The bee industry has had its ups and downs for centuries. Here's a tidbit from the past:

African Bee Genes Blamed For Depleting U.S. Apiaries 
By Edward Roby United Press International
November 16, 1977

It was in the early springtime just over a decade ago when Harold Halbgewachs first noticed the mysterious “disappearing bee disease” that left some of the new hives empty on his Cozad, Neb., apiary farm. 

“We had hauled new bees up from Texas and unloaded them in the bee yards,” said Halbgewachs. “In a day or two, we had a lot of hives that there wasn’t even a bee in them.”

“I’d been doing this for years. Never had any trouble before,” said Halbgewachs, who began commercial beekeeping in 1936. “That was the first it hit me. It’s mainly what they determined to be ‘disappearing disease’.”

About the same time, other veteran beekeepers across the country started complaining about the puzzling springtime malady that depleted their hives just when valuable crops like apples, almonds and citrus fruits need the thorough pollination only honey bees can provide.

Some blamed the problem on pesticides, a recognized killer of foraging bees for which federal compensation is readily available to beekeepers. But scientists, who reasoned that local insecticide spraying could not affect bees over such wide areas, began looking for exotic bee diseases, including viruses.

Agricultural experts tried to link the disappearing phenomenon on poor bee management techniques or cold weather.

But it wasn’t until 1974, after years of declining honey production, that Halbgewachs attended an apiarist seminar given by Dr. William T. Wilson and heard a chilling theory that made sense to him.

Wilson, a U.S. Department of Agriculture bee researcher at Laramie, WY., contends the problem began in the early 1960s with a scientific accident honey bee stocks with genes from their African cousins · that ferocious bee strain blamed for sometimes fatal attacks on humans and livestock in Brazil.

Besides foul-tempered aggressiveness, documented African bee traits include an industriousness unmatched by other honey bees as well as less resistance to cold weather.

Wilson traced the Africanization of American bees to bee semen imported from Brazil in 1961 for Department of Agriculture experiments at laboratories in Baton Rouge, La., and Davis, Cal if. Wilson believes and USDA officials concede, that Africanized drones from 15 or 20 experimental hybrid bee colonies at Baton Rouge were allowed to fly free, despite the risk they would cross-breed with queen bees at local apiaries.

Because, queen bees raised in apiaries throughout the South are sold to Northern beekeepers seeking to replenish their colonies in the spring. The spread of African traits like weakened resistance to cold would have been vast accelerated.

At the time the disappearing disease struck h colonies, Halbgewachs said, he had been buying some queen bees from Bill Debessonet, commercial beekeeper at Donaldsonville, La., not fc from the USDA labs.

“I think I got into a lot of trouble buying queens,” he said. “When we’d get a norther in an the temperature would drop, that’s when we’d los the bees.”

He said Debessonet finally went out of business because of the problem.

“We need to change our stock over the whole country,” he said. “This has spread everywhere.” Wilson theorizes that African honey bee cannot withstand the rigors of the North because they evolved in a climate where their foraging instincts were triggered by sun lighting condition The normal European honey bee (apis mellifera) however, will not forage for pollen and nectar in cold weather because they are attuned to both light and temperature stimuli.

Thus, he reasons, the new hybrid bees simply disappearing on cold spring days because the instincts send them forth to forage and freeze to death when it is sunny.

“ ‘Disappearing disease’ is not a disease but a genetic problem,” Wilson concluded.

 

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