Day 39: The early buzz on Colony Collapse Disorder

Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious syndrome that causes the crash of whole colonies of honeybees, has plowed through the nation’s beekeeping operations for the past two years. While over-winter loss statistics won’t be in for another few weeks, early indications are the disorder hasn’t yet run its course.

Meanwhile, federal biologists are making slow, halting progress toward drawing a link between the devastating condition and pesticides, with one researcher closing in on the theory that combinations of pesticides are to blame, and another keeping a keen eye on a class of agricultural poisons called neonicotinoids, which mimic nicotine in insect nervous systems.

For the past month or so, about half the nation’s bees have been pollinating almond crops in California. The most thorough annual bee counts will come in toward the end of this month, at the close of the almond harvest and before the bees get trucked to their next assignments. In the best case scenario, beekeepers will report over-winter losses that are acceptable to them — around 20 percent. Losses of 30 or even 50 percent of bees would match the reality of the past two years, and could indicate a resurgence of CCD.

Already, there are disturbing hints.

One 3rd-generation beekeeper in Minnesota has had trouble keeping his bees alive for years. So he recently shipped housing and equipment to Florida for nearly 800 colonies, and paid a Florida beekeeper to grow them. The project was going well as of early January, but by the end of the month — when the colonies should have shipped to California for almond pollination — they’d crashed. Three million bees disappeared in a matter of two weeks.

Such losses are disheartening for beekeepers who are investing more time and money on their operations than they ever have in the past — with most feeding protein supplements so their bees will have a better shot at resisting whatever is causing the die-offs.

Maryann Frazier, a Pennsylvania State University researcher, has been testing hives throughout the CCD crisis, and says she’s still exploring multiple ideas about the way pesticides contribute to CCD. One of her major findings is that pesticides are rarely detected alone in the hives of crashed colonies. 

“On average we find … about six different pesticides,” she said. They typically include both agricultural poisons that the bees bring back to the hives, and others that the beekeepers apply for the control of mites. ”Certainly in the lab we’ve been able to document there are synergistic effects.”

Frazier suspects the pesticides, especially when combined, weaken the bees’ immune systems and make them more susceptible to disease. “We have some beginning data to support that hypothesis,” she said. When she tested the crashed hives from Florida, she found “high exposures of pyrethroids in combination with synergistic fungicides and other pesticides, and one should expect toxic consequences to this type of brew,” she wrote in a memo to the beekeepers.

Within a week or two, the USDA will make its annual CCD report to Congress, and the agency will come closer than it ever has to implicating pesticides as a cause of CCD.

The EPA has been the slowest to draw a link, opting instead to assign blame to the beekeepers’ common practice of trucking colonies all over the country for pollination, or to the mites and viruses that prey on honeybees.  “We aren’t saying pesticides are a cause yet,” said Steven Bradbury, a director within EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs. “Some type of disease process seems to be the primary cause. The question is what are the other secondary stressors bees are facing. Clearly pesticides need to be studied.”

The beekeepers think the EPA has it backwards. They’re blaming pesticides first, because they say bees have long coped with the other stresses. But neonicotinoids made their big foray into the agricultural market in the early 2000s, just before CCD hit. Dave Hackenberg, one of the most politically active beekeepers, says it’s telling that Bayer representatives are repeatedly meeting with beekeepers about CCD.

“They wouldn’t be sitting at a table talking to us if they were sure on a stack of Bibles it wasn’t their fault,” he said.

Bradbury did say that the EPA, along with the USDA, are “working really hard on the neonicotenoids.” The USDA is the lead agency studying the link between CCD and pesticides, but if that link were to come clear, it would be the EPA’s job to regulate those pesticides. Some European Union countries have  suspended the use of neonicotinoids after studies connected the toxins to widespread deaths of honeybees there. 

Reporting of Colony Collapse Disorder has been oddly mixed, with one story going so far as to “debunk” Colony Collapse Disorder and blame pesticides ahead of the research, and the New York Times denying the very validity of the disease. 

More information about CCD is available through the EPA and the USDA.