FROM:
Bee-fuddling by John S. Adams
http://www.missoulanews.com/

EXCERPTS:

For the last 35 years Lance Sundberg has devoted his life to
honeybees. The Columbus resident started his first beehive in 1972 as
an eighth-grade 4-H project. The next year he added a second set of
bee boxes and spilt the hive into two. The year after that he added
two more hives—also known as colonies—and again doubled his bees and
increased his honey production. Over the course of the ensuing decade
Sundberg added more and more colonies to his thriving apiary (the
technical name for a bee yard), and by 1983 his passion for bees had
outgrown his childhood hobby and become his livelihood.

Now with 5,600 honeybee colonies of his own, plus an additional 2,000
hives leased from beekeepers in Washington and Nebraska, Sundberg runs
one of Montana's largest beekeeping businesses. Every year in late
October he packs his bees, loads them onto trucks and ships them to
California where, from February through spring they go to work
pollinating the state's almond and fruit crops. For five to six months
out of the year Sundberg lives on the road, traveling from
California's Central Valley almond orchards north to Washington's
apple orchards. He usually returns home to Columbus, a small mining
town west of Billings, for no more than 10 days during the season.

"We're kind of like gypsies in a way," says Sundberg in his easy
Central Montana drawl. "We pack our houses and all of our trucks and
machinery and all our bees and migrate around the country."

But now a mysterious ailment afflicting the nation's honeybees is
threatening Sundberg's livelihood. Across America, millions of
honeybees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving
beekeepers like Sundberg facing potential ruin. In at least 24 states
beekeepers are reporting inexplicable disappearances of entire
colonies. Some beekeepers have lost more than 80 percent of their
colonies already this year, the bees simply disappearing from hives
without a trace. The malady, which researchers have dubbed "Colony
Collapse Disorder" (CCD), is not only threatening the livelihoods of
beekeepers, but could have serious impacts on the production of the
country's fruit and nut crops, many of which depend on honeybees to
pollinate their blossoms.

And so far no one has a clue as to what's causing this troublesome and
mysterious disorder.

"I'm in the middle of it," Sundberg says from California, where he's
been unloading pallets of beehives. "It's a real volatile business
right now, and we don't understand the cause of some of the deaths of
our colonies."

Sundberg says of the 21 semitrailer-loads of bees he hauled to
California, five truckloads worth have died. In each case, the bees
have up and left the boxes without leaving any trace.

"The bees are just gone," he says. "The unusual thing about this
phenomenon is that you don't know where the bees went. You know they
were there last week, and you go and look the next week and they've
just disappeared."

Sundberg is one of the hundreds of migratory beekeepers across the
country who each year load millions of bees onto semitrailers for
contracted pollination work. In Montana there are about 50 such
beekeepers, and Sundberg's Sunshine Apiaries is one of the largest
with 64 contracts with various California almond growers.

"Almonds are the biggest money game in the business," Sundberg says.

The high demand for bees, coupled with increased death-loss ratios of
colonies due to parasitic mites, hive beetles, wax moths and now the
mysterious CCD, has led to skyrocketing costs to rent pollinating bee
colonies. In 2004 Sundberg rented boxes of bees to almond growers for
about $53 per colony for the season. The last two years the price has
been closer to $140 per colony.

But despite nearly tripling his rental fees in the last three years,
Sundberg says for the first time in his career he is more than
$100,000 in the hole. Due to the heavy CCD losses he sustained last
month, Sundberg says he spent about $120,000 importing bees from
overseas just to maintain his contracts with growers. That's money
he's never had to spend in years past and it's hitting his bottom
line.

"That will turn around when the growers start making payments to me
for my pollination services, but I've never had to buy supplemental
bees in that kind of volume," Sundberg says. "I've never had these
kinds of death-loss ratios before."

During a normal year, once Sundberg's bees are in the orchards, he
returns home to Columbus for 10 days or so while his bees do the work.
But this year that's not going to happen. Instead he'll stick around
and monitor the boxes for signs the colony is dwindling because he
knows if his bees can't fulfill his end of 64 contracts, there are
plenty of competitors waiting to pick up his work.

It's an unsettling time for beekeepers like Sundberg. Because the
almond industry isn't acknowledging the problem, and many beekeepers
don't want to talk about it, researchers are scrambling to solve one
of the greatest mysteries the beekeeping industry has ever seen. And
every time Sundberg goes into the orchards and opens a box of bees
he's not sure what he's going to find.

"If you can imagine raising horses or cattle…" Sundberg says, "and a
third of everything you raised died on you before you ever get to do
anything with it, but you still entail the costs of raising it. That's
daunting."

That's why Sundberg, along with thousands of beekeepers and
agricultural producers throughout the country, is counting on
Bromenshenk and his interstate team of researchers to find a cause --
and a cure -- before CCD turns the collapse of individual colonies
into the collapse of an entire industry.

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