When CCD first broke last fall--before it was even called Colony Collapse--a lot of people pointed the finger at high-fructose corn syrup. Now it is in some 30+ states. Some suspected contamination from genetically modified corn; others just surmised that this crap was not any better for bees than it is for us. I feel that if it is in the corn, it's probably in the syrup. A lot of beekeepers have stopped using HFCS, joining a small number of purists, like myself, who'd always shunned it, preferring instead to feed the bees honey or a self made sugar syrup. This costs the beekeepers money, since honey still fetches a decent price on the market, but it pays off in the long run. Don't ever feed your bees honey that you don't know and trust the source of the honey tho, many off the shelf honeys are not as pure as you might thing and can carry AFB (American Foul Brood) spores. I don't use any HFCS. I'm convinced that as a result, my bees are stronger; even on the bees I move, I have kept my losses this past year under 10%, while some of my colleagues lost more than half and sometimes up to 90 percent, including one in Shelburne Falls Mass that lost 75%.

Is hauling bees around the countryside in the back of a truck and feeding them soda sweetener what is making them weak? As Jerry Hayes, the CCD top man, puts it, "What would happen to you if I made you run marathons, sleep every night in the back of a moving car, and only fed you chocolate bars?" Think about how you'd feel..

 Another thought is Genetic Diversity. Many bee breeders sell there own bees. Many are line "line" breeders with out even knowing it. Anyone that breeds good dog or cats will tell you line breeding si very bad. Line breeding is incest, and thats so easy to do with bee's and drones. Many drones are the off spring of the mother queen, even if from your other hives.. where did you get all the bees from? the same place, so I'd bet they are all related.

For most of the 20th century, the federal government maintained four laboratories dedicated to honeybee research. But in the last seven or eight years, funding has fluctuated and the feds have threatened to shutter some labs entirely, even as threats to bee health and demand for pollination have increased. Solutions to so many of the problems plaguing the bee industry seem tantalizingly close--the bee genome was just sequenced, for instance, and anecdotal evidence suggests that a hardier, more industrious bee could be produced by controlled cross-breeding domestic bees with Africanized "killer" bees--but the resources to produce these breakthroughs just aren't there. I feel this might be a really bad idea. I have heard of a local Keene NH area hobby beekeeper that got a package of Africanized bee's.. they most likely would not have lived thru the winter, BUT did go after the family, including the dog, when the dog brushed against the hive.. They stopped counting at 600 stings on the dog.. and yes it did not make it. I have to wonder if this is a path that might be better if we stayed off. If you recall the Africanized bee's came in the Americas by a similar breeding plan back in the 1950's in Brazil. I much prefer picking up where Brother Adams left off after his lives work.

Brother Adam has devoted a lifetime, nearly 70 years, to developing a new bee, the Buckfast bee.  He was born Aug.  3.  1898 in southern Germany under the name of Karl Kehrle.  In 1910, as a very sickly little11-year-old boy, he was dropped off at Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Devon, England by his mother. By 1915 he began his work with bees and by 1919 he took over the responsibility for the bee yard and saved the British beekeepers in the process.

Brother Adam has in his book Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey, page 52, formulated his aim of breeding as follows  : "Our ultimate aim is the formation of a bee that will give us a constant maximum average crop consonant with a minimum of effort and time on our part."

Brother Adam's overriding idea of breeding is that none of the native races alone have all the best possible combinations of qualities to suit man.  But just like the corn breeding program, like crosses followed by selection can give us better bees.  Brother Adam wanted to combine the best qualities from different races into a new super bee possessing a combination of qualities that give the modern beekeeper maximum crops with a minimum of work. Something he did very well,tho was never really finished. He was able to go back 50 years in maternal AND paternal genealogy with his bees and all this long before computers and the like.

When the Acarine mite (Tracheal Mite) came to the British Isles, it exterminated the native black bees.  Thirty of the monastery's 46 colonies died in 1915/16 due to the mite infestation (the black bees in England today are descendants from imported black bees).  The surviving 16 colonies were all headed by Italian queens mated with native black drones.  The best of these crosses formed the base of Brother Adam's new bee.

