Honeybee Die-Offs

  • Researcher Dennis VanEngelsdorp says the rates of honeybee die-offs threaten the beekeeping business. (Photo courtesy of the NBII)

Beekeepers expect about fifteen percent of their bees to die every winter. But for the past few winters they’ve seen die-offs of thirty percent or more. Mark Brush reports on a new survey that’s keeping track of honeybee losses:

Transcript

Beekeepers expect about fifteen percent of their bees to die every winter. But for the past few winters they’ve seen die-offs of thirty percent or more. Mark Brush reports on a new survey that’s keeping track of honeybee losses:

This is the fourth year in a row that beekeepers have see die-offs this high. The survey was done by the USDA and the Apiary Inspectors of America.

Dennis VanEngelsdorp was one of the researchers who conducted the survey. He says the rates of honeybee die-offs threaten the beekeeping business – and that’s important because honeybees pollinate about a third of the foods we eat:

“If we want to produce fruits and vegetables in this country, we need to have honeybees and we need a pollination force. And without those, we won’t be able to produce those in this country. So we’re not going to starve, but certainly the variety in our diet will change.”

Most of the beekeepers blamed the latest deaths on bad weather in the fall and winter. VanEngelsdorp says you can add to that habitat destruction that hurts the bees’ food supplies; invasive mites that spread disease – and the still unexplained problem of Colony Collapse Disorder.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Native Pollinators in Trouble

  • Jeffrey Pettis says while honeybees are a concern because they pollinate crops, the wild plants that rely on native pollinators can be in trouble as well. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Honeybees have been dying by the millions because of colony collapse disorder. But government officials say it’s not just the bees that are in trouble. Lester Graham reports.

Transcript

Honeybees have been dying by the millions because of colony collapse disorder. But government officials say it’s not just the bees that are in trouble. Lester Graham reports.

Jeffrey Pettis heads up the USDA’s bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland. He says there’s a lot of concern about honey bees because they pollinate crops. But he’s also really concerned about wild native bees, butterflies, bats that pollinate plants in the wild.

“The wild plants that rely on native pollinators can be in trouble as well. So, there’s certainly should be concern for all pollinators in addition to honeybees, which I like to think of as a major agricultural pollinator.”

Pettis says habitat destruction is hitting nature’s wild pollinators hard, but bats are also dying because of white-nose syndrome, a fungus that’s spreading, killing bats by the millions.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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A Bee by Any Other Name

  • Experts say beekeeping is an important line of defense against killer bees. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:

These bees have established themselves in a number of states throughout the southern U.S. They spread naturally and they are spread through trade. The bees can hide out in shipping containers. One swarm was found inside the engine compartment of a new car.

Now, despite the nick name “killer bee” – experts say, yes they’ll defend their nest with more gusto – but the killer bee name is just hype.

Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman is a bee expert with the USDA. She says it’s likely that the bees will keep spreading – but beekeeping is an important line of defense against Africanized honeybees.

“You know, beekeepers, whether they’re small or large, are really the buffer between African bees and the public, because they keep pure European bees.”

DeGrandi-Hoffman says – Africanized or not – bees are still a critical part of our food system because they pollinate so many of our food crops.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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The Bee Man of Brooklyn

  • John Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:

Transcript

Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:

When I first got in touch with the Gotham City Honey Co-op and told them I wanted to do a story on beekeeping in New York, they were a little nervous about talking with me. They were worried about a New York City health code that makes urban beekeeping illegal. The city’s worried about people getting stung. The Honey Co-op didn’t want to blow anyone’s cover, but eventually they did hook me up with John Howe.

Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse – which means every day – several times a day, actually – he climbs four flights of stairs and one shaky ladder to get up to his hives.

“I gotta go up the ladder. I’m getting tired of it.”

(sound of roof opening)

“Turned out to be a nice day.”

Howe keeps two hives. He says there could be up to 150,000 bees in them.

“You can see them all going in and out. Lot of bees, yeah.”

Honey bees can fly up to three miles from their hives, looking for flowers to pollinate. Howe’s bees probably buzz by thousands of his neighbors every day. I asked him if anyone ever complained about them or called authorities to turn him in for illegal beekeeping. Howe said his neighbors are actually pretty cool with the bees.

