When bees sneeze

Black Mountain beekeeper Ed Buchanan has lost 150 of his 400 hives in the past two years. “Part of it was starvation,” he says. “We didn’t have a good fall flow of goldenrod and aster. The other part was due to CCD.” (Colony collapse disorder is a mysterious malady that’s wiping out honeybees on at least two continents.) But despite his critical losses, Buchanan is philosophical. “They were hit worse this past winter out in the mid-U.S. There are people out there who have lost thousands of hives.”

Lonely workers: Colony collapse disorder is a mysterious malady that leaves hives nearly empty of worker bees. courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture

Besides tending his own hives, Buchanan works with the North Carolina CCD Task Force, which is searching for the cause of the problem. Reported in at least 24 states across the country and in Canada and Germany, the syndrome is known by several different names, but apiarists have generally settled on CCD, which describes the result without offering any information about the cause. That’s appropriate because, so far, the cause remains a mystery. And while the malady is much in the news this year, some beekeepers believe it has actually been around for three or four years, but only now are the dots being connected to reveal a widespread pattern of decline.

The symptoms aren’t hard to read. Mature worker bees abandon an otherwise healthy hive en masse, leaving the queen (who is flightless) and a small number of young workers behind—too few to successfully tend the many larval bees. And while bees are notorious honey bandits, for some reason other bees don’t raid the nearly abandoned hives. Something repels them. Researchers have found high levels of two types of fungus in the stricken hives, but though the levels are high, the presence of the fungi doesn’t represent anything new in and of itself.

Sandy Mush beekeeper David Cowart says he lost 50 of his 60 hives over the winter and that other local apiarists have lost at least 30 percent of their hives during the same period.

Various causes have been proposed and discarded to date. An April 16 story on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America blamed cell phones for the bee decline. “This morning a new theory. Your cell phone: Could it be killing the bees?” Diane Sawyer asked dramatically. For expert testimony, the network turned to George Carlo, a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology who wrote a book in which he argues that cell phones cause cancer. His assertions have been refuted by studies published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and he has no apparent connection with or expertise concerning bees or agriculture. Nonetheless, Yahoo News and other media outlets quickly picked up the cell phone/honeybee story.

But according to the Web site of the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, the lead agency studying the problem, the cell-phone theory was considered and discarded long ago. “The distribution of both affected and nonaffected CCD apiaries does not make this a likely cause,” reports the group, which serves as an information clearinghouse for the problem. “Also, cell-phone service is not available in some areas where affected commercial apiaries are located in the West.”

Genetically modified crops have also been put forward as a cause, with some reports in Germany suggesting that the problem was associated with the presence of Bt corn. Bt corn contains DNA from organisms that produce Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt kills caterpillars that ingest it and, in addition to the target corn earworms, has been implicated in the widespread demise of monarch butterflies. But researchers say Bt has no known effect on members of the order Hymenoptera—bees, wasps and ants—and so is an unlikely culprit. “While this possibility has not been ruled out, CCD symptoms do not fit what would be expected in Bt-affected organisms,” MAAREC reports.

The principal areas of MAAREC’s investigation at present are: chemical residue/contamination in the wax, food stores and bees; known and unknown pathogens in the bees and brood; parasite load in the bees and brood; nutritional fitness of adult bees; level of stress in adult bees; and lack of genetic diversity.

Asked if he’s developed any theory about the cause, Buchanan said, “The recommendation I made to the task force is this: I’d like to see a study done to see if the chemicals we use to kill mites [a serious hive pest in recent years] have lowered our bees’ immune systems so that some previously insignificant disease or mite is killing them.” So far, the N.C. Department of Agriculture has declined to fund such a study, he notes.

Regarding his own prospects this spring, Buchanan said: “I’ve got a standing order with a queen breeder for 150 queens. I have already started 100 hives this spring. This is the buildup period for honeybees. They’ll be going up from 12,000 to 15,000 in a hive to 50,000 within a month.”

The chief problem Western North Carolina beekeepers face this year, says Buchanan, is the weather. “It got warm too early, and things put out too early. Then came the record cold. There won’t be any early honey this year, and I’ll have to feed the new hives,” he explained. Once again, however, Buchanan took a broad view, adding, “And it’s not only the berries and apples and peaches—there’ll be no acorns and beechnuts. Wildlife will suffer this next winter.”

Nor is his concern limited to the critters. “People need to remember that every third bite of food they take is dependent on honeybee pollination. It’s like Albert Einstein said: ‘If we lose the bees, four years later we will lose the human race.’”