Bee die-off perplexes scientists

[Seamus OBlimey]

Swarm of bees grounds UK aircraft

Almost 200 passengers found themselves stranded at Bournemouth Airport for 11 hours after their plane turned back after flying into a swarm of bees.

The Palmair Boeing 737, bound for Faro in Portugal, took off from Bournemouth at 0810 BST on Thursday.

But after flying into the swarm the pilot experienced an engine surge an hour later and returned the aircraft to the UK for checks.

Engineers ruled it was unsafe to fly and another plane took off at 1915 BST.

Ingested bees

A total of 196 passengers were affected including 90 attempting to travel to the Algarve and a further 106 waiting to return to the UK.

The incident happened just two days after a swarm of 20,000 bees descended on Bournemouth Pier.

It is believed the plane's engines ingested the bees while flying over Bournemouth but this did not cause problems until later into the flight.

The passengers from Faro arrived back in Britain at 0120 BST.

[zuestorz]

The above story and several others strongly suggest that the bees have just had enough! Take this crazy Balkan scenario for example.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6701517.stm

And here they are again making an obvious statement about mankinds organized religion.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hereford/worcs/4093770.stm

I think the bees are conducting a worldwide protest.

[marmot]

HAARP Transmissions May Accidentally be Jamming Bees Homing Ability

[ninakat]

Thanks marmot, that's quite interesting. Sounds plausible.

Conclusion: Large Scale CCD began in the summer of 2006, HAARP went to full power in the summer of 2006. Initial research shows bees are sensitive to electromagnetics and/or specific frequencies outside of the visual spectrum, HAARP transmits over a broad range of frequencies. Bees are sensitive to changes in the visual spectrum. HAARP can induce changes in the same visual spectrum that bees utilize. CCD is taking place in a limited regional locations of North American and Europe, HAARP testing has shown the greatest reception of their transmissions are within North America and Europe.

While we cannot determine if it is a particular radio frequency, optical transmission, optical frequency or electromagnetic signal associated with the HAARP transmissions which may be interfering with the bees at this point, the evidence is suggestive of further required research to narrow down potential interference frequencies and phenomena.

[nomo]

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory ... /story.htm

Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees - Scientist

SPAIN: July 19, 2007


MADRID - A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.

The culprit is a microscopic parasite called nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain's honey industry.

He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries.

"We started in 2000 with the hypothesis that it was pesticides, but soon ruled it out," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Pesticide traces were present only in a tiny proportion of samples and bee colonies were also dying in areas many miles from cultivated land, he said.

They then ruled out the varroa mite, which is easy to see and which was not present in most of the affected hives.

For a long time Higes and his colleagues thought a parasite called nosema apis, common in wet weather, was killing the bees.

"We saw the spores, but the symptoms were very different and it was happening in dry weather too."

Then he decided to sequence the parasite's DNA and discovered it was an Asian variant, nosema ceranae. Asian honeybees are less vulnerable to it, but it can kill European bees in a matter of days in laboratory conditions.

"Nosema ceranae is far more dangerous and lives in heat and cold. A hive can become infected in two months and the whole colony can collapse in six to 18 months," said Higes, whose team has published a number of papers on the subject.

"We've no doubt at all it's nosema ceranae and we think 50 percent of Spanish hives are infected," he said.

Spain, with 2.3 million hives, is home to a quarter of the European Union's bees.

His team have also identified this parasite in bees from Austria, Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe and assume it has invaded from Asia over a number of years.

Now it seems to have crossed the Atlantic and is present in Canada and Argentina, he said. The Spanish researchers have not tested samples from the United States, where bees have also gone missing.

Treatment for nosema ceranae is effective and cheap -- 1 euro (US$1.4) a hive twice a year -- but beekeepers first have to be convinced the parasite is the problem.

Another theory points a finger at mobile phone aerials, but Higes notes bees use the angle of the sun to navigate and not electromagnetic frequencies.

Other elements, such as drought or misapplied treatments, may play a part in lowering bees' resistance, but Higes is convinced the Asian parasite is the chief assassin.

