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.
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