Mysterious Disappearing Bees

  • Brownish-orange bumps on the backs of these bees are Varroa jacobsoni mites, a possible cause of CCD. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:

Transcript

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:


That fresh crisp apple you bite into for lunch comes from
a bee pollinating an apple blossom, but honeybees in the
U.S. are under tremendous stress. A new threat is
devastating them. It can wipe out entire colonies.


There’s plenty of honey still left in the hives to feed
the bees, but the bees have vanished. Scientists are
baffled. They’re calling it “Colony Collapse Disorder.”


Dennis van Englesdorp is bee inspector for the state of
Pennsylvania. He says the disorder first showed up in his
state last fall. But it’s now threatening the entire
beekeeping industry:


“We could not sustain the level of loss we’re seeing this
year several years in a row. And there are crops that are
90 to 100% reliant on honeybees for pollination. You need
bees for apples. And if you don’t have bees you don’t have
apples.”


A research team at Penn State University has given
themselves until fall to come up with some answers.


On a hilly farm in northern Michigan, Julius Kolarik raises
apples, cherries and honeybees. It’s a sunny day with the
temperature nudging near 50 degrees:


“So, no, it’s a beautiful day for bees. Makes you feel
good when you see bees flying. Makes me feel good
(laughs).”


This is the first time Kolarik has checked his bee yard
since fall. He uses his hive tool to pry the top off each
three-foot high colony to see how the bees are doing:


“We can see that they’re alive and that’s the main thing.”


It used to be considered an embarrassment if a beekeeper lost more
than 10% or so of his bees annually, but things have
gotten a lot tougher in recent years.


Parasitic mites have infested honeybees just about
everywhere. They’ve weakened the bees and left them
vulnerable to diseases and that’s meant annual losses
double what they used to be.


Now on top of that, there’s this new disorder. But Julius
Kolarik is not so sure how new it is. He’s been
raising honeybees since he was a kid:


“We’ve seen some of the same symptoms, so uh, through the
years. Even before we finally said that we have mites, uh.
We were getting unexplained losses. But now it’s come back
again. ‘Cause other years guys have lost whole yards but
left one or two hives.”


Bee researchers say previous outbreaks of colony collapse
were isolated incidents. This time it’s spread across the
country.


Tom McCormick’s small beekeeping operation supplies honey
to local markets in western Pennsylvania. That is, it did
until two years ago. That’s when he says collapsing
disorder killed half his colonies, so he bought more bees
to replace them. They did OK last year, but this spring
he’s looking at an 80% loss:


“To me it doesn’t make sense to go buy more bees and throw
them right back into the same situation without any idea
what the cause is.”


McCormick says two of his beekeeping friends have been
totally wiped out. And they’ve been seeing more than one
thing going on in their hives:


“One, we see hives full of honey and no bees. Totally
gone. We see other situations where we have a nice large
cluster of bees with honey all surrounding them and the
bees dead.”


When he reported this two years ago, he says, state
officials ignored him. Pennsylvania state beekeeper Dennis van Englesdorp admits
he thought McCormick had a serious mite problem at first.


But now researchers at Penn
State are checking other possible
environmental stresses that could be killing honeybees.
van Englesdorp says pinpointing the cause can be just
as difficult with bees as it is with humans:


“You can get a heart attack if you don’t eat well, if you
drink too much, if you smoke, you’re genetically disposed
to a heart attack. It could be one of those factors. It
could be a lot of those factors combining together.”


For this year, he says, the disorder means the number of honeybee colonies will be lower,
but he expects there to be enough to meet pollination
demands.


For The Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.

Related Links

Mapping Wooly Mammoth Genome

Wooly mammoths stopped roaming the Great Lakes region 10,000 years ago. But a Canadian scientist has made a breakthrough in reviving their prehistoric genetic code. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

Wooly mammoths stopped roaming the Great Lakes region 10,000 years
ago, but a Canadian scientist has made a breakthrough in reviving their
prehistoric genetic code. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David
Sommerstein reports:


Scientists have studied ancient DNA in the past, but only in fragments.
Geneticist Hendrik Poinar got well-preserved DNA from a wooly
mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost. Poinar is an assistant
professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He and
colleagues at Penn State University have found a way to map the entire
mammoth genome.


“So, it’s really having a Kodak moment on the genes of the past, really,
as they were evolving, and being able to answer fascinating questions
about what makes a mammoth a mammoth, or what makes a Neanderthal a
Neanderthal, and how they differ from a human.”


So far, they’ve completed just one percent of the genome.


Poinar says the discovery begs tough ethical questions, like bringing
extinct animals back to life.


