Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Mysterious Disappearing Bees

MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARING BEES
Bob Allen
March 26, 2007

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.

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