[chlamor]

Introduction

The U.S. beekeeping industry has faced a number of obstacles to healthy bee
management over the years. These obstacles range from arthropod pests to
pathogenic diseases. Now a "new" problem threatens the beekeeping industry
and it may eclipse altogether the bee maladies of old. Termed "colony
collapse disorder" (or CCD), the disorder has gained considerable national
and international attention.

Beekeepers around the United States have reported higher-than-usual colony
losses since the fall of 2006. Some beekeepers in states reporting CCD have
lost 50-90% of their colonies, often within a matter of weeks. This
translates into thousands of dead colonies and millions of dead bees. In a
country where honey bees contribute an estimated 20-40 billion US$ in added
revenue to the agriculture industry, these bee losses cannot be taken
lightly.
States (in red) where beekeepers are reporting significant honey bee losses
to CCD.
Courtesy: Bee Alert Technologies, Inc.

Even though thousands of honey bee colonies are dying, a small percentage of
U.S. beekeepers are reporting significant colony losses. However, these
beekeepers typically manage commercial operations with thousands of
colonies. Therefore, the data represent a minority of beekeepers but a large
number of colonies. For example, less than 2% of all Florida beekeepers as
of April 2007 reported colony losses to a disorder with symptoms matching
those of CCD. Yet collectively, these beekeepers lost thousands of colonies.


CCD may not be a new disorder. In fact, many colonies have died over the
past 50-60 years displaying symptoms similar to those of CCD. The disorder
as described in older literature has been called spring dwindle disease,
fall dwindle disease, autumn collapse, May disease, and disappearing
disease. We may never know if these historic occurrences share a common
cause with modern-day CCD. They do, however, share the symptoms.

Colony Collapse Disorder

Colonies with CCD exhibit an ambiguous, ever-updated series of symptoms.
Colonies with the disorder appear healthy as few as three weeks prior to
collapse. However, the adult bees soon "disappear" (hence its historic
nickname "disappearing disease") from the colonies, leaving behind a box
full of honey, pollen, capped brood, a queen, and maybe a few worker bees.
Beekeepers report that colonies with CCD do not contain any dead bees,
neither are there dead bees on the ground outside of the colonies. The adult
bees simply disappear. The final symptom is that small hive beetles, wax
moths, and other nearby honey bees ignore the empty hive even though the
hive contains foodstuffs on which they ordinarily feed.
Healthy colonies of bees contain thousands of worker bees.
Colonies suffering from CCD have few or no bees remaining in the hive.
Photograph: Sean McCann, UF Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory.

The Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium (MAAREC:
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/index.html ) is the current clearing house for
CCD-based information produced by the CCD Working Group. Composed of
scientists, beekeepers, industry, and government officials, the CCD Working
Group defined the symptoms of CCD as follows:


- *Collapsed colonies*
1. complete absence of adult bees in colonies, with few or no
dead bees in or around colonies,
2. the presence of capped brood, and
3. the presence of food stores (both honey and bee bread) that
are not robbed by other bees or typical colony pests (small hive beetles,
wax moths, etc.). If robbed, the robbing is delayed by a number of days.

- *Collapsing colonies*
1. an insufficient number of bees to maintain the amount of
brood in the colony,
2. the workforce is composed largely of younger adult bees,
3. the queen is present, and
4. the cluster is reluctant to consume food provided to them by
the beekeeper.

These symptoms have been debated due to problems with their interpretation.
For example, not all beekeepers who claimed that their colonies were
affected by CCD had colonies experiencing exactly these symptoms. Also, some
in the industry felt that the symptoms could be interpreted to include
almost any colony that dies or has died over the past 20 years. However for
now, these symptoms remain the most reliable indicators of CCD.

What causes CCD?

The "cause" of CCD is under investigation. To be sure, the hysteria
surrounding CCD has outpaced the science. Beekeepers and investigators have
suggested varroa, inadequate rainfall, proximity to power lines, colony
treatments, moving stresses, genetically modified crops, lack of genetic
diversity, inadequate nutrition and chemicals present in the environment,
just to name a few, as possible causes of CCD. At this point, almost every
conceivable and realistic cause remains a possibility. The leading
candidates and a brief explanation of their potential role are listed below.



