.
Chris Mullin, a Pennsylvania State University professor and insect toxicologist, recently sent a set of samples to a federal laboratory in Raleigh, N.C., that will screen for 117 chemicals. Of greatest interest are the “systemic” chemicals that are able to pass through a plant’s circulatory system and move to the new leaves or the flowers, where they would come in contact with bees.
One such group of compounds is called neonicotinoids, commonly used pesticides that are used to treat corn and other seeds against pests. One of the neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, is commonly used in Europe and the United States to treat seeds, to protect residential foundations against termites and to help keep golf courses and home lawns green.
In the late 1990s, French beekeepers reported large losses of their bees and complained about the use of imidacloprid, sold under the brand name Gaucho. The chemical, while not killing the bees outright, was causing them to be disoriented and stay away from their hives, leading them to die of exposure to the cold, French researchers later found. The beekeepers labeled the syndrome “mad bee disease.”
The French government banned the pesticide in 1999 for use on sunflowers, and later for corn, despite protests by the German chemical giant Bayer, which has said its internal research showed the pesticide was not toxic to bees. Subsequent studies by independent French researchers have disagreed with Bayer. Alison Chalmers, an eco-toxicologist for Bayer CropScience, said at the meeting today that bee colonies had not recovered in France as beekeepers had expected. “These chemicals are not being used anymore,” she said of imidacloprid, “so they certainly were not the only cause.”
Among the pesticides being tested in the American bee investigation, the neonicotinoids group “is the number-one suspect,” Dr. Mullin said. He hoped results of the toxicology screening will be ready within a month.
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