To Bee or Not to Bee: Diagnosing Colony Collapse Disorder
By Barth Anderson
Judging by recent news stories about colony collapse disorder and the vanishing of the bees - in newspapers from the Star-Tribune to the BBC -- you'd think we were a few breaths away from Doomsday Day.
For example, major media outlets usually note with apocalyptic glee that one third of all U.S. crops rely on honeybees for pollination and that colony collapse disorder "could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet," says MSNBC. Gaudy stats saying that some beekeepers are suffering up to 90% bee losses are also cited.
But Brian Fredericksen of Ames Farm isn't getting sucked into the hype.
"I don't know of a single beekeeper in the tri-state area that claims to be affected," says Fredericksen.
That's not to say that he doesn't see a problem with the current bee die-off or that he doesn't believe it's actually happening - but Fredericksen, whose organic single-source honey operation maintains 300 hives in 17 different locations across southern and central Minnesota, sees this as a more complex problem requiring creative thinking.
"You have to ask yourself," Fredericksen says, "about an industry that trucks hives all over the country, with around 400 hives per truck; you have to ask about the practice of temporary winter holding yards that make the bees' whole lives itinerant; you have to ask about preventative antibiotics [for mites and predatory bacteria]; you have to ask about an industry that puts bees on monocrops that do nothing for bees nutritionally. Now this is our patient. How can we begin to diagnose the problem?"
Worse, according to Fredericksen, is that now Congress is getting involved with colony collapse disorder and allocating money for research (a.k.a., "throwing money at the problem").
"How can we even do research on an organism that's so stressed out? It's a joke," says Fredericksen.
Part of what makes this disorder so difficult to diagnose, is that significant bee die-offs have been happening since the Nineteenth Century. Is this die-off really different - or just bigger? Indeed, even that's difficult to assess, since die-offs in the late 1990's and early 2000's, may have even been bigger than the current so-called "colony collapse disorder." Queens are currently available for purchase, for example, but in earlier die offs, there were no queens on the market.
"My hunch tells me," Fredericksen says, "that this [current die-off] is not as out of whack as the headlines say."
It's more likely, says a report from the University of Florida, that a tiny percentage of beekeepers have the largest number of colony losses. From a statistical standpoint, this might suggest a "user error" rather then a pathogen or disorder that puts all honeybees at risk. In other words, a small number of "industrial beekeepers" are the ones who are suffering colony collapse disorder and no one else.
Writers and organic beekeepers are seeing this pattern, as well. For example, Tom Philpott of Grist reported that organic beekeeping has been spared the devastation of conventional, industrial beekeepers. "Colony collapse disorder has been limited to large operations that truck their hives cross country to 'chase the bloom,' as it's known."
Meanwhile, organic beekeeper Sharon Labchuk, quoted on Guerilla Network News, throws down the gauntlet, saying, "I'm on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list."
Is this another case of factory versus pastoral food production? Are practices that industrialize the honeybee to blame for colony collapse disorder?
Thirteen Opinions
Dr. Marla Spivak, Professor of Apiculture at the University of Minnesota, disagrees. Spivak says it's not that simple and that organic beekeepers aren't likely to be the best judges of whether colony collapse disorder is happening in their hives.
"Organic beekeepers simply don't know if they are suffering from colony collapse disorder or not," Spivak says, "because there is always a certain amount of loss because they don't use miticides [pesticides to control mites]. So they can't possibly know if colony collapse disorder is happening to them."
Furthermore, Spivak says there is a long-standing feud between mass-market beekeepers who "chase the bloom," as Philpott calls the migratory beekeeping life, and small-scale, organic beekeepers. Put twelve beekeepers in a room and you'll have thirteen opinions on what their "best practices" should be, as Spivak puts it.
"It's an opinionated group," she says. "The beekeepers who truck their bees blame the hobby and organic beekeepers who never [chemically] treat their hives, saying that pest problems start with them. Meanwhile, the organic and hobby beekeepers blame the migratory beekeepers for using pesticides and overworking their bees."
Spivak asserts that, while industrial-level, migratory beekeeping is reporting the lion's share of CCD cases, trucking bees isn't enough to explain the extent of the current die-off.
"Let's talk about this as a person. If you're someone who travels a lot, you aren't exhausted to death afterward. You might be set back, but you bounce back in a day or two. If you're already weakened when you travel, however, that's when you get sick. I just spoke with a beekeeper today who has 20,000 to 30,000 bees. He just finished trucking to North Dakota to pollinate the wheat crop and his bees look fine. So it's not trucking itself that's causing the problem."