1. *Traditional bee pests and diseases (including American foulbrood,
European foulbrood, chalkbrood, nosema, small hive beetles, and tracheal
mites):* These bee maladies likely are not responsible for CCD because
they do not have a history of causing CCD-like symptoms. That said,
traditional bee pests and diseases may exacerbate CCD. With that in mind,
scientists have not abandoned experiments investigating these candidates.

2. *Style of feeding bees and type of bee food:* The style of feeding
bees and types of bee food used to feed bees vary considerably among
beekeepers reporting CCD losses. As such, no correlation has been found
between what colonies were fed and their likelihood of survival. Despite
this lack of evidence, many beekeepers have abandoned the practice of
feeding high fructose corn syrup to bees due to indications that it can form
byproducts that are harmful to bees.

3. *How the bees were managed:* Management style is a broad category
but it can include the type of income pursued with bees (honey production,
pollination services, etc.) or what routine colony management beekeepers
perform (splitting hives, swarm control, chemical use, etc.). As you can
imagine, both of these vary considerably among beekeepers so this possible
cause of CCD is given less attention. That said, poor management can make
any colony malady worse.

4. *Queen source:* Initial investigations considering queen source as
a cause of CCD have turned up no evidence that the disorder is tied to queen
production. Yet, scientists are investigating the lack of genetic diversity
and lineage of bees, both related to queen quality, as possible causes of
CCD. Regarding the former, it has been said that fewer than 500 breeder
queens produce the millions of queen bees (and therefore all bees) used
throughout the U.S. Geneticists refer to this as a genetic bottle
neck. This lack of genetic biodiversity has, in effect, made U.S.
honey bees a virtual monoculture. Monocultures usually are susceptible to
any pest/disease that invades the system. Honey bees are no exception.

5. *Chemical use in bee colonies:* Without doubt, the beekeeping
industry is overly-dependent on chemical pesticides and antibiotics used to
treat various bee-related maladies. Overuse and misuse of these chemicals
(including insecticides, vitamins, snake oils, etc.) is rampant. In many
cases, the pesticides used to control varroa
mite<http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/misc/bees/varroa_mite.htm >and small
hive beetles<http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/misc/bees/small_hive_beetle.htm>(just
to name two examples) double as insecticides in other pest management
schemes. Putting insecticides into insect colonies cannot be beneficial to
bees, even if the chemicals are not killing the bees outright. A number of
newly-discovered, sub-lethal effects of these chemicals on honey bees
(workers, queens, and drones) should be given stronger consideration as
possible causes of CCD.

6. *Chemical toxins in the environment:* A popular theory is that
chemical toxins in the environment are responsible for CCD. In many
instances, the beekeepers reporting colony losses manage large migratory
beekeeping operations. In migratory operations, beekeepers move bees from
blooming crop to blooming crop around the country. Because pesticides are
used widely in cropping systems in an effort to kill herbivorous insects,
one is left to consider the potential for non-target chemical effects on
bees. In addition to being exposed to chemicals while foraging on our
nation's crops, honey bees also may acquire chemicals through contaminated
water sources as they drink water containing chemical runoff. Conceivably,
these chemical residues can accumulate in wax and food stores in the colony,
thus killing bees.

7. *Genetically modified crops:* A number of people have blamed
genetically modified crops for the widespread bee deaths. Scientists have
begun initial investigations into this theory but all available data suggest
that genetically modified crops are not the culprit, at least as far as the
plants themselves are concerned. Interestingly, many seeds from which
genetically modified crops are grown are dipped first in systemic
insecticides that later appear in the plants' nectar and pollen. This makes
genetically modified plants suspect because of their chemical treatment
history, not because they are genetically modified.

8. *Varroa mites and associated pathogens:* Even with the hysteria
surrounding CCD, varroa
mite<http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/misc/bees/varroa_mite.htm >remains
the world's most prolific honey bee killers. Not surprisingly,
varroa and the viruses they transmit have been considered as possible causes
of CCD. The primary flaw with this theory is that varroa have been in the
U.S. only since 1987. Therefore, it is impossible for varroa to have
caused the CCD-like outbreaks that occurred prior to 1987. A final point
worth considering in the varroa/CCD issue is that many of the chemicals used
in bee colonies are used to control varroa. So varroa (perhaps not directly)
has been considered a leading candidate because the mite itself is damaging,
it transmits viruses to bees, and it elicits an all-out chemical assault
from beekeepers.