“Creating Pleistocene Park, basically.”


Poinar published the discovery in a recent issue of the Journal Science.


For the GLRC, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Urban Vegetable Farm Takes Root in Brownfield

  • Just outside the Greensgrow compound (photo by Brad Linder)

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of a gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a small
farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial neighborhood:

Transcript

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of an gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a
small farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial
neighborhood:


One of the first things you notice about this one-acre plot in
Philadelphia is how out of place the farm looks. About a block away is a
busy interstate highway that jams up with rush hour traffic twice a day.


The farm itself is surrounded by rowhouses, a steel galvanizing plant, and
an auto detail shop.


Chino Rosatto runs the auto shop. About 8 years ago, he first met his new
neighbors – a small group of farmers.


”It was weird at first, you don’t see no farm in the city.”


But Rosatto says he got used to the farm started by Mary Seton Corboy
pretty quickly.


“It was an empty lot. Nothing there. Just fenced up, and that was it. She
came up, did something with it.”


Before it was an empty lot, this city block was a steel plant. In 1988
the building was demolished, and the EPA declared the site hazardous.


It was cleaned up, but Rosatto says it was nothing but concrete slabs
until Mary Seton Corboy and her small group of volunteers came and started
the farm they call Greensgrow.


Corboy moved to Philadelphia from the suburbs nearly a decade ago. With a
background as a chef, she’d always been concerned about how hard it was to
find fresh produce. So she decided to grow it herself.


“The question that just kept coming up over and over again was, is there
any reason why you have to be in a rural area to grow food, given the fact
that the market for the food, the largest market for the food, is in the
urban area?”


Corboy says usually food travels an average of 1500 miles from its source
to wind up on most Americans plates. And she says when it comes to flavor
– nothing is more important than how fresh the food is.


“If you eat strawberries that are commercially available,
you have no taste recognition of something that people 40 years ago would
say is a strawberry, because of the refrigeration, because of the way they
are picked underripe, because of the things they are sprayed with to give
them a longer shelf life.”


Corboy says her first choice for a farm wouldn’t have been an abandoned
industrial site. But the rent was cheaper than it would be at almost any
other spot in the city.


And even though the EPA and scientists from Penn State University
confirmed that there were no toxic chemicals left, Corboy doesn’t plant
anything edible in the ground.


She grows some plants in greenhouses. Others are planted in raised soil
beds. And she grows lettuce in PVC pipes that deliver nutrients to the
plants without any soil at all.


Corboy still regularly sends plant samples out for testing. The results?


“At one point Penn State sent us back a report, we talked to
them on the phone about it, and they said your stuff is actually cleaner
than stuff that we’ve seen grown on farms. Go figure that. We feel very, very comfortable
with the produce that we grow. Because, you know, I’ve been living on it
myself for 8 years.”


And restaurant owners say they’re happy to buy some of the freshest
produce available.


Judy Wicks is owner the White Dog Cafe, a Philadelphia
restaurant that specializes in locally grown foods and meat from animals
raised in humane conditions. She’s been a loyal Greensgrow customer for 8
years.


“As soon as we heard about Greensgrow, we were really excited
about the idea of supporting an urban farm on a brownfield – what a
dream! To you know, take an unsightly, unused block, and turn it into a
farm. It’s just a really exciting concept.”


Wicks says she’s never had a concern about the quality of the food,
because of the care taken to prevent it from touching the soil.


In addition to its restaurant business, Greensgrow sells fruit and
vegetables to Philadelphia residents at a farmer’s market twice a week.
The farm also operates one of the only nurseries in the city, which begins
selling plants this spring.


Mary Seton Corboy says running the farm has taught her a lot about food,
the environment, and waste. She says she doesn’t look at empty lots the
same way anymore. She’s learned to squeeze fruits, vegetables and flowers
out of every space of this city block. And she sees value in the things
other people throw out.


On a recent night Corboy was driving home with her farm manager Beth Kean,
and they spotted a pile of trash beside a building.


“But what they had dumped were all these pallets. And Beth
was with me in the car, and we both turned and looked at them and went,
Look at those pallets! Let’s come back and get them, they’re in great
shape!”


Urban farming is tough. Corboy originally had lofty goals for her farm.
Greensgrow was going to be a pilot project, something she’d expand to
include 10 farms throughout Philadelphia.


8 years later, Greensgrow is still anchored on its original one-acre site.
But by keeping her costs low and selling to loyal customers, Corboy sold
200-thousand dollars worth of produce last year. That was enough to make
2004 the farm’s first profitable year.


For the GLRC, I’m Brad Linder.

Related Links