Buzzkill: Dire Outlook for Honeybees and the Consumers Who Depend on Them
Source: By DREW HALFNIGHT, AOL News
Posted: 11/20/09 11:26AM
Filed Under: Environment
As the temperature drops, Canadian honeybees are retreating into the thermoregulated core of their colonies to cluster and feed through the cold months.
But come spring, only two thirds of those bees are expected to come out alive.
Since 2006, an average of 33 per cent of Canadian honeybees have died each year from a range of factors that scientists have yet to pin down.
The deaths are creating a buzz because, aside from producing the sweet stuff we stir into tea, honeybees are relied upon to pollinate all manner of food crops.
Without bees for pollination, Canadian consumers wouldn’t have apples, pears, most berries, almonds, cucumbers, soybeans and canola seeds, among other staples.
A conservative estimate by the Canadian Honey Council puts the total value of honeybee pollination to Canadian agriculture at around $1 billion.
“It’s a long-term threat to agriculture in general,” says honeybee researcher Stephen Pernal of the decimation of bee populations. “One out of every three forkfuls you put in your mouth depends on insect pollination.”
‘Vigilance is required’
When the problem was first recorded in several U.S. states in October 2006, Canadian beekeepers had reason to believe the problem would pass them by.
That’s because U.S. beekeepers reported a set of symptoms that were never observed in Canada and haven’t been to this day.
Grouped under the term Colony Collapse Disorder, those symptoms included the mysterious disappearance of bees and bee corpses. (In the U.K., the problem is dubbed the “Mary Celeste phenomenon” after a ship whose crew disappeared in 1872.)
“We can be proud that Canadian beekeeping seems to be a gentler practice,” reads a February 2007 report on the threat of Colony Collapse Disorder.
“Nevertheless, vigilance is required,” the authors cautioned. “Beekeeping in Canada and the U.S. share too many similarities for Canadians to dismiss the problem out of hand.”
Three months later, Canada’s annual report on commercial honeybee operations surfaced. It showed double the normal honeybee mortality rate.
The 2007-08 and 2008-09 reports were no better. The latter indicated over 200,000 commercial bee colonies, or 33.9 per cent of the total, did not survive the spring.
In places like southern Alberta, where farmers need access to at least 60,000 honeybee colonies to pollinate hybrid canola seeds each summer, those figures spelled trouble. The province lost 44 per cent of its bee population.
“The pollination isn’t done by wind. It’s not done by hand,” says Pernal. “It’s done by bees.”
'No smoking gun'
Earlier this year, the federal and provincial governments launched the Canadian Pollination Initiative (CANPOLIN) to tackle the problem of pollinator decline.
Pernal is one of over 50 researchers on the project, and one of about five working specifically on honeybees, the principal agricultural pollinator.
Since 2007, Pernal has been studying Nosema Ceranae, a new, little-known parasite blamed for the decimation of Spain’s bee population. Pernal is convinced that Ceranae has played a significant role in the decline of Canada’s bee population, too.
He says another key suspect is Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite which began attacking honeybees in 1990, pushing mortality rates to about 15 per cent.
Entomologist and CANPOLIN researcher Rob Currie has been breeding bees for resistance to a range of nuisances including Varroa mites.
“We’re trying to select for better grooming behaviour,” Currie says, adding that his team is having “some success.”
Meanwhile, several other potential factors, such as harsh winter conditions, starvation due to inadequate nectar flows, residual mitricide and crop pesticides absorbed into beeswax, will keep scientists busy for years to come. Cell phone radiation, once rumoured to be a culprit, is not among these factors, says Pernal.
Scientists believe some combination of stressors is responsible for the decline in bee populations in countries all over the world, from Spain to Taiwan and Bermuda to Brazil, but the precise cause continues to elude them.
“There seems to be no one defined cause, no smoking gun,” says Pernal. “Solutions will take a number of years.”
Currie agrees that it would likely take “five to ten years” before science to make a breakthrough.
“Up to this point we’ve been able to keep up with the problem” – by developing pesticides that work only to a limited extent – “but that’s getting increasingly difficult.”
'Large losses'
Beekeepers and farmers continue to suffer. In the U.S., the cost of a hive rose from $60 apiece in 2004 to $180 per hive in 2006, while prices in Canada have adopted a similar course.
The Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists has called the decline in bee populations “unsustainable” and warns of a chronic shortage of colonies available for pollination.
The Canadian Honey Council has launched the Save Our Bees campaign calling for “hive health action and education.”
“If the beekeepers continue to suffer,” says Currie, “the economics of the whole business will change.”
In short, beekeepers will jack up prices to stay in business, and farmers will pass those costs on to consumers.
“They’re large losses to make up,” says Pernal of the sudden collapse of bee populations. “The ways to make up those losses will be costly.”
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