9. *Nutritional fitness:* Scientists have proposed nutritional fitness
of adult bees as a potential cause of CCD. This topic is being investigated
although little information exists currently to suggest nutrition is playing
a role. Malnutrition is a stress to bees, possibly weakening the bees'
immune system. This could have devastating effects on the bees' ability to
fight pests and diseases.

10. *Undiscovered/new pests and diseases:* Finally, undiscovered or
unidentified pests/pathogens are considered a possible cause of CCD. Many of
the known bee pests and diseases in the U.S. were introduced in the
last 30 years. We can expect this trend to continue as globalization
increases. This is already happening. For example, *Nosema apis* (a
protozoa that lives in the digestive tract of honey bees) has been present
in the U.S. for many years. In 2006, scientists discovered and
identified a new nosema species, *Nosema ceranae*, present in some
colonies displaying symptoms of CCD (it also has been found in bee samples
dating back to 1995). When this disease is present in bees in elevated
levels, the bees wander from colonies, never to return. Although many do not
consider *N. ceranae* to be the cause of CCD, it and other new
pathogens may play an important role in elevated bee deaths.

Many scientists believe that CCD is caused by a combination of the factors
above. To illustrate this point, some dead bees showing symptoms of CCD have
had high numbers of normally-benign pathogens in their bodies. The data
suggest a massive immune system crash in infected bees, an event that allows
normally-benign pathogens to kill the bees. In theory, any stress or
combination of stresses (chemicals, genetic bottlenecks, varroa, etc.) can
suppress a bee's immune system. Considering synergistic effects as a
potential cause of CCD makes the disorder increasingly harder to study, but
for now, this conclusion seems to be the safest assumption.

Mid-Atlantic Apiary Research and Extension Consortium:
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/index.html

[chlamor]

http://www.mlive.com/news/kzgazette/index.ssf?/base/news-23/11800202 6916110.xml&coll=7
Suspect in bee die-off: Insecticide widely used bug spray may be behind deaths of millions of bees

An insecticide is suspected of causing a colony collapse disorder that has killed millions of honeybees worldwide and up to half of the 2.5 million colonies in the United States. The chief suspect, say many scientists, is imidacloprid, the most commonly used insecticide on the planet.

The potent chemical can be sprayed on plants or coated on seeds, which then release the insecticide through the plants as they grow.

Research has shown that in sublethal doses imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids can impair honeybees' memory and learning, as well as their motor activity and navigation. Recent studies have reported ``anomalous flying behavior'' in imidacloprid-treated bees, in which the workaholic insects simply fall to the grass or appear unable to fly toward the hive.

Mark Longstroth, Michigan State University Extension's district educator for fruit in southwestern Michigan.
Longstroth hasn't reviewed data on how imidacloprid is suspected to affect the honeybees, but he said implicating the chemical as the colony collapse culprit sounds plausible.

Some U.S. entomologists who recently have been analyzing dead bees have found a remarkably high number of viruses and fungal diseases in the carcasses, leading them to suspect there may be other culprits besides neonicotinoids. "When neonicotinoids are used on termites, they can't remember how to get home, they stop eating, and then the fungus takes over and kills them. That's one of the ways imidacloprid works on termites -- it makes them vulnerable to other natural organisms. So if you look at what's happening to honeybees, that's pretty scary.''

This "coating on seeds" is new. Since 2005- 2006, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Bayer have acquired patents to "coat" their GE corn, soy, canola, and cotton with this class of insecticides. This is NOT being tested by the regulators as a possible causative or contributing factor in CCD. They don't look, so they don't find.

[pepsified thinker]

I was actually both somewhat relieved, and excited, the other day, at the sight of a regular old honeybee nosing around some clover in my yard.

BUT A QUESTION: are neonictinoids (or whatever) used in all areas where CCD is happening?

[nomo]

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... /index.htm

As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks

The mysterious disappearance of millions of bees is fueling fears of an agricultural disaster, writes Fortune's David Stipp.

