{"id":8310,"date":"2007-04-17T22:54:40","date_gmt":"2007-04-18T05:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/?p=8310"},"modified":"2016-09-02T23:00:49","modified_gmt":"2016-09-03T06:00:49","slug":"are-b-c-s-bee-colonies-the-latest-to-die-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/?p=8310","title":{"rendered":"Are B.C.\u2019s bee colonies the latest to die off?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alex Roslin<\/span><\/p>\n

Publish Date: August 16, 2007<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happening to the bees? The fuzzy little honey-making critters are dying off like the dinosaurs, and no one knows why. In the U.S., according to a congressional report updated in June, up to 36 percent of 2.4 million bee colonies were wiped out last winter. Canadian beekeepers reported losses of one-third of this country\u2019s bees during the winter, including a 23-percent loss in British Columbia.<\/p>\n

Scientists have dubbed this bee Armageddon \u201ccolony collapse disorder\u201d, and it\u2019s provoking worldwide alarm. CCD doesn\u2019t just mean there\u2019ll be less honey or lower chances of getting stung. The bee pandemic is \u201cthe biggest general threat to our food supply\u201d, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because one of every three bites of food we eat comes from bee-pollinated plants: peaches, blueberries, strawberries, melons, citrus fruits, apples, broccoli, squash, cucumbers\u2013you name it. The little insects are worth $15 billion annually to U.S. farmers and $1 billion in Canada\u2013$300 million in B.C. alone.<\/p>\n

Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning entomologist E.O. Wilson told the Associated Press last May that the honeybee is nature\u2019s \u201cworkhorse\u2013and we took it for granted. We\u2019ve hung our own future on a thread.\u201d If the bee collapse continues, added Kevin Hackett, head of the USDA\u2019s bee and pollination program, we\u2019ll be \u201cstuck with grains and water\u201d.<\/p>\n

The alarm isn\u2019t due just to the sheer number of bees lost. It\u2019s also because the cause is still a mystery almost a year after CCD hit the headlines. The finger has been pointed at everything from powerful new pesticides to genetically engineered crops, weather, mites, stress, bad nutrition, microbes, even cellphones<\/strong> and, you guessed it, aliens. The search for the culprit is opening a window onto the dark side of how big agribusiness gets food to our tables.<\/p>\n

In Canada, there\u2019s another twist. Most of the Canadian beekeeping industry says the huge bee die-off here actually had nothing to do with CCD. Instead, it was simply caused by a harsh winter and an outbreak of Varroa destructor mites, a pesky little parasite that is the bane of beekeepers.<\/p>\n

\u201cCCD is simply not here,\u201d said Paul van Westendorp, the provincial apiculturist at the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. Van Westendorp is the man in charge of inspecting beekeeping operations for disease control. \u201cUp to this point, I can say with confidence that we have not experienced CCD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jean-Marc Le Dorze isn\u2019t so sure. His 1,200 hives at Golden Ears Apiaries in Mission, did just fine last winter. In fact, his loss was a paltry five to seven percent\u2013less than half the 15-percent norm. \u201cIn the early spring, my bees were in the greatest condition I\u2019ve seen them,\u201d he said. \u201cThings were looking very, very good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trouble started in mid May, when his bees were pollinating blueberries in the Fraser Valley. The bees vanished from 30 hives. No dead bees, just bee eggs and larvae left behind in hives. \u201cThe adults weren\u2019t there. Kind of like that CCD thing\u2013large, broad, sudden, unexplained die-off of adults. That\u2019s a telltale sign of CCD.\u201d<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t the catastrophic 80- to 100-percent loss that some U.S. beekeepers had seen, but what scared Le Dorze was that he didn\u2019t know the cause. It was enough to convince him not to truck his bees to Alberta for honey production as he had planned. \u201cI brought them all home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about Le Dorze\u2019s losses, van Westendorp acknowledged he had heard \u201canecdotal\u201d reports about \u201cCCD\u2013like\u201d outbreaks in B.C. He said they had occurred at \u201cless than five\u201d beekeeping operations. \u201cWe leave open the possibility that CCD exists in B.C.,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason I\u2019ve refrained from talking about CCD is the causes are still unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Le Dorze\u2019s losses did seem to come as a surprise to Ed Nowek. He\u2019s a 30-year veteran beekeeper in Vernon and president of the Canadian Honey Council, representing 400 to 500 beekeepers across the country. Nowek had just finished telling the Straight that none of the recent Canadian bee deaths were due to CCD. \u201cWe\u2019re calling it excessive winter losses,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not really considering it CCD. The symptoms are different.\u201d<\/p>\n

