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.

How many more causes can we shop or tweet for? At least one more, hopes Haagen-Dazs, makers of those indulgences so inadequately called ice cream.

Haagen-Dazs has been running a campaign to raise awareness about the decline of honey bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder. It’s close to the ice cream maker’s heart, and also should we say vat? , because the bees help pollinate almonds and, obviously, supply honey, both vital ingredients for HD flavors.

Haagen Dazs announced it is extending the campaign through December and has invited the public to participate in a week of  tweeting for the cause via TwitCause, the largest social cause portal on Twitter. During the designated week, Nov. 5-11, Haagen-Dazs will donate $1, up to $500 a day, for everyone who tweets their support. The money will be sent to the University of California-Davis for a new Bee Sanctuary/Education Center and for research on how to help save the bees.

Honey bees in North America have been declining due to CCD for several years. The mysterious phenomenon claims entire colonies after the bees become disoriented and the adults fail to return to the hive.

Help the Honey Bees, a web-based campaign by Haagen Daz is trying to build buzz for the beneficial insects, which are beset by a mysterious ailment that causes whole colonies to collapse.

The effort includes backing some cute You Tube videos (dancing humans dressed as bees definitely help personify this issue), and a series of “challenges” on the Experience Project in which people can plant a flower or pledge to eat natural foods to help honey bees. There’s also a bee trivia quiz.

Why bees? And why Haagen Daz? There are pragmatic and altruistic reasons. The ice cream maker depends on honey bees for many of the foods used to flavor its delectable recipes. Almond and strawberry-flavored ice cream, for starters, both begin with bees pollinating plants in the field. Vanilla Haagen Daz, a signature flavor sweetened with honey, also depends directly on the bees – obviously. And now the company has created a new Vanilla Honey Bee to highlight the honeybee’s woes.

But bees pollinate much more than the plants Haagen Daz needs. They make many of the crops grown in the US click, come springtime. (If you missed high school biology and need a brush-up on this, there’s one on the site.) So keeping these little matchmakers healthy is an issue with many  stakeholders, basically humans who eat.

Yet, in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has killed millions of bees (one in three hives in the last three years), the bees are struggling and crops are threatened.

There are other pollinators, butterflies, bats, birds, but most are geared to certain plants. Bees are the workhorses of pollination.

Congress held hearings and the USDA is funding research, but bee farmers (apiarists) say the money is not nearly enough. Haagen Daz is donating an undisclosed amount of money to research too.

Officials have not come out with an official cause of CCD. Some researchers are studying a virus that might weaken the bees and trigger CCD. Others say pesticides, particularly certain types that are taken up by plants, may be damaging the bees neurologically. (See our story from last summer.)

Those studying CCD have noticed that afflicted bees seem to lose their homing instincts or orientation, a sign of a neurological factor. Experts are studying the problem worldwide, because without bees, ecosystems can collapse, crops and gardens can wither as fruits and vegetable plants fail to produce.

Haagen Daz hopes to raise the profile of this problem, which affects us all but has been (pardon the pun) flying under the radar.

Whatever the cause of CCD, advocates say you can do your part by:

• Getting rid of pesticides in your lawn and garden

• Planting native plants with flowers that sustain bees (The Pollinator Partnership has garden guides to make sure you’re planting what bees want to eat.)

• Sending a note to lawmakers to pay attention to this issue

Here’s one of those bee spots on You Tube:

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

A compound from honeybees known as propolis, the substance bees use to seal their hives, may protect against heat stress in athletes, according to an article released in the Journal of Food Science, published by the Institute of Food Technologists.

Honeybee propolis, or bee glue, has been widely used as a folk medicine. An active ingredient in propolis known as caffeic acid phenethyl ester (or CAPE) has a broad spectrum of biological activities including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antiviral. Hyperthermia, or heat stress, is considered to be the main factor underlying the early fatigue and dehydration seen during prolonged exercise in the heat.

The discovery is another reminder of the potential ramifications of the loss in recent years of millions of bees around the world to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Scientists 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.

In the new study, researchers examined blood from 30 competitive cyclists who engaged in endurance training for two to four years prior to the investigation. None participated in any competitions or intensive training or had any clinical illness or medical or surgical treatments four months prior to the study.

“Since hyperthermia and free radical generation are related to exercise-induced physical damage, it is reasonable to test whether an antioxidant can prevent or reduce hyperthermia-induced free radical generation and damage,” lead researcher Yu-Jen Chen of Chinese Culture University in Taiwan said in a statement. “CAPE rescued mononuclear cells from hyperthermia-induced cell death. This implies that CAPE might not only promote athletic performance but also prevent injury secondary to endurance-exercise-induced hyperthermia.”

The researchers indicated that further human studies need to be conducted to solidify their findings.

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.