“I give them free honey, so that helps. People just raise their eyebrow or shrug and say, ‘that’s neat.’ They call me bee man. I walk down the street, they say, ‘hey bee man, you got any honey?’”

Across town, Roger Repahl raises honeybees in the garden of a church in the South Bronx. He started beekeeping ten years ago, when local gardeners noticed that their vegetables weren’t getting pollinated.

“The community gardeners were complaining that they were getting a lot of flowers but very little fruit. So Greenthumb – that’s the community gardening wing of the parks department – Greenthumb said that’s because you don’t have enough pollinators in the South Bronx.”

So Repahl trucked some hives down from Vermont, and he says the bees pretty much solved the neighborhood’s pollination problem.

Now, this is the kind of story that gets beekeepers like John Howe pretty steamed up about New York’s anti-beekeeping laws. Like a lot of cities, New York is doing just about everything it can to encourage community gardening. But to grow your own food, you need insects to pollinate your plants. John Howe says banning honeybees is like banning local food.

“The best reason for making bees legal is that they pollinate so many plants. The more bees that we can raise and keep, the more chance we have of having food.”

It’s not quite that clear cut. At least, that’s what James Danoff Burg says. He studies insects at Columbia University. He says there are native bugs that do plenty of pollinating. Beetles, for example, and other kinds of bees like honeybees. And those native species are being driven out by honey bees, which are originally from Europe.

“I think it’s a mixed bag. They have benefits to people, for certain. And from a human perspective, if all you’re concerned about is that your plants get pollinated and you can get the fruits that come from that, it’s a pure positive bag. The negative part of that mixed bag comes when you start to think about native biodiversity.”

But Danoff Burg says preserving native biodiversity maybe doesn’t matter so much in a place like New York. The city’s ecosystem has already been changed so much, and there are other, more wild places where native insects can thrive.

So even though NY is America’s biggest city, it might also be the best place in the country to raise bees. As long as you keep them out of sight of the law.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Using Honey for Healing

  • Stores in Alandejani's hometown of Ottawa have had an increase in sales of manuka honey after the study was reported (Photo by Karen Kelly)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 90,000 Americans are diagnosed with an antibiotic-resistant infection each year. Doctors and patients are desperate to find an alternative treatment for these infections. Karen Kelly reports on the possibility of a new approach using a common household ingredient:

Transcript

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 90,000 Americans are diagnosed with an antibiotic-resistant infection each year. Doctors and patients are desperate to find an alternative treatment for these infections. Karen Kelly reports on the possibility of a new approach using a common household ingredient:

(sound of teapot and pouring)

A lot of us like to pour a cup of tea with honey when we’re feeling achy and stuffed up.

But researcher Talal Alandejani wondered if honey might be good for more than just soothing a sore throat.

He’s an ear, nose and throat doctor at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
He knew honey had been used on the skin for centuries to kill bacteria in wounds.
And he wondered if there might be a way to use it with his patients.

He treats people with chronic sinus infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

“I thought, what if I could use it in the sinus where we use antibiotics, but we still can’t get rid of the infection. It’s a natural product, it has less side effects and it’s less expensive.”

So, Alandejani chose four different types of honey:
clover and buckwheat honeys, which are common in North America,
Manuka honey, which is grown in New Zealand and sold mostly in health food stores,
and sidr honey from Yemen, which is hard for Americans to find.

He then grew bacteria in petri dishes.
Some were free-floating – the kind killed by antibiotics.
The others are called biofilms – they have a coating that resists medications, and they’re the cause of chronic sinus infections and other diseases.

Alandejani squirted the bacteria with antibiotics in one dish, and honey in the other.

The manuka and sidr honey -along with the medications – killed the free-floating bacteria.
The biofilms, though, were a different story.
The antibiotics didn’t kill them, but the honey did.

In fact, the two foreign honeys killed about 90% of the pseudomonas and 60 to 70% of MRSA bacteria. Both can cause deadly infections.

Alandejani presented his findings at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Oto-laryn-gology, Head and Neck Surgery.

And he was swamped with questions from doctors and sinus patients eager to try it.

“Even the patients in our clinics want us to treat them right now, before even doing the trials or the animal studies. And they’re willing to take the harm of it, if there is any, because their disease is not treated until now.”

Alandejani says the challenge is that the honey has to come in contact with the bacteria – so it would have to be diluted and injected into the sinuses.