By David Stipp, Fortune

August 28 2007: 2:55 PM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- It's a sweet time for honeybees in the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the ones humming around Dennis vanEngelsdorp seem too preoccupied by the blooming knapweed nearby to sting him as he carefully lifts the top off their hive. VanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania's state apiarist, spots signs of plenty within: honeycomb stocked with yellow pollen, neat rows of wax hexagons housing larval bees, and a fertile queen churning out eggs.

But something has gone terribly wrong in this little utopia in a box. "There should be a lot more workers than there are," he says. "This colony is in trouble."

That pattern -- worker bees playing Amelia Earhart -- has become dismayingly familiar to the nation's beekeepers over the past year, as well as to growers whose crops are pollinated by honeybees. A third of our food, from apples to zucchinis, begins with floral sex acts abetted by honeybees trucked around the country on 18-wheelers.

The mysterious deaths of the honeybees

We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination.

But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too.

And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)

In late June, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns starkly warned that "if left unchecked, CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses."

$9.3 billion worth of endangered crops

Late last year vanEngelsdorp, a strapping, 37-year-old Netherlands native with a thatch of blond hair and a close-cropped goatee, helped organize a group of bee experts to identify the killer. In recent months he's acted as the team's gumshoe, driving thousands of miles to collect bees and honeycomb samples from CCD-afflicted hives to analyze for clues.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania State University entomologist Diana Cox-Foster has scoured bees from collapsed colonies for signs of disease-causing microbes. She's shown that the insects are chock-full of them, as if their immune systems are suppressed.

Now the entomologists, aided by Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University scientist known for cracking the case of the West Nile virus (he identified the mosquito-transmitted killer of birds and sometimes people), are closing in on possible culprits and reportedly have submitted a study identifying a virus associated with CCD to a scientific journal. The bug may have been introduced into the U.S. via imported bees or bee-related products, say researchers familiar with the study.

"If I were a betting man," says Dewey Caron, a University of Delaware entomologist who co-authored a recent report on CCD's toll, "I'd bet it's a virus that's fairly new or one that's mutated to become more virulent." Other pathogens, such as fungi, may have combined forces with the virus, he adds.

But merely showing that germs selectively turn up in cases of CCD, he cautions, won't necessarily nail the culprit, for it will leave a key question unanswered: Are such microbes the main killers, or has something else stomped bees' immune systems, making them vulnerable to the infections?

After all, the first report on AIDS focused on a strange outbreak of rare fungal pneumonia, "opportunistic" infections whose root cause was later identified as HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.

A fight about fish farms

Fortunately, a bee apocalypse seems unlikely at this point. Beekeepers have recovered from CCD-like hits in the past -- major bee die-offs seem to occur about once a decade. Most beekeepers recently contacted by Fortune say hives generally appear normal of late.

Still, ominous reports of worker-scarce hives like the one vanEngelsdorp recently examined suggest that whatever causes CCD is still in circulation and may well decimate hives again when bees' floral support system drops away this fall.

If that happens, "it will be a lot worse than the first time, because [commercial beekeepers] have already spent a lot of their money" replacing lost bees, says Richard Adee, head of the country's largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms of Bruce, S.D., which, despite its name, is largely a pollination business.

The losses weren't insured, he adds: Because of all the unpredictable things that can kill bees, from mites to droughts, insurers have long refused to cover them. "We'll see a lot of guys just hang it up."

So that's the thing to worry about: While CCD isn't likely to obliterate honeybees, it may wipe out enough migratory beekeepers to precipitate a pollination crisis.

They're already thin on the ground -- a rare breed of truck drivers who also happen to be applied entomologists, amateur botanists, skilled nursemaids of cussed old machines, traveling salesmen, and Job-like nurturers of finicky, stinging insects that, when they're not mysteriously dying off, can suddenly swarm on you like something out of Hitchcock.

Commercial beekeepers make up only about 1% of the 135,000 owners of hives in the U.S., but they manage over 80% of the nation's 2.4 million honeybee colonies. If the waning number of hives in the U.S. is any indication, commercial beekeeping was already in a long-term decline before CCD struck -- in 1960 there were about five million hives, more than twice as many as there are today.

