[Pollinator] Boston Globe Article Embedded

[Ladadams@aol.com]

Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company 

The Boston Globe
 June 20, 2006 Tuesday
THIRD EDITION 
SECTION: HEALTH SCIENCE; Pg. A1 
LENGTH: 1220 words
HEADLINE: CROPS NEED POLLEN - AND CROSS-COUNTRY BEEKEEPERS 
BYLINE:  BY BETH DALEY, GLOBE STAFF
BODY:  
NANTUCKET Wes and Glenn Card gingerly eased two flatbed trucks wrapped in 
fine mesh screens off the 6 a.m. cargo ferry from Hyannis yesterday and slowly 
rumbled over a downtown cobblestone street, taking care to not shake loose their 
valuable payload.
In the cabs, the Cards ignored a handful of bees dancing on the dashboards 
escapees from the more than 4 million honeybees humming in hives stacked on the 
back of the trucks.
Eight miles later, the brothers began unloading the trucks in a cranberry 
field, unperturbed as the freed bees dive-bombed their ungloved hands before 
dispersing through the bog to feed on the blossoms.
The bees' arrival is an annual event crucial to keeping the island's 
cranberry crop robust. Without trucked-in bees, New England's $121 million crop of 
cranberries, blueberries, and apples would likely crash because there aren't 
enough wild bees to pollinate all the fields. But the honeybee is locked in a 
two-decade battle with a parasite that has sliced the nation's commercial hives by 
one-third and appears to have wiped out much of the wild honeybee population. 
Now, frustrated with the parasites' ability to de velop widespread resistance 
to the chemicals designed to kill them, the US Department of Agriculture, 
scientists, and beekeepers are racing to develop new weapons. 
"We are at a very critical period, it's very depressing," said Tony Jadczak, 
Maine's state beekeeper. "We just keep losing bees."
Honeybee hives are trucked around the country to keep up with the blooming 
seasons for various crops. The Nantucket bees began their trip in Louisiana, 
with stops along the way in California, New Jersey, and Maine. Itinerant bees 
pollinate $6 billion to $8 billion worth of crops each year across the country, 
from Florida oranges to California almonds.
Since a tiny Asian mite was found in the United States in 1987, the number of 
beehives for hire has dropped from 3.6 million to 2.4 million, the US 
Department of Agriculture says. The decline has pushed up the price farmers pay to 
rent hives, and many fear there may eventually be too few bees to pollinate all 
the crops.
Maine has lost about half of its resident beekeepers, both hobbyists and 
those for hire, in the past 20 years in part because the honeybees are so 
difficult to keep alive, Jadczak said. And this year, higher fuel costs have added 
almost $1,000 to the price for bringing a truckload of hives from southern states 
to New England.
Bees, despite their nasty sting, are one of the most valuable pollinating 
insects in the world. Through hairs on their body and legs, they unwittingly 
transfer pollen from one flower to another as they forage for nectar and 
protein-rich pollen, allowing fruit to bloom. While birds, bats, and other insects also 
pollinate various crops, bees tend to favor the crops that humans love to 
eat: Nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables.
And of the thousands of species of bees, it is the honeybee that is 
agricultures' darling. Brought over from Europe by the settlers, hives about the size 
of a small suitcase can hold 20,000 to 50,000 bees. The bees in two hives can 
pollinate an acre of cranberries in about two weeks.
In the past, New England family farmers would keep their own hives to 
pollinate crops. But as single-crop farms grew larger, native bees weren't able to 
pollinate all the plants.
Even if they could, the bees would die out after the bloom faded because 
there would be few other flowering plants to feed on the rest of the year. It soon 
became less expensive for farmers to hire migratory beekeepers for a few 
weeks each year than to have their own hives.
Today, these self-styled "bee cowboys" travel from bloom to bloom. The Cards, 
whose father owns the 15,000-hive Merrimack Valley Apiaries Inc. in 
Billerica, take the bees, housed in wooden boxes, across the country on a circuit that 
ends in June with honey-making.
"We round 'em up and herd them out," Wes, 25, joked as he stood in the 
Nantucket Conservation Foundation's 193 acres of cranberries. Nearby, Glenn, wearing 
a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a cowboy riding a giant bee, stuffed dry grass 
into a smoldering small steel can, then waved it near the hives to quiet the 
bees so they would be easier to move.
The Cards protect themselves only with the blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts 
they don when they begin to transfer the hives from the truck to the ground. 
They wear a beekeeper's veil to protect their faces and heads, but rarely wear 
gloves. They do get stung occasionally but say it's better than wearing hot 
gloves and a full-body beekeeping suit. Using a forklift, they unload pallets 
filled with hives onto a bog dike. The bees will forage several miles during 
the day before coming back every night to their hive.
The Card family has been trucking bees since 1958, but Wes says it's getting 
harder every year, because of the mite, called varroa destructor. The crablike 
mites attach themselves to bees and suck their blood, killing them or 
lowering the hive's population enough so the colony collapses. The mites transmit a 
host of diseases that can also kill the bees. Another deadly mite, which lodges 
in bees' airways, also has become a problem since the 1980s.
"It's a tenuous situation," said Nicholas Calderone, an associate professor 
of entomology at Cornell University, who studies honeybees.
The National Academy of Sciences, which conducts studies for Congress and 
government agencies, is expected to release the first-ever look at the decline of 
the nation's pollinators, including honeybees, in September. Calderone, along 
with 14 other specialists, is looking at loss of habitat, pesticides, 
disease, and invasive species such as mites that might be contributing to the decline.
Already in the wild, where it is nearly impossible to treat hives, most 
honeybees appear gone. In fact, some bee specialists say if you see a honeybee in a 
garden, it's more likely an escapee from a beekeeper's hive than a true wild 
one.
In commercial hives, US Department of Agriculture researchers and independent 
scientists are trying a suite of new methods to combat varroa's ability to 
build resistance to mite-killing chemicals. They are selectively breeding bees 
that seem to be able to sniff out mite-infested young and drop them out of the 
hive to slow an infestation. They are trying to use organic methods such as 
fungi to kill the mites. And they are trying to breed the mite-resistant Russian 
bee with the honeybees to create a natural defense. But, there has been no 
solution yet.
Bee prices are rising because of these costlier methods of thwarting mites 
and the high demand for the smaller number of surviving hives.
Bees were in such short supply in 2005 for the massive California almond 
harvest, the United States opened its borders for the first time to bees flown in 
from Australia. Hives, which normally go for $40 to $50 for a pollination 
season, went for as much as $130.
In New England, where fewer bees are needed, prices have risen only gradually 
in the past 10 years, but beekeepers say they will need to raise them soon.
"It's extremely frustrating because it's becoming harder and harder to raise 
a beehive," said Wes, as honeybees buzzed around his head in the bogs. "We 
need something, more research, something to stop the mites."
SIDEBAR:
VARROA MITE
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA. 
GRAPHIC: PHOTO CHART MAP
LOAD-DATE: June 20, 2006

Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Coevolution Institute
423 Washington St. 5th
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 362 1137
http://www.coevolution.org/
http://www.pollinator.org/
http://www.nappc.org/


Our future flies on the wings of pollinators.