Beekeeper Laura Johnson enjoys tending to her buzzing friends, but the real motive behind her hobby is stopping the decline of honey bees.

Honey Bees (Photo: USDA)

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has been threatening bees, and the dozens of crops they serve, around the world for the past several years.

So Johnson, an organic gardener in suburban Atlanta, decided it was time to jump into honey.

It wasn’t a great year to start. An unusually rainy season cut honey production for many Georgia beekeepers. And since Johnson’s hive was so new, she decided to let the bees keep their honey this year instead of harvesting it.

“That’s part of the reason I got a hive. I figure if we help the bees along maybe that will help. Without bees we won’t have food,” she said.

Johnson reasons that more bee keepers can help slow the decline of honey bees. And with scientists breeding stronger strains of bees, she hopes they have a fighting chance.

Right now she has one hive, but has plans for another in the spring.

“I’m trying to do it as natural as possible, with no chemicals,” she said. “I was green before it was cool.”

For example, she puts powdered sugar in the hive to get rid of mites and cinnamon to discourage ants.

Bee keepers across the US had a slightly better year in 2009, with honey bee losses slowing slightly in the U.S. over the 2008-2009 winter, when the most bees succumb to disease. About 29 percent of the domestic honey bees died from CCD and other causes, compared with 36 percent and 32 percent in the previous two winters.

While the year was better, losses of that magnitude are not “sustainable,” according to the report by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the USDA.

Georgia saw a rough harvest this year, according to avid beekeeper and county cooperative extension agent Tom Bonnell.  Honey production was down due to a weird confluence of heavy rain and heat. Bonnell’s hives only produced eight gallons this year, compared with 15 gallons last year.

Like his fellow bee keepers, Bonnell monitors reports about CCD, a phenomenon in which the bees leave the hive, become disoriented and fail to return, leaving the hive to die.

Some experts believe Colony Collapse Disorder can be attributed to a virus caused by the varroa mite; others say the bees are being poisoned by pesticides that act on the nervous system. The bees are exposed to the pesticides while eating pollen in crop fields, and the neurotoxins cause them to lose their bearings.

Some believe another contributing factor to CCD is the way bees are used in commercial agriculture, with beekeepers taking hives large distances across the US to pollinate fields. This theory maintains that the traveling bees become vulnerable to disease and stressed as they move in and out of their home turf.

Tom Bonnell demonstrates his working honey hives

“About every 10 years something comes up and aggravates the honey bee,” Bonnell said. “I think CCD is hitting the commercial bee keepers and not the hobbyists … (is) because they (hobbyists) don’t drag bees all over the United States.”

“Once you drag them from state to state you don’t know what they’re getting into.”

Heightened awareness of CCD has led to an increase in the number of new beekeepers and bee clubs, Bonnell said. And that’s a sweet situation.

“It can be a family adventure. You can look at that as an heirloom to pass down to generations,” Bonnell noted.

Commercial beekeeper Billy Engle also relishes the practice of bee keeping, but has decided to downsize this year because it’s too much work for his failing health.

Engle has operated Rose Creek Honey Farm in The Rock, Georgia for more than 20 years.

“It was not a good year for bees. Mine really have not died off like the previous two years, but I only had half a honey crop this time,” he said.

If you’ve been wondering about all the buzz over honeybees, here is some food for thought – or rather some thought about food: Bees play a role in one out of every three bites of food Americans eat.

Pollinators, mainly bees, but also butterflies, songbirds and even bats, perform such a critical function in the food chain that their absence threatens everything from the viability of vast fields of commercial corn and other crops to the tomatoes in your garden. Without the bees and other pollinators, plants can fail to produce the fruits and seeds we eat.

Which is why a San Francisco-based group called the Pollinator Partnership has dedicated itself to the survival of pollinators — from hummingbirds to small mammals to the fragile and busiest pollinators of them all, the bees. Partnership members, along with beekeepers and researchers testified before Congress last week to lobby lawmakers for more funding to research the decline of many pollinators, particularly the loss of millions of bees around the world to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Oft described as a “mysterious” phenomenon, CCD is increasingly being linked, not so mysteriously, to a new class of potent synthetic nicotine-based pesticides that are used on a wide array of crops. Germany recently banned several pesticides in this category because of their suspected role in the deaths of millions of bees; other experts are raising questions about whether plants treated with neo-nicotinoids are toxic to bees because the plants harbor the pesticide in their nectar and pollen.