Dr. Murray Grossan is an ear, nose, and throat doctor in Santa Monica.
He says the treatment looks promising.

“They do use honey for stomach problems, stomach ulcers and so on, so it probably would be pretty safe to put into the sinus. But unfortunately, we have to go through all sorts of protocol there.”


In the meantime, stores in Alandejani’s hometown of Ottawa have had an increase in sales of manuka honey after the study was reported.

It’s not cheap – manuka honey can cost as much as $50 a jar.

Alandejani says he used the regular manuka honey, nothing especially strong.
And he can’t vouch for it’s effectiveness if you just eat it.

But he’s now trying it on sinuses in animal studies.

And soon, his patients with chronic sinusitus will have their chance to try it as well.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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Hard Times for Honeybees

  • (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

Beekeepers are continuing to lose their honeybees. About a third of many beekeepers’ colonies have been dying mysteriously each year for the past several years. Rebecca Williams reports researchers think they’re getting closer to an answer:

Transcript

Beekeepers are continuing to lose their honeybees. About a third of many beekeepers’ colonies have been dying mysteriously each year for the past several years. Rebecca Williams reports researchers think they’re getting closer to an answer:

Honeybees have had some bad luck.

Researchers think there are a couple of things hurting the bees all at once.

They think bees’ immune systems are being weakened.

Maybe because of pesticides. And maybe because bees aren’t getting the variety of food sources they need.

Bees normally collect pollen and nectar from many different plants. But when they’re used on farms, they’re just visiting one kind of plant.

And then on top of that, bees appear to be getting hit by a virus.

Maryann Frazier is a honeybee expert at Penn State University.

She says, until researchers can figure out exactly what’s going on, she expects beekeepers to keep losing a lot of their bees.

“I think what we’re at risk of, more so than the bees dying out, is the beekeepers giving up and not continuing to truck their bees all over the country.”

Beekeepers use honeybees to pollinate about a third of our food supply.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Beekeeper Points Finger at Pesticides

  • One theory behind the bee loss is pesticides (Photo by Robert Flynn, courtesy of the USDA)

Honeybees are dying at an alarming rate.
Some beekeepers have lost their entire hives.
It’s been tough for food growers too. That’s
because honeybees pollinate up to a third of
the foods we eat. Mark Brush checked in with
a commercial beekeeper to see how pollinating
is going this year:

Transcript

Honeybees are dying at an alarming rate.
Some beekeepers have lost their entire hives.
It’s been tough for food growers too. That’s
because honeybees pollinate up to a third of
the foods we eat. Mark Brush checked in with
a commercial beekeeper to see how pollinating
is going this year:

“Well, there’s twelve months on the calendar and I think we’re busy for thirteen of ’em.”

That’s Dave Hackenburg. He trucks his bees year-round all over the country to pollinate
crops. He says, so far, there have been enough bees to cover most of the crops. But with
bees continuing to die – he’s not sure how much longer beekeepers can keep up.

Hackenburg is convinced that pesticides – known as nicotinoids – are behind the loss in
honeybees.

“I can lay down a road map where bees have been – that have been on these crops where
these products are used – within two to three months afterwards – we start to see the
colonies collapse. Bees that didn’t go to these crops, set out in the woods, away from pesticides, are doing fine.”

Researchers are investigating pesticides as one possible cause. They’re also looking at
viruses, stress, and a lack of genetic diversity as other possibilities.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Urban Beekeepers Creating a Buzz

  • Beekeeper Rich Wieske started with two hives in downtown Detroit. Now he manages more than one hundred throughout the city and its suburbs. (Photo courtesy of Rich Wieske, by Rebecca Cook)

Honeybees are dying. Sometimes entire hives
are dying and scientists can’t figure out exactly why.
Some people are trying to help, and one of the ways
they’re helping is by becoming beekeepers. Rebecca
Williams reports there are some beekeepers who actually
raise bees in big cities:

Transcript

Honeybees are dying. Sometimes entire hives
are dying and scientists can’t figure out exactly why.
Some people are trying to help, and one of the ways
they’re helping is by becoming beekeepers. Rebecca
Williams reports there are some beekeepers who actually
raise bees in big cities:

Some people call them guerrilla beekeepers. They like to keep their hive locations a secret. That’s
so the neighbors won’t get worried about 60,000 bees living next door.