The last time the beekeeping industry was threatened was in the late '80s, by the varroa mite. Back then, bees were raised primarily for their honey, profit margins were small, and bees traveling to the coast on pollination trips was basically unheard-of. Alarms were raised, but nothing much was done, and 20 years later, beekeepers are still battling varroa. But in the last 10 years, fees for pollination have increased by 600 percent--from $20 to $25 per hive in the late '90s to more than $150 per hive now. Even taking into account the rising costs of maintaining bees, that's staggering. Package bees themselves have risen quite a bit and many bee breeders are little more than "puppy mills". Package bees here in New England vary from about $60 to $125. Cheaper is not always the better deal, think dogs.. This growth was stimulated by expansion of the almond market (among others), and the simultaneous decline of natural pollinators by mites and the destruction of their natural habitats. All this new money created a small elite of relatively wealthy, bottom-line über-beekeepers. These people already have significant capital invested in equipment; they're unable or disinclined to reform their practices, they know how to use the system to their advantage, and they are determined not to let this become another chronic problem to be managed by more hang-ups in time and money, à la varroa. Enter: Colony Collapse Disorder?

One would be hard-pressed to come up with something more topical, more media-friendly, more sexy than CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder, with its undertones of apocalypse and extinction, is intensely appealing to our collective sense of guilt about shitting all over the environment and our expectation of (and perhaps even desire for) some kind of divine punishment. Almost all the beekeepers I talked to, even the obscure hobbyists, were already sick and tired of talking to reporters, such has been the blitz. "The bees are dying, and you could be next" is the new "we've got to take out Saddam or he'll drop the A-bomb on us!" And cell phones are not the cause.. well maybe if the bee si flying while talking on it.. but otherwise no..
In the end, perhaps Colony Collapse isn't much of a mystery at all. Bees are dying because they eat too much corn syrup, work too much, spend too much time in a truck rather than outside, and are being poisoned by pollutants. The same things that are killing us are killing the bees, there life cycle is just faster . Think back some years with the 3 eyed fish and the mutated frogs..

But while it's clear that commercial practices are weakening bees, rendering them susceptible to all kinds of opportunistic pathogens, there's still a major missing piece of the puzzle. The sudden onset of CCD this past year leads one to suspect that there was something that set off the die-offs, some new pathogen or environmental pressure that tipped the scale. But what?

 I remember that most beekeeper use high-fructose corn syrup. I also remember reading that alot of corn grown in the US is genetically modified. So I have to wonder if high-fructose corn syrup tainted with genetically modified organisms could be the culprit. I have been asked quite a bit about what's causing CCD.

I don't feel I need to guess anymore.
I don't know if I should talk about this, and do wonder whom might complain and file a lawsuit in these lawsuit happy days.  I'm connected with a lot of people very close to this CCD investigation, and I know that there are researchers who are very careful about what they say and just as importantly don't say --they're almost afraid for their lives and lively hood.

I feel CCD was triggered, by a class of pesticides widely used to treat seeds and plants. Alot of corn seeds come treated with it before the farmer even gets it to plant. Then many treat the whole field with more. The plants that grow from these treated seeds incorporate the pesticide into their entire systems, called a systemic poison, from roots to leaves to stems to pollen and nectar. When pests (or bees) feed on treated plants, the chemical destroys their nervous system. The people in charge know that this particular type of pesticide is causing CCD, but they're keeping it quiet--and spending millions to make sure others keep it that way. At the end of this story--it takes an hour to tell and includes other nefarious and high-level government conspiracies.  The pesticides, marketed under the names Poncho, Gaucho, Admire, Calypso  and many other names, all belong to a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, "systemic" pesticides which, when applied to seeds, manifest themselves throughout the mature plant. When an insect ingests any part of the plant--leaf, seed, stem, or, in the case of bees, pollen or nectar, it gets a dose of a neurotoxin that can cause a swift and lethal breakdown of an insect's nervous and immune system. For growers, this pesticide is efficient and limits their own exposure to nasty chemicals sprayed directly on their crops. Introduced in the early '90s, these pesticides were a true revolution in pest control.

But not all insects are pests. In fact, one of these chemicals, imidacloprid, is the very same pesticide--marketed here as Admire and overseas as Gaucho--that was banned in France in 1999 as a suspected culprit in drastic and mysterious die-offs in honeybees. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and chemical company better known for aspirin, has a crop science division that manufactures and sells Gaucho and many other pesticides. The company protested the ban in France, citing studies that found no correlation between imidacloprid and bee die-offs; beekeepers countered with their own studies that found the opposite result. The French government sided with the beekeepers, and the ban stayed in place and was expanded in 2004. Imidacloprid/Gaucho/Admire is used on a wide selection of fruits and vegetables in the United States, including apples, strawberries, and melons--all crops routinely pollinated by bees--and countless others.

Now thinking about the hives that have been lost, those that seem like textbook cases of CCD. Could the bees have been exposed to this particular type of pesticide? Looking at a map you might not see much, which wasn't encouraging; bees have a flight radius of only 2-5 miles in each direction from their hive, and there didn't seem to be any cultivated farmland nearby. But when you ask the beekeeper if he knows of any crops nearby, they usually says yes immediately. There's a huge farm a couple mile away.

