In the 6 August 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert has written one of the most detailed articles on the perilous state of beekeeping in North America that we’ve come across yet.

She began as a journalist, moved to start reading up on honeybees when the Times first broke the “mysterious disappearance” story last February.

All this information struck me as disturbing, and therefore interesting. I thought that at some point I might want to write about it myself, and so I began to read up on bees.

The literature of apiculture is vast and seductive; I learned one amazing thing after another…

Beekeepers won’t be surprised to learn that the more Kolbert read about honeybees, the more her interest grew. From reading scientific works to reading how-to books on beekeeping, she soon moved on to browsing the beekeeping supply catalogues.

By the time I ordered my hive, the initial reason for having one—to learn about colony-collapse disorder—had dissipated. The disease (or whatever it was) hadn’t turned up in the region where I live, which is western Massachusetts. But by that point I wasn’t sure whether I was writing the story to keep bees or keeping bees to write the story.

One of the first people to notice that there was something seriously wrong with his hives, she says, was David Hackenberg of Pennsylvania. “After I smoked about five pallets, I realized I’m not smoking anything,” he told Kolbert. “I started jerking covers off, and the hives are empty.”

He’d shipped 2900 hives to Florida for pollination, and 2000 of those colonies were dead.

Pennsylvania’s state apiary inspector, Dennis van Engelsdorp, wasn’t too concerned at first. Mites, he thought, or perhaps one of the virus diseases that do afflict bees, esepcially under stressful conditions.

But then he started slicing some of Hackenberg’s bees…

Normally, if you cut open a bee its innards, viewed under a microscope, will appear white. Hackenberg’s bees were filled with black scar tissue. They seemed to be suffering not so much from any particular ailment as from just about every ailment.

“There was just so much wrong with them,” van Engelsdorp recalled. “And there weren’t any mites.”

More beekeepers starting reporting the same problem and Elizabeth Kolbert followed the CCD trail as a journalist, while the full extent of the disaster began to emerge.

Kolbert spoke to beekeepers, to apiary inspectors, to entomologists, and to Ian Lipkin — the public-health epedemiologist whose lab at Columbia University had done a lot of work on diseases transmitted between animals and humans, notably the West Nile virus.

At various points, Lipkin had up to a dozen of his researchers assigned to the CCD mystery, sometimes working seven days a week on the “metagenomic analysis” of bees — extracting all the genetic information available, from “not just the bees themselves but also the protozoa, bacteria, viruses, and fungi that had been living in them.”

At the time that I spoke to him, Lipkin had just sent off a paper on C.C.D. to a scientific journal. He was reluctant to discuss its contents, for fear of jeopardizing its acceptance, but he did indicate that it contained what he considered to be a breakthrough. One patho-gen in particular was, in his words, “highly associated” with C.C.D.

“My speculation would be that this particular pathogen is a trigger that takes an otherwise borderline population and throws it over the edge,” he told me. “I think that’s what we’re seeing.”

… He wouldn’t tell me what kind of pathogen he was talking about in the case of C.C.D., but soon I learned that it was a virus. I also learned that it was suspected that the virus had entered the U.S. on imported bees.

At the same time as she was researching her report, Kolbert was also starting out on her own adventure in beekeeping — getting her first package of Italian bees, suffering a bear attack on her backyard hive, and consulting with other beekeepers on a defence for the replacement nuc. (She ended up with an ingenious arrangement of wires that suspends her hive between two trees, high above bear height.)

The article Kolbert has produced reflects both her personal interest and her journalistic objectivity. It gives a fine overview of Apis mellifera past and present, the biology and society of honey bees, their role in the natural world and in human food production, and the practices of modern apiculture. And it lays a foundation for understanding the complex issues of maintaining a healthy population of pollinators.

Above all, Kolbert’s article is lively and readable — it could go a long way toward helping the general public understand not only the struggles that apiculture faces but why we, as beekeepers, are so intensely fascinated by every aspect of those busy little insects.

See
Stung: Where have all the bees gone? by Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker, 6 August 2007