There are white beehive boxes on rooftops in Paris, Chicago, Manhattan. And there are beehives
tucked into open lots in the middle of downtown Detroit.

(traffic and other neighborhood sounds)

Rich Wieske has been raising bees here for eight years.

“You think of cities as buildings. Detroit’s a little different because there’s been a lot of homes
bulldozed and torn down so there’s a lot of open fields – great for bees!”

Bees have a lot to eat in the city. They love the pollen and nectar from backyard gardens.

Rich Wieske’s just gotten a shipment of bees from California. Today he’s installing new worker
bees and queens into his hives in the corner of an empty lot. He’s one of the people trying to
replace the bees that are mysteriously dying.

This shipment of bees comes packed in wooden boxes – sort of like big shoeboxes – and there are
about 9,000 bees to a box.

(Buzzing)

“Don’t move fast but be warned okay?”

Wieske gives the box a big shake. No kidding – he’s shaking the box of 9,000 bees. They pour
into the hive in a bright orange stream. The bees buzz by our heads, and land in my hair, and fly
up my sleeves.

(buzzing)

But Rich Wieske promises the honeybees are not out to get us. They’d actually rather not sting,
because then they die.

Wieske has a hive he suspects is a little worked up. So he gets out the smoker. It looks like the
love child of a watering can and a miniature accordion. It sends out little puffs of white smoke.

(puffing noises)

“I use lavender, sage, any dried herbs. Also those
chips you find in the bottom of a gerbil cage.”

He waves the smoker around the hive before he lifts the cover off. He says the puffs of smoke
calm the bees down. It covers up the alarm pheromone bees give off, which apparently smells like
bananas if you’re unlucky enough to smell it.

Wieske got into beekeeping with two hives, and now he’s got more than a hundred.

“You’ve got to watch beekeepers. A lot of them become missionaries. You can tell a beekeeper because they love talking about bees, and they’ll talk to anybody about bees
and try to get them to become beekeepers.”

Wieske has a lot of apprentices.

(goose honking)

The next stop on our bee tour is a working farm – right in the middle of downtown Detroit.

Rich Wieske is helping his understudies install new bees in the hives. He’s giving Adam Verville
the same lesson he gave me earlier.

“This is the sort-of scary part.”

(shaking box and buzzing)

Verville says a lot of his friends keep bees in the city.

“People don’t have much money. These projects supplement our incomes essentially by giving us
food and honey.”

There is a lot of honey in beekeeping. Not a whole lot of money though. But the beekeepers say
they feel like they’re part of something bigger.

Stephen Buchmann is a bee expert. He coordinates the group Pollinator Partnership. He says
honeybees pollinate a third of the food grown in the United States. So every beekeeper replacing
disappearing bees helps.

“By having
thousands of people all over the country doing this they have a significant impact on pollinator
declines.”

Buchmann says you don’t have to raise bees in your backyard to help out. He says you can plant
flowers that bees like – like sunflowers and lavender. You can cut down on pesticides in your
yard or use none at all. And you can support your own urban beekeepers by buying local honey.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Life Not So Sweet for Honeybees

  • Honeybees have been dying at a rapid pace for the second year in a row. (Photo by Rob Flynn, courtesy of the USDA)

For the second year in a row, honeybees
are dying at a startling rate. Mark Brush reports
beekeepers are asking the public for help:

Transcript

For the second year in a row, honeybees are dying at a startling rate. Mark Brush reports
beekeepers are asking the public for help:

Farmers rely on honeybees to pollinate a lot of the food we eat – apples, blueberries,
almonds, soybeans – the list goes on and on.

Beekeepers are losing about a third of their hives each year. The sudden die-off is
known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Researchers are still trying to figure out what’s
making the bees sick.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp is the President of the Apiary Inspectors of America. He says
when the bees get sick, they fly away from the hive to die because they’re social
creatures.

“If you belong to a social group, you don’t want to infect your sisters. And so what we
think is happening. Is these bees somehow are aware that they’re ill, and so they’re flying
away from the colony to die away from the colony.”

vanEngelsdorp says you can help the honeybees by growing plants that bees like in your
backyard, by supporting local beekeepers by buying their honey, or by becoming a
beekeeper yourself.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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