Most Farms use pesticides. Depending on which pests they  have at the time.  Most wouldn't reveal the brand names or the specific chemicals they use to kill bugs.

Even if the local farm isn't using imidacloprid, it's entirely possible that there's someone else in the flight radius who is. Imidacloprid is also approved for uses ranging from flea control on dogs and cats (for which it's sold as Advantage, over the counter) to breaking up termite colonies, with little or no restrictions. If you find a termite mound in your backyard, you can simply go on eBay or down to the local hardware store, get a big ol' vat of imidacloprid, and dump it on the ground. And so it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's using imidacloprid where, and for what purpose.

You can buy it at Wal-Mart & Home Depot. And you know what Joe Consumer is like. He thinks a little is good so a lot is better. They're not following the directions on the bottle.

In the last three years, they've just been pouring this chemical on crops. It's approved for everything....All I'm saying is, you go buy this stuff to use on aphids or whatnot, and the little insert from the chemical company says straight out that it, one, makes bugs quit eating, two, induces memory loss and confusion, and, three, gives them a nervous system disorder. And that's exactly what's happening to bees. But then I'm just a dumb beekeeper who's been  keeping bees for years. What do I know? Does not seem to hard to make the connection if you use a little common sense..

Well surely, knowing that bees are such an important part of the ecosystem, not to mention the economy, chemical companies and farmers alike wouldn't just indiscriminately soak the countryside with a chemical that turns both bees and pests into convulsing, gibbering zombies, would they? There must be a fail-safe in there to prevent killing all the bees.

No, says Jerry Hayes, of the CCD Working Group. "Imidacloprid kills bugs, insects, good and bad alike. It works on bees in the exact same way it works on all other insects."

So did someone drop the ball?

Hayes pauses, weighing his words. He is too nice a guy to put it just so. "Someone didn't look closely enough," he says.

This isn't as surprising as it initially seems, considering the process by which a pesticide comes to market. The EPA often doesn't even test a pesticide before it goes on the shelf; it entrusts the chemical companies themselves to oversee safety testing on their own products, almost always rubber-stamping the results without verifying them independently, says Laura Hepting of the D.C.-based nonprofit Beyond Pesticides, which monitors the pesticide industry. "The large majority of the data is provided by the companies themselves," she says. "The EPA has a panel that reviews this information, but they only do their own tests if a red flag pops up. But this data can be--and often is--skewed. Not only results, but the procedures that produce those results, can be tweaked. There are loopholes."

The studies the chemical industry had to submit to gain approval for imidacloprid merely required demonstration that the levels of the chemical found in the nectar and pollen of treated plants were "sub lethal" to bees. Strictly speaking, this is true. For instance, imidacloprid can make bees stop grooming themselves, which allows lethal fungal infections to thrive in bee colonies--in this case one could truthfully, if disingenuously, say that the fungus killed the bees, not imidacloprid. You could say the same in cases when impaired bees can't find their way home and die of exposure, that it was the elements that killed them, not the pesticide. When imidacloprid  causes the bee's to jitter in their dance, sending worker bees off in the wrong direction and they get lost.. It's bad directions to blame, not the imidacloprid.  Also a point to think about.. "sub lethal" in the nectar and pollen of treated plants.. What do the bees do with the nectar? They simmer it down, kinda like maple sap into maple syrup, they simmer the nectar down into honey. This "boils off" the water and concentrates the toxins.. again, some common sense..

We're wasting our time picking on poor little old chemical companies when we should be out there lobbying for a ban on fungi, bad directions and weather!

So why not just ban imidacloprid? Because Big Chemical (due to corporate consolidation, six corporations--Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, BASF, and Dow--control almost the entire global market for crop protection) is, well, big. According to Bayer's 2006 Annual Report, Bayer CropScience sales of imidacloprid pesticides topped €560 million (about $746 million). That's about 10 percent of Bayer CropScience's approximately $7.5 billion in total sales, making imidacloprid products, according to the company, the world's No. 1 best-selling pesticide.

With so much money at stake, any ban on imidacloprid would be an uphill battle. Even after France's government shut down use of the pesticide, Bayer insisted it was harmless to bees and went so far as to file a lawsuit against a French beekeeper for derogatory remarks he made in the media about Gaucho. (The suit was dismissed by a judge in 2003.)