When told of Le Dorze\u2019s empty hives, Nowek admitted it sounds like CCD. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty interesting. It\u2019s showing symptoms similar to the U.S., yes, we could say that. I\u2019ve got to give him a call, then.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Nowek\u2019s little guys also did the disappearing trick. His 12 million bees living in 200 hives at the Planet Bee honey farm had a busy season last year. Their first pollination contract was in April. Nowek trucked them to cherry and apple orchards in the Okanagan Valley, where he set them loose to move pollen from flower to flower so the crops could grow.<\/p>\n

Next up were blueberries in May, followed by raspberries and cranberries in the Fraser Valley until July, then back to the Okanagan for honey production until August. Farmers need one to four hives to pollinate each acre, depending on the type of crop, so Nowek\u2019s tiny workers were good for 100 to 200 acres of apple trees or 50 acres of blueberry bushes.<\/p>\n

By late summer, Nowek started seeing problems. His bees were vanishing and leaving behind empty hives. Normally, when bees die from an infestation or disease, they do so in or near their hives and leave behind lots of dead bodies. This time, there were none. There wasn\u2019t even any brood in the hives to form the next generation of bee babies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was unusual,\u201d he said over the phone from his honey-products store in Vernon. \u201cThe bees were just gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came fall and winter, and Nowek lost still more bees to the usual seasonal attrition that comes with the colder weather. By last spring, he had only about one million bees left in 50 or 60 hives. A typical winter loss should have cost him just 15 percent of his hives. His loss was 70 to 75 percent since the summer.<\/p>\n

But was it CCD? No, said Nowek. He thinks the main cause was Varroa mites, which built up earlier than expected last summer and were already decimating his hives before Nowek could apply chemical treatments to kill the pests. To make matters worse, a hot July fried the flowers that bees go to for pollen, which they need for protein.<\/p>\n

DAVID HACKENBERG HAS little doubt why his bees disappeared. He\u2019s the Pennsylvania beekeeper who went public about CCD last November. He said he started the fall with more than seven million bees in 2,950 hives. One day in late November, 400 hives were suddenly empty. Like Le Dorze, Hackenberg didn\u2019t find any bodies, just brood in the hives. By January, 70 percent of his hives had been emptied.<\/p>\n

\u201cI called everybody,\u201d he said on the phone from his office at Hackenberg Apiaries in Lewisburg. \u201cSomething really weird is going on here. Bees don\u2019t go off and leave their young. But they did. We\u2019re talking about a mass exodus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hackenberg, 59, started beekeeping in high school and has worked with bees his entire adult life. He doesn\u2019t hesitate when asked what caused his bees to vanish: pesticides, particularly a new class of powerful chemicals called neonicotinoids (or neonics), which are an artificial form of nicotine.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy theory\u2013and I\u2019m just a dumb beekeeper\u2013is something has broken down their immune system,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s new is the increased usage of neonicotinoids. Three years ago, you started really seeing it. Now, it\u2019s everywhere. It\u2019s the pesticide of choice in this country\u2013and yours too. You can\u2019t get away from the stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hackenberg is now refusing to put his bees on farms where neonics are used. Back in Mission, Le Dorze said he doesn\u2019t know if neonics caused his bee losses. He does say, however, that the pesticide is usually sprayed on blueberries, the crop his bees were pollinating when they vanished.<\/p>\n

This link is fuelling controversy because neonics have become widespread, mostly through their frequent use in treating genetically engineered seeds. If neonics were to blame for CCD, it would make bees the first known species to become a casualty of the biotechnology era.<\/p>\n

Last March, the Sierra Club called on the U.S. government to fund emergency research into the neonic connection and, if GM crops are found to be responsible for CCD, to ban the plants. \u201cYou look at what\u2019s new exposure, and this is the new exposure,\u201d said Laurel Hopwood, the group\u2019s GM campaigner, from her home office in Cleveland, Ohio.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is big. We\u2019re talking about the food supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hackenberg\u2019s claims appear to coincide with the findings of the world\u2019s largest-ever field trial of GM crops, done for the British government in 2003. The three-year study, which involved 4,000 visits to fields and the counting of 1.5 million insects and birds, found that powerful chemicals used in conjunction with GM crops were highly harmful to bees, butterflies, and birds. Fields of biotech canola and sugar beets had dramatically fewer bees than conventional farms.<\/p>\n

