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.

Continue Reading »

If there’s one positive side to the recent struggles faced by beekeepers in North America, it may be in the amount of press that the apiculture industry has gained. The honeybee has finally gone mainstream, one might say, capturing the sympathy and imagination of the public (and even political cartoonists) in a way that “bugs” seldom manage to do. People who never thought twice about the critical role of honeybee pollination in ensuring our food supply are now keenly aware of the value of bees, and of their plight.

Since last fall, large numbers of U.S. bees have mysteriously disappeared from hives in at least 35 of the 50 states — a mystery that’s caught the attention of Ian Lipkin.

And who is Ian Lipkin?

You won’t find his name in the rolls of prominent bee researchers or apiculturists. In fact, Science News reports, before now Lipkin has never studied a bee disease — he works in the epidemiology department of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Lipkin is the pathogen hunter who in 1999 figured out that a cluster of people with encephalitis in New York had caught a then-obscure virus called West Nile. Since then, his lab has refined ways to use high-speed genetic sequencing to search for novel pathogens worldwide. What involved him in this insect-disease case, he says, is “the same thing that has captured the imagination of the public — the notion that there’s been this inexplicable loss of bees.”

The theories around Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) have been many and varied, to say the least.

(Jeff Pettis, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture bee research laboratories, joked to a reporter from the Washington Post that the vanished bees might have “worn themselves out making crop circles, thus explaining two mysteries at once”!)

So far, researchers have ruled out several hypotheses including cell phone usage and it’s beginning to look as if “more than one factor may be coming together” in the mystery of the missing honeybees, Pettis says.

Research is hampered by the lack of sample to work on, because CCD doesn’t leave large numbers of dead bees in the hive to be analyzed by scientists. Working with what is available, however, Lipkin and his colleagues in epedimiology have been working with the bee labs to analyze the genetic material, looking for genetic sequences that show up in sick colonies but not in healthy ones.

Identifying the source of those sequences could reveal a pathogen.

Starting in March, Lipkin and his epidemiology team have thrown themselves into the search, working with bee labs. “This has been a huge project, absolutely huge,” Lipkin says.

After all this work, Lipkin’s tight-lipped about what his analyses have revealed. He will say, however, that his lab, with help from others, is closing in on a suspicious infectious agent.

See:
Not-So-Elementary Bee Mystery: Detectives sift clues in the case of the missing insects
by Susan Milius
Science News, Vol. 172, No. 4, p. 56

For Sale:
20 Live Bee Hives
30 Standard Supers
100 Shallows
Miscellaneous bee equipment

Truro, Nova Scotia area

1-902-895-0730
1-902-657-3860 + leave message

The Provincial Apiarist reminds NB beekeepers that Nova Scotia bees would need to be inspected in that province before they could be brought into New Brunswick. Permission to import bees into the province is dependent on the inspection results being acceptable.

Tuesday, 11 September 2007
Central Beekeepers Alliance Meeting
Agricultural Research Centre, Fredericton, NB
7:30 p.m.

Want to learn more about Beekeeping? Visitors and new beekeepers are always welcome! Most meetings include an educational session, group discussion, or hands-on demonstration for the benefit of beginning beekeepers in central New Brunswick.

The Agricultural Research Centre (”Experimental Farm”) is on the Lincoln Road, Fredericton. Entry is around the back of the building.

Political cartoonist Etta Hulme offers a new tongue-in-cheek theory on a possible cause of Colony Collapse Disorder:

Etta Hulme, the Fort Worth Star Telegram
04/27/07