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A PARASITE DEVASTATES BEES, AND FARMERS ARE WORRIED
By Iver Peterson
New York Times
May 2, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/nyregion/02hives.html

FAIRFIELD, N.J. - "Do you want to see a ghost town?" Joe Linelho asked. He
pulled the lid off one of his beehives and worked one of the honey frames
loose with a small blade. Not a bee responded to the intrusion. The hundreds
of little hexagonal cells, where young bees should be incubating, were
empty, and at the center hung a cluster of bees, all dead.

Mr. Linelho, a bee hobbyist, began the winter with 40 hives, each with a
queen and 50,000 to 70,000 honeybees. In the spring, when fruit growers rent
hives to pollinate their crops, he had just 20 thriving hives left, with the
rest as dead as the one he had just opened, or nearly so, with only a few
bees surviving.

Beekeepers across the country have found losses in similar or worse
proportions, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, with
the West Coast hit the hardest. And while it is normal for a small number of
domestic bees to die over the winter, an Asian parasite, the Varroa mite, is
blamed for much of the bee death.

"This is a national problem," said Kevin Hackett, national program leader
for bees and pollination at the Agriculture Department's Research Service.
"We've lost at least half of our hives, and 70 percent in some areas. With a
couple of million hives in the U.S., and you reduce that population by half,
that's very serious."

The problem is not just about honey. Bees are needed to pollinate $15
billion worth of agricultural products a year. Growers report increasing
competition, and rising prices, for the hives that are moved around the
country in the spring, from the almonds in California in February to the
apples, blueberries and other fruits elsewhere later in the season.

"All the fun stuff - the fruits and nuts and berries - are pollinated by
bees," Mr. Hackett said.

Paul A. Raybold, the New Jersey state apiarist, has so far inspected 756
hives in the state and found 440 of them dead. "You always expect a winter
die-off of maybe 5 or 10 percent, but nothing like this," he said. A warming
spell followed by a cold snap last winter caught many bees away from their
honey supply, Mr. Raybold said.

But most of the losses are being attributed to the Varroa mite, which came
into the country in the early 1980's, Mr. Raybold said, and began by
devastating the country's wild honeybee population.

Beekeepers used miticides to protect their bees. But now the mite - which is
unusual among parasites because it kills its host, Mr. Raybold said - is
developing resistance to the chemicals, and researchers are looking for new
defenses.

For commercial beekeepers and the farmers who need their bees to pollinate
their crops each spring, the loss of so large a part of the bee population
has aroused concerns about shortages and high prices.

"I'm not in the pollination business, but this year I wish I was," said Bob
Hughes, president of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association, who said he had
lost more than half of his nearly 200 hives in Yardville, N.J. "I've had
three phone calls in three days from people who want to rent colonies for
pollinating. I sent two of them to hobbyists I knew. But the other one I
couldn't help." So far this spring, he said, 11,000 hives have been brought
to New Jersey to pollinate crops.

Fruit growers usually pay $30 to $40 to have a hive placed among their
plants in the spring, with the hive's owner keeping the honey. But Chris
Heintz, director of research for the Almond Board of California, said she
had heard reports of growers paying more than $100 per hive. With one hive
needed per acre of almond trees, that can add up fast.

Such an increase in the price of bees worries Paul Geletta, one of the
owners of Atlantic Blueberry Farms, a big producer in Hammonton, N.J.
Knowing that there might be a shortage, he arranged back in January to rent
hives for this spring, lining up beekeepers in Louisiana, Florida and
Virginia. But if people in California are paying $100 for a hive that
fetches about $40 in New Jersey, he said, will he be able to get bees next
spring?

"Some of the beekeepers down South are going to be tempted to go out to
California for the almonds if this keeps up," Mr. Geletta said.

Mr. Linelho has bought a "hygienic queen" from Russia, one that is
genetically predisposed to keep itself and other bees clean of dirt and
parasites. He hopes this tendency will spread to his bees. He and Mr. Hughes
will also employ beekeeping tricks to combine surviving bees from decimated
colonies. The hope is that these combined colonies can produce a queen - and
that researchers can find a way to stop the mites.

One possible solution involves putting screens in the bottom of the
honeycomb frames that would make it harder for mites that have fallen down
to climb back. Another involves deploying a chemical bees secrete in making
wax that is harmless to the bees but potentially fatal to the mites. In
addition, researchers are working on a fungus, also harmless to bees but bad
for mites, that would be applied to vinyl strips and hung inside the hive.

"This is a crisis, right now," said Mr. Hackett, the Agriculture Department
researcher, "and we're throwing everything we have at it."

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Published by David Sunfellow
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