As well, a U.S. study in 2003 found that chemical use on GM crops had shot up 32 percent per acre in the previous eight years, while it had fallen on conventional farms by 30 percent.<\/p>\n

The link between CCD and neo nics is one of the questions intriguing Chris Mullin, an insect toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University. He\u2019s a member of the CCD Working Group, a team of academic and government scientists leading research into the bee apocalypse. The group expects to release its long-awaited report in October and is zeroing in on two causes for CCD; pesticides and a new unnamed virus, Mullin said. \u201cWe\u2019ve detected within the food of honeybees a lot of pesticides, including neonicotinoids,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s still too early to tell what specific role the neonics play in causing CCD, but Mullin said studies have shown neonics degrade the immune systems of bees, making them more susceptible to disease. The working group singled out neonics, he said, because CCD made its appearance shortly after the new chemical became widespread in genetically engineered crops in 2000 and 2001. \u201cThat\u2019s why we looked at those groups of chemicals first,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Here in B.C., Paul van Westendorp is dubious. \u201cMullin may be 100 percent correct, but I should caution that I have seen highly speculative articles [about CCD]. I will wait until I have more substantial information,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Instead, he blames CCD on the explosion of so-called migratory beekeeping. The practice has become a linchpin of corporate agriculture and involves trucking bees thousands of kilometres to pollinate up to 20 crops each year. \u201cHoneybees have not evolved over millions of years to spend their lives on the backs of flatbed trailers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The heavy workload isn\u2019t just stressing the hell out of bees. It also doesn\u2019t give them adequate nutrition. That\u2019s because in the era of big agribusiness, each pollination site is a vast monoculture: just one type of crop, not the broad variety of plants that bees feast on naturally.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the same thing as if you eat only bananas,\u201d van Westendorp said. \u201cYou will not only be sick of bananas, but you will have a few nutrition problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the bee workload has soared, U.S. bee colony numbers have collapsed from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million last year, before CCD hit. \u201cLike in any livestock production system, if you\u2019re stressing the animal, it will not only malfunction, it will become vulnerable to disease,\u201d van Westendorp said.<\/p>\n

Canada is slightly better positioned to resist CCD, he said, because migratory beekeepers move bees shorter distances and fewer times per season.<\/p>\n

Douglas McRory, the provincial government apiculturist in Ontario, agrees that U.S. practices are likely to blame for CCD. \u201cThey put those colonies on trucks and move them around the whole frigging country. The poor things don\u2019t know where they are half the time,\u201d he said. \u201cTheir beekeepers are doing stuff that has come back to haunt them that our guys don\u2019t do up here.\u201d<\/p>\n

McRory also blames chemicals\u2013not those used by farmers, but rather those used by beekeepers themselves. U.S. beekeepers indiscriminately use pesticides to control mites and other infestations, he said, and some are suspected of brewing their own chemicals to save costs. The misuse of chemicals has fostered drug resistance among some pests, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve loaded up their beehives with so many chemicals down there\u2013some registered, some not. They\u2019ve got those bees resistant to everything known to man.\u201d<\/p>\n

BACK IN PENNSYLVANIA, Hackenberg is frustrated by the Canadian response. \u201cThe provincial folks [in Canada] have got their heads buried in the sand,\u201d he retorted. He admitted that trucking bees around the country puts stress on the little critters: \u201cNo doubt about it; we\u2019ve been beating these things around.\u201d But he said he\u2019s done it for 40 years, while CCD has only just appeared. As for the chemicals used by beekeepers, he answered: \u201cWe have beekeepers using the same mix of chemicals for years, long before this thing happened. We also have beekeepers who got CCD and didn\u2019t use any chemicals,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething is going haywire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth may be all of the above, according to Mark Winston, an SFU entomologist who has done extensive research on bees. \u201cWe\u2019re probably looking at multiple factors that came together in the past season in a perfect storm,\u201d he said on the phone from his Vancouver office.<\/p>\n

The culprit, he said, is likely the combination of stressors from the rise of big corporate agriculture\u2013chemicals, monoculture, and trucking bees around all season\u2013which has made bees sitting ducks for diseases and infestations. \u201cI don\u2019t know if a new virus would be popping up if bees weren\u2019t already stressed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt raises a fundamental question about mass agriculture. We\u2019ve managed things to such an extent that it is biting back at us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source URL:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.straight.com\/article-105742\/are-b-c-s-bee-colonies-the-latest-to-die-off<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.emfacts.com\/2007\/08\/785-bee-die-off-now-observed-in-british-columbia\/<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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