THis was forwarded to me by a friend.
SOrry I didn't get the source.
Paul Cronshaw DC
CYberchiro and Hobby Beekeeper
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America's honeybees are in a bad way.
Already weakened by 12 years of battling blood-sucking mites, bees
have been brought to their knees by a soggy spring on the heels of
many regions' exceptionally cold winter. Experts estimate that more
than 90 percent of wild colonies have been wiped out nationwide,
along with a large number of those tended by beekeepers. "It's
devastated the population of unmanaged bees that are in hollow
trees and old buildings and things," said Hachiro Shimanuki of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's bee research laboratory in
Beltsville, Md. Shimanuki estimated that this year's
winter-spring-parasite catastrophe has killed off 30 percent of
existing colonies of domesticated bees, but emphasized that the
number varies widely from one state to the next. In Maine, state
apiary inspectors reported losing 80 percent of kept bees. In
Wisconsin, beekeepers lost 67 percent of their stock. New York
estimates losing 60 to 70 percent of its domesticated bees. Even in
Georgia, where losses are estimated at only 15 percent, hive
inspectors noted a shortage of bees available to pollinate the
state's squash crop. But most farmers managed to get their plants
pollinated some way, Shimunaki said. "I don't think it's been a
critical shortage," he said. "Nobody has called in a panic and
said, 'We don't have any bees.' " But those who depend on wild bees
for pollination are in for a rough summer. Gardeners and small
farmers who can't afford to rent colonies from beekeepers won't see
very much in the way of cucumbers, melons, apples, blueberries and
the dozens of other crops that won't produce without bees. "The
people probably who will suffer will be backyard types," said Troy
Fore, executive secretary of the American Beekeeping Federation and
professional beekeeper in Jesup, Ga. "People who don't go to the
trouble of renting bees." In the past, many farmers relied on wild
bees to pollinate their crops. Although these aren't wild in the
truest sense -- they're really just domesticated colonies that have
escaped human domination -- they are wild in the sense that they
don't require tending. But as those populations have declined in
recent years, bee rental has become a sizeable industry. Keepers
make $46 million annually renting their charges to farmers, who
rely on bees to produce an estimated $9.7 billion worth of crops.
Bees are on the defensive because of two tiny mites, one visible
only with the aid of a microscope. That parasite, known as the
tracheal mite, crawls into the breathing tubes of an adult honeybee
and sucks its blood. But it's the larger, tick-sized varroa mite
that really puts bees in a bind. It attacks both adults and
developing eggs by attaching to them from the outside. "The mites
get onto the adult bees and live off their blood," Shimanuki
explained. But what they do to young bees is much worse. If
infested eggs hatch at all, the young can emerge disfigured, often
lacking a wing or a leg. And because "the honeybee colony does not
tolerate anybody who is physically disfigured," Shimanuki said,
worker bees usually devour the crippled insects as soon as they're
born. The two types of mites, which appeared in the United States
in the 1980s, have devastated bees around the country. Agriculture
Department researcher Gerald Loper, who has monitored bees in the
Oracle, Ariz., area since 1988, has seen them dwindle from 215
colonies in 1993 to 12 this March. "I think they may well have seen
their low point this spring," Loper said. This year has been worse
than most, especially in the Northeast, because of the weather.
Cold winters wipe out beehives simply because the bees' body heat
can't keep the hives warm enough. So if a hive's population is
already reduced by mite infestation, it's that much more
susceptible to the cold. "You don't have the critical mass to keep
the hive warm," Shimanuki said. Cool, rainy weather this spring
just made matters worse by delaying the blooming of plants, he
added. No blooms meant no nectar, so bees had to live on honey for
a few weeks longer than they normally would. Many hives probably
just ran out, Shimunaki said. Remaining colonies will probably
bounce back, Loper said, but many won't be the same. In the
colonies that he's studied, Africanized bees, also known as killer
bees, have shown more resistance to the mites than their honeybee
counterparts. So the colonies that pull through will be those that
have hybridized with the invaders from the south, becoming more
aggressive. Bee experts said that they can't predict how the
decline in the wild bee population will affect wild plants and the
animals that eat them. But they guessed that in places such as New
York and New Jersey, which may have no wild honeybees left, there
aren't going to be too many wild berries this year.
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