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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>An article about bees and CCD from the latest
issue of <EM>House and Garden</EM> magazine.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A
href="http://www.houseandgarden.com/gardening/almanac/bees">http://www.houseandgarden.com/gardening/almanac/bees</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV id=articlehed><STRONG><FONT size=4>Bee Smart</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV id=articleintro><STRONG>The huge number of empty hives has been blamed on
cell phones and pesticides, but the real culprit could be the dim way we garden
now</STRONG></DIV>
<DIV id=articleauthor><SPAN class="c cs"><EM><SPAN>By</SPAN> Tom
Christopher</EM> </SPAN></DIV><!-- start article body -->
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Becky Jones takes her tool and pops the lid off another beehive. She finds
no activity in the hive's top story. "It doesn't look good, Ted." Her husband
and partner in Jones's Apiaries, Ted strides over. The tension is
palpable.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>So far, these beekeepers' survey of the 52 hives they delivered a few days
ago to pollinate the blueberry bushes on a farm in Glastonbury, Connecticut, has
been reassuring. Clouds of honeybees have surged around us, carrying pollen and
nectar back to their hives and in the process fertilizing the blueberry blossoms
to ensure an abundant crop in mid-July. But the unspoken fear all morning has
been the possibility of colony collapse disorder (CCD), the mysterious ailment
that destroyed up to 70 percent of the bee colonies in some regions of the
United States last winter. Ted has a friend in Pennsylvania who lost 5,000
hives.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nor, as Becky points out, is CCD a calamity just for beekeepers. About a
third of the food crops grown in the United States depend on honeybees for
pollination. Without a visit from hives like those of the Joneses, an orchard's
apple crop might be reduced by three-quarters. Even the wild blueberries in
Maine now depend on imported hives. Sixty thousand hives, Ted tells me, mostly
trucked in from out of state, are needed each spring to pollinate that crop.
After the hives are trucked to New York State for the apple orchards early in
the season, they are taken to Massachusetts and then to their sojourn in Maine.
These days, honeybees have a schedule fully as frenetic as that of any corporate
multitasker.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>And that is surely a factor in the current honeybee disaster. A
conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Claire Kremen
has been focusing since 1999 on the interaction of farming practices with
populations of wild and domesticated bees. Treating honeybees as migratory
workers stresses the hives, but, she adds, it's not as if CCD came out of the
blue. For 50 years, she says, the number of honeybee colonies in the United
States has been in a steady decline (the total has decreased by 50 percent),
punctuated intermittently by sudden die-offs caused by epidemics of pests and
diseases. Trucking the hives all over the country, she adds, is a perfect way to
increase stress and spread disease. In fact, I've heard beekeepers refer to
Maine as "the cesspool of beekeeping." It's possible that one of the reasons CCD
has not yet appeared in Connecticut is that the state's beekeepers don?t take
their hives out of state.</DIV></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I suggest to Kremen that it's crazy to assign the pollination of a huge
portion of our food harvest to a single species of imported insect. (The
domesticated honeybee, <EM>Apis mellifera</EM>, is a native of Europe.) "That,"
replies Kremen, "is what we have been saying for a while now." Honeybees, she
points out, aren't even efficient at pollinating blueberries. Native bees, such
as the Maine blueberry bee (<EM>Osmia atriventris</EM>) and the local bumblebees
(<EM>Bombus spp.</EM>), do a far better job. The same is true for cranberries,
another native American crop. But by expanding our areas of cultivation to vast,
unbroken monocultures, by bulldozing hedgerows and woodlots, and by chemically
poisoning all our weeds, we've robbed the natives of nesting sites and the
flowers that would furnish them with pollen and nectar when farm crops aren't in
bloom. Where we haven't evicted them we've starved them out.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Fortunately, says Kremen, the wild bees found a sanctuary. Gordon Frankie,
Kremen's colleague at UC Berkeley, has discovered that urban and suburban
gardens can be surprisingly rich in wild bees. He has identified 40 different
species visiting the small garden of bee-attractive flowers that he and his
students planted on the Berkeley campus, and they have identified a total of 82
species within the area. Frankie's Web site, <A
href="http://nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/gbt.html"
target=_blank>nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens</A>. gardens, includes lists
of plants and outlines of cultural techniques that will make any garden
bee-friendly. For those gardeners who prefer print media, there are fact sheets
about native pollinators published by the <A href="http://www.xerces.org/"
target=_blank>Xerces Society</A>, an Oregon-based nonprofit devoted to
invertebrate conservation, as well as its booklet "Farming for Bees." The
booklet highlights the society's collaboration with Claire Kremen and Audubon
California; this triumvirate has been restoring bee-friendly native vegetation
along streamside corridors at several sites in California's intensively farmed
Central Valley to see if it will boost depleted populations of indigenous
pollinators. If successful, Kremen says, this technique could be extended to
farms throughout the country.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>When Ted and Becky Jones lifted the top story off the brood chamber at the
base of that troubled hive on the Connecticut blueberry farm, they found the
colony—queen, workers, and drones—still intact although reduced. Ted speculated
that the honeybees had been injured somehow in the drive over from the Joneses'
bee yard. He worries about the stress to his bees, adding that the long hours
and heavy lifting of constantly shifting hives discourage young people from
becoming beekeepers. It's time, I think, for gardeners to do their part in
lightening the load.</DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>
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<DIV><FONT
size=1>______________________________________________________</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><STRONG>The Xerces Society for Invertebrate
Conservation</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=1>The Xerces Society is an international
nonprofit organization that </FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=1>protects the diversity of life through
invertebrate conservation. </FONT></FONT><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=1>To
</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=1>join the Society, make a </FONT></FONT><FONT
size=1>contribution</FONT><FONT size=1>, </FONT><FONT size=1>or read about our
work, </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>please visit </FONT><FONT size=1><A
href="http://www.xerces.org/">www.xerces.org</A>.</FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>Matthew Shepherd</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>Senior Conservation Associate</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>4828 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland, OR 97215,
USA</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>Tel: 503-232 6639 Cell: 503-807 1577 Fax: 503-233
6794</FONT></DIV>
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size=1>mdshepherd@xerces.org</FONT></A><FONT size=1> </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT
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