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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><a
href="http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/guest-column-a-low-tech-treatment-for-bee-plague/">http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/guest-column-a-low-tech-treatment-for-bee-plague/</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=timestamppublished><font size=3
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>January 27, 2009, 10:00 pm</span></span></font></span>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<!-- date updated --><!-- <abbr class="updated" title="2009-01-27T18:28:04-05:00">— Updated: 6:28 pm</abbr> --><!-- Title -->
<h3><b><font size=4 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:13.5pt'>Guest
Column: A Low-Tech Treatment for Bee Plague<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h3>
<!-- By line --><!-- The Content -->
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>By <a href="http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/guest-columnists/">Aaron E.
Hirsh</a> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>On a
bright day last spring, I hiked at dawn into the foothills behind our house in <st1:State
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Colorado</st1:place></st1:State>. Snow still lay
in the shadows beneath boulders and pine trees, but the morning was warm
— so warm the honeybees I keep up there would soon awaken, emerge from
their wooden boxes and begin searching out their first nectar of the new year. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As I
climbed the final slope, I could see that two of the hilltop hives were already
thrumming with activity: bees lifted off from the entry holes, catching the
light and rising like sparks on a wind; and bees spiraled in for a landing,
returning already from their first outings. The third hive, however, was
conspicuously quiet — its entrance a small dark hole offering no sign of
life.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Colony
Collapse, I thought: The bee plague.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>Bees crawl on a frame used in bee hives. (Ann Johansson for The New
York Times) <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As
you’ve probably heard, honeybees are disappearing. Across the country,
beekeepers are cracking open their hives to discover the remnants of a sudden
and mysterious desertion: the stores of honey are good; the brood are tucked as
usual into their cells; but all the adults are gone. Last winter, over a third
of the honeybee hives kept in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> suffered the strange
fate now called <a href="http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572"
target=new>Colony Collapse Disorder</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>What’s
at stake here is not just our honey, or our favorite symbol of cooperative
society, but our food. Most of our crops require pollination — deposition
of a bit of male pollen on the female flower — to set fruit and
ultimately produce the parts we eat. Out of 115 of the world’s leading
crops, 87 depend on animals — predominantly bees — to perform that
vital act of placing pollen. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>And it is
important to add that, here in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the majority of our
crops are pollinated not by wild bees, or even by honeybees like mine, which
live in one location throughout the year, but by a vast mobile fleet of
honeybees-for-rent.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>From the
almond trees of <st1:State w:st="on">California</st1:State> to the blueberry
bushes of <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Maine</st1:place></st1:State>,
hundreds of thousands of domestic honeybee hives travel the interstate highways
on tractor-trailers. The trucks pull into a field or orchard just in time for
the bloom; the hives are unloaded; and the bees are released. Then, when the
work of pollination is done, the bees are loaded up, and the trucks pull out,
heading for the next crop due to bloom. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
mobile fleets have been hit exceptionally hard by Colony Collapse Disorder, and
if the epidemic continues, crop yields will soon decline. The consequences of
CCD are therefore very clear. The causes, however, are not.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>A recent
survey of all the foreign DNA that could be found in honeybee hives discovered
that a certain virus was present in 85 percent of hives that had fallen to CCD,
but only 5 percent of hives that had not. That’s a strong association.
But it’s not perfect, and there is surely more to the story.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Many of
us have had the experience of contracting a cold shortly after an intense
stretch of work. The lesson in this common ordeal — that the transition
from health to disease is rarely so simple as exposure to the wrong bug —
is probably as true for honeybees as it is for people. And CCD hit a honeybee
population that was already feeling worn down: a large mite that attaches to
bees and sucks their fluids, a tiny mite that inhabits the bee trachea, and a
pair of fungal infections were all taking a toll when CCD first appeared. Not
surprisingly, evidence of this grim company also showed up in the survey of
foreign DNA.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But those
plagues, too, could be part of a broader erosion of honeybee health. If you
hang around beekeepers, from the hobbyists on up to the managers of mobile
fleets, you’ll hear a variety of hypotheses about CCD. The mobile hives,
some say, are overworked: for a species that evolved with an off-season and a
steady home, year-round migratory labor must be taxing.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>What’s
more, each time they fly out into a new workplace, the itinerant honeybees
encounter a variety of insecticides, herbicides and crops engineered to produce
insecticidal proteins. And between jobs, they get a road-trip diet of pure corn
syrup, which lacks many nutrients. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Some
keepers say the problem isn’t just with the honeybees’ lifestyle,
but with their genetics, as well, since they’ve been bred for traits that
make them easier to handle, but may also render them more vulnerable to
disease.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The list
of plausible risk factors goes on. But if the cause of CCD truly is complex and
multi-factorial, or if it simply remains obscure, what is there to do?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>I’d
like to back up a bit, because here we may need a brief history of bees.
