Honey Bees Return

Welcome Back!

You may have heard rumors of a great honey bee disappearance. It was often said in vague ominous tones that their disappearing was the canary in the coal mine showing the earth was about to die. More to the point without pollination the worlds crops could theoretically collapse. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery. Mystery or not it looks like the Bees are back.

AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.

Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut.

Too Many Bees! Its a crisis! So why the disappearance in the first place:

It is hard to pin down what has been causing honeybees to vanish. “People want it to be genetically modified crops, pollution, mobile-phone masts and pesticides,” says Dr Ratnieks,(a professor of apiculture at Sussex University) and it is “almost certainly none of those”. But he adds that such large losses to a population are not unusual in epidemics.

One explanation offered by both Dr Ratnieks and Mr Traynor is of a once-rare disease, possibly caused by the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), sweeping through colonies that have already been weakened by parasites such as Nosema ceranae, a parasitic fungus from Asia. Some have suggested that N. ceranae alone might be sufficient to cause CCD, as the fungus is believed to have been widespread since 2006, when CCD first became a problem. There is also Varroa, a parasitic mite, which has been another problem in bees for some time, and which might also transmit the IAPV. But there is almost certainly a further factor causing stress on the bees—a poor diet.

Basically bees were used to show environmental damage by humans desperate for a cause. As for their diet, apparently there may be a human factor involved, since bees were being used to pollinate crops, they were meeting less of their overall diet needs. The solution, bees may need supplements to balance out their diets. Healthier bees would then be less likely to get sick, which may have caused the collapse of colonies in the first place.

As for the threat of collapse:

Though the idea that there is a broader and costly pollination crisis under way is entrenched (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is spending $28m on a report investigating it), the true picture is cloudier. In 2006 America’s National Academy of Sciences released a report on the status of pollinators in North America that concluded “for most North American pollinator species, long-term population data are lacking and knowledge of their basic ecology is incomplete.” Simply put, nobody knows. As for the managed bees of America, Dr Ratnieks says that “the imminent death of the honeybee has been reported so many times, but it has not happened and is not likely to do so”.