Beekeepers, researchers and advocates want the U.S. House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture to help find answers.

“What I asked for at the testimony was some sort of funding to sample what’s inside our hives. It’s only by following the data that we’ll get a clue on this (CCD), but so far the effort to collect data has been very limited,” said David Mendes, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

Some scientists, including those looking at the issue for the U.S. government, believe that CCD is a result of multiple stresses on the bees, such as loss of habitat, drought and possibly chronic exposure to pesticides, that weaken the bees immune systems, subjecting them to untimely deaths from viruses and other infections.

But Mendes, among others, thinks the trigger could be more specific.

“I’m of the opinion that something is poisoning our bees,” he said, explaining that more sampling of hives should reveal what is causing fundamental changes in bee behavior, such as the hallmark abandonment of hives that occurs with CCD.

Mendes says he and other beekeepers suspect that nicotine-based pesticides may be to blame because they act on the bees’ nervous system, which could explain the changes in the bees feeding and homing behaviors that appear related to CCD.

These pesticides act differently than previous generations of contact pesticides because they are taken up “systemically” or internally by the plants’ roots and leaves, and persist for longer in the soil and treated crops, he said.

Contaminated adult bees could be transferring these chemicals via affected pollen to their young, possibly inflicting neurological damage even at the larval stage, Mendes explained.

The Florida beekeeper, another beekeeper, David Godlin, and experts testifying before the subcommittee urged Congress to treat the matter with more urgency and allocate more funding to explore the pesticide connection, or any other explanations for CCD.

By Shermakaye Bass

A year and a half ago, news of a mysterious phenomenon captured the country’s attention – something known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that was affecting up to 30 percent of America’s commercial honeybee producers, whose mobile apiaries pollinate one-third of the country’s food supply.

For months, the international media carried reports on CCD (essentially a disappearing act by America’s worker honeybees), projecting repercussions that would drive produce and dairy prices through the roof and eventually cause large-scale food shortages in the U.S.

Then, as inexplicably as the syndrome’s arrival around 2004-2005, the media blitz died down. This winter, while commercial beekeepers prepare to send their hives cross-country for spring pollination, the CCD problem again looms large, if not larger, as some apiculturists see hints of a recurring nightmare. Others report having already lost huge chunks of their colonies.

“I think people thought we had it worked out, but we don’t,” says Pennsylvania State University’s Diana Cox-Foster, adding that a lack of federal funding has stymied critical research. She and others say that, indeed, if CCD isn’t resolved soon, American agriculture will feel a major sting, and so will consumers.

The good news is that over the past year, and particularly in the past couple of months, scientists have made important inroads. According to entomologist Cox-Foster, the newest findings from her and collaborators at Columbia University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Research Laboratory show a solid link between U.S. versions of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) DNA and hive decimation, strongly tying the virus to imported Australian honeybee packages. The team has long suspected a connection between IAPV and CCD.

Last month, they and others around the country shared data at the National Beekeeping Conference in Sacramento, the first ever gathering of the country’s two major bee associations. CCD researchers also discussed ongoing attempts to characterize and isolate different viruses that appear to play a role in CCD, while others continue to explore the impact of environmental degradation, chemical interlopers, as well as disease carried by Varroa mites and small-hive beetles.

Photo: Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium

Beekeepers report having already lost huge chunks of their colonies

Though far from having an answer, producers and scientists emerged from the meeting more convinced than ever that if Congress doesn’t quickly fund CCD research and a national honeybee-health survey – provisions that are in both versions of a Farm Bill currently on the table – the beekeepers, too, may become a dying breed.

Minnesota beekeeper David Ellingson, whose family farm celebrated its 60th anniversary last year, says that although his colonies are looking good so far this winter (last year he lost 65 percent), he’s desperate for action.

“You know, we need answers to this yesterday – and we need the funding now. Next year is too late,” the 54-year-old says. “There have been other farm bills in the past (with authorization for bee research funding), but it didn’t happen. Things like that make you wonder. With all the technology we have now in agriculture and science.… I just know I can’t survive another year like I had last year.”

Since the colony collapses were first reported in 2004, apiculturists have been lobbying lawmakers and federal agencies for funds (approximately $75 million in the current proposed legislation). Some are optimistic that this time help is on the way, while others like Scott Black Hoffman, of the Xerces Society in Oregon (which promotes biodiversity), suspect that this being an election year – “and with so many other things on people’s minds” – bee health will once again get tabled.