Where have all the honey bees gone? By Meera Lester
Beekeepers are worried . . . and have been for a while. For some, honey is nothing short of liquid gold. No bees, no honey, no money. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it was 2006 when American and European beekeepers first sounded the alarm that their bees were abruptly disappearing at unusually high rates. And now, for not-well understood reasons, roughly a third of all honey bee colonies in the United States have disappeared. Colony Collapse Disorder is the name given to the problem by scientists studying the conundrum, but precise causes and solutions continue to evade them.
Bees swarm around their queen in an apricot tree after leaving the hive
The life of a honey bee is short, spanning months not years. The female worker bees survive only about six weeks during the summer when they work themselves to death, literally, but can survive four months or longer in winter. Bees are reproduced by eggs of the queen, and it is the queen who determines whether or not the egg passing from her ovary is fertilized. Fertilized eggs produce female workers or queens. The unfertilized eggs become male drones. Once mated with a virgin queen, the drone dies.
The signs that something was wrong became evident as vast numbers of bees began to die off or just disappear. Honey bees form new hives by swarming. In fact, a swarm is a mechanism for establishing a new colony. Swarming often occurs as the population of a hive increases and the bee domicile becomes too congested. Often seen in late May or June when worker bees and drones follow their queen out of the hive, swarms with as many as 30,000 bees will find another suitable home. However, in Colony Collapse Disorder, the departing bees do not return and the once thriving colony fails to replace itself with healthy a new population.
Carlos Carvajal (left) and Jill Nasrallah (right) have positioned a new hive for the colony under the tree where the bees have just swarmed.
Scientists have conjectured a number of possible reasons for the puzzling mass disappearance of the bees, including exposure to pesticides, parasitic mites, lack of food sources, and even a virus that possibly compromises the honey bee immune system. The bees’ widespread disappearance continues to concern scientists and gardeners but, especially, America’s beekeepers, many of whom derive income from honey and pollination fees.
Without honey bees doing the work of pollination, the supply of foods such as cucumbers, broccoli, avocados, cranberries, apples, and almonds, for example, could dwindle to nothing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to NRDC, will provide $20 million over five years to study the problem, but some sources feel that the monetary amount is too little and demonstrates a lack of real commitment to solving a puzzling problem that could result in crop losses of $15 billion or more.
Honey bees explore their new hive
In recent years, a number of cities, such as Berkeley, California, have passed laws permitting homeowners to have hives of honey bees in their backyards. Establishing and maintaining healthy hives becomes paramount if the honey bee population in America is ever again to reach pre-Colony Collapse Disorder levels.
Meera Lester has written over two dozen mass market nonfiction books and hundreds of articles and columns. She resides in Northern California where she had her husband tend a potage garden, watch over a small orchard, care for five chickens, and help their neighbor harvest honey from his hives of honey bees. His family sells the honey under the label of Pete’s Gold, Organic Backyard Honey.
Dead bees on the ground after an unsuccessful attempt to rescue them, using water.