Meanwhile, demand for pollination services is growing, largely because of our love affair with the almond -- it's increasingly seen as a health food, and the FDA acknowledged in 2004 that there are data "suggesting" a daily dose of 1.5 ounces of almonds or other nuts, along with a low-fat diet, may lower the risk of heart disease. By 2012 nearly 90% of the hives now estimated to exist in the U.S. will be needed to pollinate California's almond groves each spring, according to the Almond Board of California.

10 crops most at risk

Commercial beekeeping has a lot in common with the disappearing family farm. The typical bee rancher is a salt-of-the-earth, 50-something, strong-armed guy who often sweats through the night forklifting hives filled with seriously annoyed bees onto a flatbed semi in order to rush them to his next customer's field 500 miles away, which just may be near a crop sprayed with insecticides that will kill 15% of his livestock as they wing around the area.

Cheap honey imported from China and Argentina has clobbered his profits, forcing him to work his bees ever harder as migratory pollinators. He loses lots of bees to "vampire" mites, hive-busting bears, human vandals, and sometimes to beekeepers gone bad, who steal hives by night and pollinate by day. His kids can see that there are much easier ways to make a living.

But for all that, he's never lost the sense of wonder that came over him the first time he heard the piping of a queen -- a kind of battle cry that newly emerged honeybee queens make before fighting to the death for hive supremacy. From outside a hive, it sounds like a child wistfully tooting a toy trumpet in a distant room.

If CCD flares up again, one of the casualties may be the Paul Revere of colony collapse, a lanky, 58-year-old beekeeper named David Hackenberg. The story of the disappearing bees began one afternoon last October when he and his son Davey pulled into one of their "bee yards" near Tampa to check on 400 hives they had placed there three weeks earlier.

The Hackenbergs' main center of operations is a farm near Lewisburg, Pa., but like most migratory beekeepers, they move their bees south each winter for a few months of R&R (rest and reproduction) before the rigors of spring pollination.

Hackenberg, a gregarious raconteur with a Walter Brennan voice, says the first sign of trouble was that "there were hardly any bees flying around the hives. It was kind of a weird sensation, no bees in the air. We got out our smokers" -- bellows grafted to tin cans that beekeepers use to waft bee-sedating smoke into hives before opening them - "and smoked a few hives, and suddenly I thought, 'Wait a minute, what are we smoking?'

"Next thing, I started jerking covers off hives ... It was like somebody took a sweeper and swept the bees right out of the boxes. I set there a minute scratching my head, then I literally got down on my hands and knees and started looking for dead bees. But there weren't any."

Attack of the mutant rice

Hackenberg spread the word about his vanished bees. Within days other beekeepers began reporting similar cases. Penn State's Cox-Foster, vanEngelsdorp, and other bee experts launched an investigation. After turning up more than a dozen cases of collapsing colonies across the country, the team issued a report in mid-December telling of beekeepers who'd lost up to 90% of their bees.

The "unprecedented losses," according to the report, had many keepers "openly wondering if the industry can survive."

By late spring CCD had made headlines around the world. Assorted phobia purveyors vied to adopt the die-off as a poster child for everything from cellphone emanations to God's Just Wrath. Internet bloggers thrilled themselves silly bandying about a sentence from Albert Einstein, which the great physicist apparently tossed off about 40 years after his death to the public-relations department of a French beekeeping group: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man will have no more than four years to live."

A survey sponsored by Bee Alert Technology, a Missoula, Mont., firm that sells hive-tracking devices and other bee wares, turned up reports of CCD in 35 states and Puerto Rico by early June.

Despite the widespread impression that CCD started with Hackenberg's losses last October in Florida, says Bee Alert CEO Jerry Bromenshenk, "our survey shows that it probably first began to show up the previous spring in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. By midsummer [last year] it was moving through the heartland," hitting hives in the Dakotas, then appearing widely a few months later in the South and on both coasts.

A survey led by vanEngelsdorp and Florida apiary inspector Jerry Hayes suggests that a quarter of U.S. beekeepers were struck by CCD between September 2006 and March 2007. Those hit by mysterious die-offs lost, on average, 45% of their hives.