Like Fredericksen, Spivak sees a wide range of problems contributing to the current bee die-off, saying that what we call "colony collapse disorder" is probably not one, single phenomenon, but a number of smaller factors all conspiring to create the appearance of a single "disorder." As an example, weather might have triggered a number of problems for the Eastern Seaboard's industrial beekeepers.
"There was a severe drought out east last year - also in North Dakota and elsewhere in the Midwest," Spivak says. "The bees couldn't collect sufficient pollen and nectar, so they didn't have enough to sustain themselves nutritionally, and beekeepers had to supplement their bees' diets this year, which is never as good for the bees as a lush, field of pollen. That's when, if you get them on a truck, with their immune systems already compromised, they're susceptible to a host of other problems."
Solid research on a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids is still underway, but it, too, could prove to be another culprit. While used in France before ultimately being banned in the U.S., neonicotinoids like imidacloprid are used in much, much greater volume here than in Europe - from home garden-use (imidacloprid isn't typically listed on labels, according to Dr. Spivak) to golf courses. Many organic beekeepers are outraged that imidacloprid is used in America after being banned in France.
"It's a potential problem," Spivak says, "but there's no current research at the dose used here in America. We simply don't know if it's the problem that some beekeepers think it is."
Another factor could be the mighty Varroa mite. Imidacloprid was embraced by commercial beekeepers as the answer to the voracious Varroa mite, but some critics of the chemical claim that it's building a stronger pest. The logic goes that if 90% of the mites are killed by imidacloprid, the surviving 10% live to reproduce and create a mightier breed of Varroa.
Some organic beekeepers willing accept a certain loss in their hives rather than contribute to such "unnatural selection." They would rather concentrate on improving bee health, breeding, and other preventative measures - the hallmarks of organic food production.
A Perfect Storm?
After weighing all the factors, though, it's clear that this bee die-off is different.
Asked to speculate on what the as-yet-unknown factor of this bee die-of might be, Spivak says that if she were to hazard a guess, a new pathogen might be to blame (a fungus has already been nominated as a possible candidate by one UC-San Francisco researcher). But even then, she cautions, "The new pathogen would be just part of the problem."
European beekeepers take this idea into account, according to Spivak, by calling the current bee die-off "Varroa plus X" instead of colony collapse disorder. By including a variable in the very name of the die-off, European researchers acknowledge that a number of factors may be at play.
"They recognize that immune compromises are very common in bees and that it may not be simply 'Varroa', per se, that will kill them," Spivak explains. "It's the secondary, opportunistic invaders that get them - 'Varroa plus X'."
Once researchers finally step forward through the heavy smoke that this issue has generated in the press, it's likely that we'll see that colony collapse disorder is something of a "perfect storm" - that a number of extreme, contributing factors have all built together and created the current die-off -- a collection of "colony collapse disorders," so to speak.
Because of this die-off's complexity, and the wide number of variables involved, Dr. Spivak says it's important to look at the issue carefully and not give in to hysteria. But she also says that the threat is serious, since so much of U.S. agriculture is completely dependent on bee pollinators.
"People needs to appreciate that honeybees are so important - all bee pollinators are important," she says, and that means addressing the fact that our environment is unfriendly to what may be the most crucial component of U.S. food production: Bees.
Spivak says the general, overuse of pesticides in America is causing a decline in native bee pollinators, and that this decline has been happening for decades. "All our pesticide use and the way we use our land, covering pastures with lawns, spraying for weeds in ditches - we're killing all the bee food. We need to let weeds grow on roadsides - flowers on weeds are what bees eat."
Despite her skepticism that organic beekeepers really have answers in regard to colony collapse disorder, Spivak says she admires beekeepers like Brian Fredericksen. "He's one of the better ones. He's doing perfect things with his bees. And I do side with the organic beekeepers," she says. "It's what I do, too. Our research [at the U of M Bee Lab] is geared toward better breeding for bees and keeping bees healthy."
Regardless of what scientists discover in regards to "colony collapse disorders" or "Varroa plus X," the die-off is a warning that we should all be heeding, according to Fredericksen.
"Bees are the 'canaries in the coalmine," he says. "We have to pay attention to the message this event is sending us."
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