Bayer's position on imidacloprid had not changed when I contacted them a couple weeks ago for comment. "When used according to label instructions, imidacloprid does not kill bees," Greg Coffey, a Bayer spokesperson tells me when I ask him flat out if his company's product is causing CCD. Sounding somewhat hopeful, he adds, "in fact, current research indicates a number of non chemical causes may be to blame."

But respected experts in the bee industry I've talked to say that imidacloprid does kill bees, and the way it works--disrupting a neural receptor in the insect nervous system --suggests that it has the same effect on all insects, bees or otherwise. It's simply working as it was made to and as per the Bayer website says it would.

Coffey sighs. "When used according to label instructions, imidacloprid does not kill bees," he says again, slower this time.

That's not how Henri Clement, the president of the National Union of French Apiculture who was instrumental in getting Gaucho outlawed in France, sees it. Although the ban went into place in 1999, he wrote in an e-mail, "we still saw effects in 2005 and 2006, as it remains in the ground for a very long time." (Studies have found that imidacloprid can have a half-life of 1 to 3 years in soil and can still be present decades later.) So one full dose this year, and one full dose next = 1.5 or more for the second year..  1.75+ for year 3 and 1.875+ the next, you can do the math and see where this is going to end up. He also reported that Bayer is trying to get other neonicotinoid pesticides, which work in the very same manner as Gaucho and would be equally as potentially lethal to bees, approved for use in France. At the same time, a recent Bayer presentation claims studies have found that imidacloprid "even in the absence of infestation with insects, exerts a supportive, stress-reducing, protective effect" on plants. A cynic might suspect the company is trying to position imidacloprid as less of a poison and more of a supplement or vitamin for crops--a subtle redefinition that would make it infinitely harder to ban.

When I contacted EPA for its response, a spokesperson forwarded me a copy of its standard statement on CCD:

EPA is coordinating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, academia, professional organizations, and beekeepers to identify the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, a massive die-off of adult bees in established honeybee colonies. Though agricultural records indicate that sudden honeybee colony collapse is not a new phenomenon, it is imperative that we learn the cause and do what we can to prevent it. The current scientific consensus is that the cause of CCD is unknown. EPA and USDA have met with insect scientists and beekeeping professionals to discuss leading theories. A report of the results of that meeting is being prepared by USDA, and scientists around the nation and the globe are moving forward with research to test the various theories. EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment and will continue to work with USDA and others to assess this potential threat. If there are actions identified that EPA can take to prevent CCD, EPA stands ready to take the appropriate steps.

When I point out that this statement doesn't specifically address anything, Enesta Jones, the EPA press officer, has no further response.

Whether or not my conspiracy theories hold water, if imidacloprid really is killing bees, we're left with at least two equally discomfiting possibilities. One: Big Chemical failed to adequately test imidacloprid and unknowingly released a pesticide that's killing the only natural pollinators we have left. Or, two: Big Chemical knew imidacloprid would kill off our primary pollinators and released it anyway.

If the latter seems puzzling, consider this question: If all the bees died out, how much would Big Chemical, the global leaders in genetically modified crops, stand to gain from a sudden demand for self-pollinating genetically modified crops? Again, apply a little common sense and think about it. Very few things in life just "happen". So to look for who might be to blame, it might be faster and easier to look for who's to GAIN...

Bees are sensitive creatures. They're easily irritated, They hate noise and vibration and bananas.. Yes bananas. They smell like their alarm pheromone. Please don't eat a banana right before going to check your hives..

But it's not bananas making bees crazy on a global scale. The heart of the question seems to be: Is CCD something correctable--if we stop trucking bees cross-country and feeding them Oreo stuffing and having them pollinate crops chocked full of pesticides, will they stop dying? Or have we set something larger in motion that doesn't just affect the bees directly under human stewardship, but bees everywhere? And who's next? Other insects, mammals, and eventually humans? Think about the mercury in seafood.. It can suck, really really suck to be at the top of the food chain..

Keith Tignor, the state apiarist for Virginia, says research on whether there have been parallel die-offs in other insect populations has just now started. The early signs are not good. In the D.C. region alone, naturalists and researchers have observed an increasing number of fish die-offs within the past several years--tens of thousands of dead fish washing up onshore, some killed by dead water or pollution, but others with no discernible cause of death except a mysterious weakening of the immune system. The same symptoms have also been observed in snails, butterflies, birds, and trees across the nation. If these phenomena are related to CCD and continue to spread across other species, well, that's quite probably all she wrote for the human race.


 Please, if you have any thoughts to share on either side of this or any beekeeping issue, please share it here. I have room for  and welcome all points of view and comments.

 TTFN

  Richard
6/12/2007