Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
    •    by MICHAEL WINES
    •    March 28, 2013

A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled
for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse
disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year was particularly bad.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees
en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last
year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent
of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the
ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But
beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a
powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into
the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they
are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.
“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky
Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first
of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve
been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss
before.”
In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its
acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical
experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.
In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an
endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently
were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has
brought far greater losses.
The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May.
But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee
research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate
would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”
Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and
dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination
season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy
blow.
Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey
Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting
losses.
“We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to
pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here
this week.
“They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they
started falling apart, when it got cold.”
Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31
tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the
start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.
Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for
beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the
losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts
to ensure their health.
Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a
quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to
onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller
harvests and higher food prices.
Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here,
and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to
California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two
hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.
This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to
guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had
planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and
left survivors weakened.
“But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that
they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two
truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.
Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive
at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher
prices for food.
Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame
drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees
despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become
increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses.
But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of
pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.
While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their
combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently
studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that
European regulators implicate in bee deaths.
The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked
rising bee deaths.
Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older
pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that
the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.
Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while
they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist
for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s
worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a
steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.
“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this
systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on
Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any
difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your
liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”
Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products
are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator
health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said
Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.
He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with
science and will let science take the regulation of our products in
whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.
A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the
E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally
approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review
of their impact on bees and other wildlife.
The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by
bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive
die-offs in Germany and France.
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has
grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that
are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say
some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from
maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said
analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax
gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals
at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the
consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned
environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to
wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted
if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called
extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have
something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

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