February 11th, 2008
Ellingson believes that would be to the nation’s detriment. He says that when the humble Apis mellifera, which constitutes 95 percent of the country’s crop pollinators (for produce as well as food for cattle feed), is in desperately slim supply, the government and mega-farms will finally act. But not until many commercial bee producers have already gone out of business.
“The beekeepers are considered a small player in agriculture production, but people just don’t see it. They don’t see the light. But they will,” he says.
Those concerns make continued research all the more essential (and, as it turns out, controversial) – not just as concerns CCD, which causes the most wide-spread devastation, but in relation to the dreaded, vampiric Varroa mite, which kills more individual bees than anything else, according to both Danny Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation, and Pennsylvania State Apiarian Dennis vanEngelsvorp.
“If we want to see this industry survive, we need to have some answers to long-standing problems as well as the new ones,” vanEngelsvorp says. “We’ve been dealing with the Varroa mite for 25 years, and right now we don’t have good control measures for it. So there are some very concrete things that we need to do outside of CCD to keep bees healthy (the Farm Bill’s funding would address some of that). For instance, we don’t understand bee nutrition. … But CCD is really scary because you have that on top of Varroa. So you can do everything right to get rid of Varroa mites, and you still might be wiped out by CCD. … They could very well be linked, like smoking is linked to a lot of different health issues. It’s a real complicated problem.”
Meanwhile, entomologist Cox-Foster and key researchers like the USDA’s Jeff Pettis, Columbia University’s Ian Lipkin and others in Arizona and Champagne, Ill., continue the race for a cure.
In an interview last week, Cox-Foster said that her Penn State lab is seeing ever more convincing evidence of the IAPV link, based on an experiment begun in mid-January, which introduced the virus into healthy hives. And if the lab can indisputably link IAPV to CCD, that’s one big step toward solving the mystery.
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