Honeybees first came to the <st1:place w:st="on">New World</st1:place> on
European ships. Once they’d hitched a ride across the <st1:place w:st="on">Atlantic</st1:place>,
however, they required no further assistance. They went feral, expanding
swiftly — on their own — across the American landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As the
feral honeybees extended their range, they took up residence alongside
thousands of native species of bees that were already here. There were the
carpenter bees, which bored holes to nest in; the bumblebees, which formed
small seasonal colonies; the orchard bees, which moved into the holes abandoned
by others; the alkali bees, which burrowed in hardpan soil; and many, many
others — all here before the honeybee.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>For bees,
the next important historical development was the transformation of landscapes.
The immigrant humans set about remaking the continent — clearing land,
building, sowing crops — and we have done so, at an accelerating rate,
ever since. Obviously, a parking lot is a hard place for bees to live. Less
obviously, a huge field of a single crop is equally unsuitable, for it lacks nesting
sites, and yields its nectar as a sudden flood that soon recedes. Consequently,
if a bee isn’t traveling the interstates by truck from one blooming field
to the next, the American landscape is a tough place to make a living.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>And yet,
the wild bees — both the feral honeybees and many of the native species
— have persisted. To this day, they are stowed away in our attics, hidden
in holes in our wood siding and our dirt roads, and mostly, subsisting in the
thin, semi-natural interstices of our transformed landscapes.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>What does
this mean for our current pollination crisis?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Those
remnant wild bees, feral and native alike, might just be the seeds of a
solution. And to sow those seeds and foster their growth, we must not till the
earth, but do just the opposite: we must take patches of agricultural land out
of production, and restore them to natural habitat.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>At
present, wild bee populations are too small, too few and too far between to
take on the task of pollinating our crops. That, of course, is why fleets of
domestic honeybee hives must be trucked in to do the job. But if the wild bees
were provided with habitat of the right kind and in the right geographic
arrangement, they could achieve pollination both reliably and effectively.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As the
swift expansion of feral honeybees across the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Americas</st1:place></st1:country-region> shows, they are not
especially picky about their habitat; most anything outside of parking lot or
vast monoculture will do. And for native bees, habitat could be restored to
suit the needs of whichever species are exceptionally good pollinators of local
crops. Bumblebees, for instance, are the best pollinators of <st1:State w:st="on">Maine</st1:State>
blueberries, whereas blue orchard bees work well for <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State> almonds.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The right
geographic arrangement of habitat would also depend on which native species are
desired for a certain crop. Many native species are willing to fly relatively
far from their home habitat — a kilometer or so — to visit flowers;
accordingly, patches of habitat for these bees could be placed relatively far
apart. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Other
species are homebodies, reluctant to fly more than a few hundred meters; to
provide their services to an entire agricultural field, habitat patches would
need to be closer together. Feral honeybees, for their part, are relatively
fleet-winged, so whatever arrangement works for the natives will work for them,
too.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Admittedly,
there are costs of this rather low-tech solution to our pollination crisis: the
opportunity cost of not cultivating those patches of land; the investment in
restoration of habitat; the extra care required in applying insecticides close
to established habitat.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But
restoring bee habitat provides many offsetting benefits. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>First, it
allows us to foster the most effective pollinators for each crop, potentially
increasing yields over levels achieved with pollination by domestic honeybees
alone. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Second,
habitat restoration is a singularly robust solution: It builds a diversified
portfolio of potential pollinators, thus reducing our exposure to any one
population’s collapse. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>And
third, a feral honeybee population distributed across a broad network of
patches would harbor genetic diversity and inhabit a wide variety of
environments — a wise insurance policy against problems with domestically
bred hives.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As I
arrived beside my own silent hive, I knelt and put my ear to the wooden box:
Nothing. In a vague gesture of apology or consolation, I placed my hand on the
box. Strangely, I received an answer: a gentle hum. And just then, from the
dark entry hole, a bee emerged into the early light. Not dead, I realized. Just
sleeping in.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>**********<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><em><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>NOTES:</span></font></i></em><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><em><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Thanks
to D.G. Burnett, O. Judson, J. Maximon, T.H. Ricketts and V.H. Volny for
helpful discussions.</span></font></i></em><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><em><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
DNA survey of honeybee hives is reported in D.L. Cox-Foster et al. (2007)
“A metagenomic survey of microbes in honey bee colony collapse
disorder.” Science 318: 283-7. A good summary of current thinking on the
causation of CCD is M.E. Watanabe (2008) “Colony collapse disorder: many
suspects, no smoking gun.” BioScience 58: 384-8. For a review of the role
of animal pollinators in our food supply, see A. M. Klein et al. (2007)
“Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops.”
Proc. R. Soc. B 274: 303-313. Two excellent papers on the services of native
pollinators are T.H. Ricketts et al. (2008) “Landscape effects on crop
pollination services: are there general patterns?” Ecology Letters 11:
499-515 and R. Winfree et al. (2007) “Native bees provide insurance
against ongoing honey bee losses.” Ecology Letters 10: 1105-13. </span></font></i></em><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><em><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>For
a guide to fostering native bees in your neighborhood, see <a
href="http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/nativebee.html" target=new>“Alternative
Pollinators: Native Bees.”</a></span></font></i></em><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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