The surveys failed to show patterns suggesting CCD's cause. But they provided alibis for some prime suspects, such as beekeeper enemy No. 1: blood-sucking Varroa destructor mites. (Picture a tick as big as a Frisbee glommed onto your back -- that's what Varroa is like for a bee.) Varroa both transmits harmful viruses to bees and suppresses their immune systems.

But CCD has been reported in many hives without significant mite problems, says Jeff Pettis, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

Sugar cane ethanol's not-so-sweet future

Another leading suspect -- stress on bees due to migratory pollination -- hasn't gotten off the hook so easily. Low honey prices coupled with rising pollination fees for certain crops have prompted migratory beekeepers to put their bees on the road more than ever during the past few years.

Some now truck hives coast to coast, beginning in February with California almonds, then moving on to crops in the East, such as Maine blueberries. That potentially exposes bees to ever more diseases and insecticides. And many of the crops, such as cranberries, don't provide adequate bee nutrition.

The insects aren't very good travelers either. When a truck carrying bees gets caught in a summer traffic jam, for instance, hives quickly overheat, despite the fact that the millions of workers inside them furiously fan their wings in an attempt to prevent it, says Wes Card, a beekeeper whose Merrimack Valley Apiaries in Billerica, Mass., pollinates crops from California to Maine.

"Then every minute counts," he adds, for unless the driver can quickly find a way to pull off the road and hose down the hives with cooling water, desperately hot queens emerge from their inner sanctums and typically wind up venturing into nearby colonies on the truck, where they are perceived as alien invaders and promptly killed. (Ironically, worker bees typically execute a condemned monarch by clustering around her and vibrating their wing muscles to generate heat, fatally raising her temperature -- beekeepers call it "balling the queen" because the executioners form a ball of bees.) A hot day can turn a load of hives into a costly mess within minutes.

Stress probably isn't the main culprit, though. In fact, the biggest commercial beekeepers -- those with over 500 hives, most of whom are migratory pollinators -- lost a smaller percentage of their hives when hit by CCD last winter than did hobbyist beekeepers, according to the survey co-authored by vanEngelsdorp.

Further, there's some evidence that CCD may antedate the modern stresses put on bees. Large numbers of honeybees have mysteriously vanished a number of times since the mid-19th century, suggesting that CCD may be just the latest episode in a "cycle of disappearance" caused by a mystery disease that periodically flares up like a deadly worldwide flu epidemic.

Still, entomologists who have personally observed the effects of CCD insist that it is unlike any bee die-off they've seen. The University of Delaware's Caron, one of the bee world's biggest names, says he was stunned when 11 of 12 hives in the school's apiary collapsed last winter, apparently because of CCD.

"Never in 40 years had I witnessed the symptoms I was seeing," he says.

Winning in the wine biz

One of CCD's strangest symptoms, say bee experts, is a phenomenon that might be called the madness of the nurses. Nurse bees are workers that nurture a hive's preadult bees, called brood. Workers begin their adult lives as nurses, and only during the final third or so of their six-week lives do they become foragers, venturing outside the hive to collect nectar and pollen.

Researchers have discovered that the young nurses are maintained in a kind of immature, thickheaded state by chemical signals emanating from the queen. Nurses aren't supposed to leave the hive. They're not ready to cope with the big outside world, which requires a mature bee's smarts. Besides, with nurses on leave, the all-important brood would wither.

Yet empty hives struck by CCD are often found with intact brood, which means nurses were on the job shortly before all the bees flew off forever. Beekeepers find this gross dereliction of duty much weirder than the disappearance of foragers, which essentially work themselves to death and often die outside the hive.

Says Hackenberg: "Basically, I've never seen bees go off and leave brood. That's the real kicker."

To explain the psychotic behavior, some beekeepers, including Hackenberg, point the finger at an increasingly popular class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. The chemicals are widely used by farmers on fruits and vegetables that bees pollinate, as well as on corn and other crops often grown nearby.

