Bee Farmers Observe Sudden Hive Die Off

By Jerry Cimisi

"We are potentially going to see an epidemic this year." Ray Lackey, president of the Long Island Beekeepers Association was relating the strange -- and potentially devastating -- problem that is afflicting honeybees: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Like the signal event that begins a horror movie, beekeepers are opening their hives this year and finding many of them empty -- as if the bees had left of one mind and decided not to return. In perhaps less ominous but no less mysterious cases, all the bees in the hive are found dead, with the beekeeper shifting perplexedly though dried, desiccated bodies.

Whereas beekeepers might experience a loss of ten or even twenty percent of their bees over the winter (as the bees hunker down and feed off the summer's honey), there are beekeepers who are losing more than half of their hives in this manner. So, most people might think, "Well, I guess the price of honey is going up." But it's much more serious than that. The production and sale of honey is not the principal moneymaker of the beekeeping business. Rather, it is supplying farmers with hives so the honeybees can pollinate their crops. It's an issue whose concerns have expanded outside the beekeepers' world. The end of March, the matter was the subject of testimony before hearings before the House Committee on Agriculture.

"We can import honey," said Lackey, "but we can't import bees." Agriculture is highly dependent on the honeybee. A major example is the almond crop in California. An industry worth billions of dollars, that supplies 80 percent of the world's almonds, the CA almond industry requires 1.2 million hives to pollinate the state's orchards. With about 70,000-100,000 bees to a hive, you do the math. "I'd say that about 60 percent of the hives are trucked in from outside the state," Lackey added. A recent article from the Washington Post reported that two entire truckloads of bees brought to California (for the almond crop) from the northeast were found dead on arrival.

There are large commercial beekeepers that follow the progression of crops from state to state. Richard Blohm, a member of the Long Island Beekeepers, outlined the commercial beekeeper's progress in the northeast. "You'll have concerns with only 3,000 hives and having to truck them to the blueberries in New Jersey, the apple orchards upstate [New York], the wild blueberries in Maine (lowbush blueberries different than the ones in Jersey), then the cranberries in Massachusetts." In fact, Colony Collapse Disorder seems to be the ugly culmination of different problems that have been afflicting honeybees over the past few years.

Peter Bizzoso of Manorville, rents out hives to "about a dozen farmers on the North and South Forks." He rents out hives to pollinate apples, cherries, strawberries, squashes and especially pumpkins. "My family's been in the bee business for 150 years, first in Brooklyn and New Jersey. I've been losing more bees over the past six years." He said he was down to a hundred hives from about two hundred a year ago, though he does not attribute all of the loss to CCD. "A lot of things have been hitting bees the last few years. There have been two kinds of mites, the CCD that no one really knows the cause of, and, with me, warm weather in January and then a colder second half of the winter. The queen laid eggs in January that the rest of the hive had to keep warm. There was enough honey to feed the worker bees wintering over, but when they are packed around the eggs to keep them warm, they won't even get off the brood to get honey for themselves. They starved to death, even though the honey was only inches away."

With hive loss hitting many beekeepers, the fact that one hears stories about hives being stolen on the East End isn't surprising. "A hive is worth about $200," said Lackey.

Blohm, who lives in East Northport, said, "It's maybe too early to tell yet how the bees on the island will fare this year, though we're getting all these reports from the south about bees that go out foraging and don't come back. Recall Lackey's earlier remark about not being able to import honeybees. The fact is, all honeybees were indeed once imported from Europe. But, of course, Native Americans grew their crops of squash, corn, etc. without them. Blohm said, "Most people confuse all types of bees. There are bumblebees that can also pollinate crops. But, unlike the honeybees, bumblebees don't survive the winter -- only the queen does. Bumblebees and other native pollinators [butterflies, some birds and bats and solitary bees such as sand bees], aren't able to pollinate crops enough for commercial concerns."

Honeybee hives have 100,000 bees. A typical bumblebee nest is 40-50 bees. Blohm added, "One thing bumblebees are good for is to pollinate in greenhouses. Honeybees always fly up to light, they keep hitting themselves against the glass. Bumblebees won't do that."

One commercial beekeeper who testified before the House Committee on Agriculture this past March was James Doan. Doan Family Farms is located in Hamlin, New York, but Doan had a lot to say about Long Island and the East End in particular. "Last summer, I had 4,300 hives," he said. "Today, I have about 2,000. We lost about a 1,000 last autumn to Colony Collapse Disease and the rest this January and February. We ship the hives down to Ft. Meade, Florida in the winter. Every week those months, we'd find 10 to 20 hives out of a hundred gone."

Doan, as well as other beekeepers, are of the opinion that the culprit is the pesticide Goucho, which causes disorientation in insects. "The problem is, at one time, it was just being used for corn. Now, it has become a broad-spectrum pesticide, it's on other crops as well as lawns.

"The bees in France were having the same problems as the bees here. In 2003, France banned Goucho and there's no problem now." Doan, who said he visited Long Island every year, related that even though the farms of the East End, who have certainly used their share of pesticides, have decreased in number in the past generation, they have been replaced by developments of large houses with big lawns or mansions with even bigger lawns, on which Goucho is being used. "I would say that there is as much pesticide being put down on these lawns has when these areas were farms." He added, "It does not seem that CDD is as prevalent on Long Island as it has been elsewhere, and let's hope it stays that way this year, but who knows. The USDA is looking into Goucho right now, as a result of the testimony of a lot of us before the Ag Committee, which was very concerned. One professor said she could not find even one bumblebee in all of California; she thought that the bumblebee might have become extinct there. "If the USDA does come to the conclusion it's Goucho causing the problem, I'm sure by next year it'll be restricted. In France, they let suppliers and farmers use and sell whatever supply was at hand, then that was it. If it just goes back to being used for corn here, we can deal with that." It has taken this dire condition to make the public realize the worth of bees. Ray Lackey related, "It is estimated that one hive of honeybees produces the equivalent of $3,000 in bird seed each year. In the normal two-mile radius of foraging, the worker bees pollinate enough flowers to produce enough seeds for birds and other animals that would cost $3,000 to buy. That shows how important these bees are for the local ecology. Human beings aren't the only ones dependent on them."

As Richard Bloom says, "Bees are the one thing on the planet that everything they do benefits people."