Soon after Bayer (Charts), the German drug and chemicals concern, first put the products on the market in the early 1990s, they were implicated in a bee die-off in France, where their use was then sharply restricted. Since 2000, studies by French and Italian researchers have suggested that low, "sublethal" doses of the chemicals -- which bees might get from lingering traces of the insecticides in fields -- can mess up the insects' memories and navigational abilities, potentially making them get lost. Bayer has countered with its own studies, which it asserts demonstrate that the products, when properly used, don't pose significant risks.

Honeybees' exposure to trace amounts of neonicotinoids can't be ruled out, says Chris Mullin, a Penn State University entomologist investigating whether pesticides are involved in CCD.

But he and other CCD investigators doubt that neonicotinoids will turn out to be the primary culprits. For one thing, many other chemicals to which bees are exposed are nerve toxins that can make them act strange at low doses. And it's hard to reconcile the rapid, widespread appearance of CCD last year with the fact that numerous such chemicals have long been widely used.

Could infectious microbes induce the nurses' insanity?

The great corn gold rush

Maybe. Young workers with a disease caused by "sacbrood" virus tend to start foraging abnormally early in life, when their healthy peers are still nursing. And as if discombobulated in their new roles, they fail to collect pollen.

Although sacbrood virus has been detected in bees from some hives with CCD symptoms, as have a number of other viruses, it doesn't appear to be closely associated with the disorder. But its ability to warp young bees' behavior suggests that viruses may well induce nurses to do the unthinkable.

Another explanation may make more sense, though: Perhaps the nurses aren't really acting crazy when they fly away. Instead, their strange behavior may represent a perfectly natural attempt by doomed workers to protect their sisters from killer microbes.

After all, a hive's workers represent a famously close-knit sorority, geared by evolution to act strictly in the best interests of their colonies. (Male "drones" don't work, by the way. They loaf about the hive most of their lives, zip out about noon every day in hopes of mating on the wing with young queens, then immediately die after copulating, presumably happy.) Beekeepers have long known that sick bees generally leave the hive to die, minimizing the risk that they will infect others.

In his seminal 1879 tome The A B C of Bee Culture, Amos Ives Root, an early giant of U.S. beekeeping, marveled that "when a bee is crippled or diseased from any cause, he [sic] crawls away ... out of the hive, and rids the community of his presence as speedily as possible. If bees could reason, we would call this a lesson of heroic self-sacrifice for the good of the community."

Might a fast-spreading, immune-suppressing disease be making nurses so sick that their urge to stay put is overruled by the altruistic impetus to depart?

The organic milk price war

The effort to answer such questions has entered a new phase with the recent linking of specific infectious agents to CCD (the ones whose identities are expected to be disclosed soon in a scientific journal). Now Cox-Foster says she and colleagues are trying to reproduce CCD's effects on bee colonies by seeding healthy hives with the agents -- the biomedical equivalent of getting a killer to confess.

Meanwhile, scattered reports over the summer of hives with abnormally few workers and little stored honey have many bee people worried. A few beekeepers, frazzled by earlier heavy losses and worried that truly ruinous ones are on the way, have already bailed out.

CCD 2 would probably be a lot uglier for growers -- and for us fruit and veggie eaters -- than version one was. In fact, we got lucky the first time it hit: "A lot of the bees brought to California this year were total junk," their hives sparsely populated because of CCD and other problems, says Lyle Johnston, a Rocky Ford, Colo., beekeeper who arranges the placement of 50,000 hives owned by other keepers in almond groves each spring. "But we had the most perfect weather during the almond bloom that I can recall. It saved our butts," by enabling bees to take to the air more often than they usually do.

"We dodged the bullet with fruit, too, this year," says the University of Delaware's Caron. "We had weak bees, but the weather was exceptional during the apple, blueberry, and cranberry blooms."

Unfortunately, Caron and others note, by keeping crop prices low, the good weather may have actually discouraged legislators from funding studies on CCD. To beekeepers' dismay, the farm bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, which calls for $286 billion to be spent over the next five years on everything from school snacks to biofuels, earmarked no funds specifically for CCD research.

And the lucky run of weather probably won't last much longer. Extraordinarily dry weather through spring and early summer in California and the Southeast has stressed bees in those regions, potentially setting up many hives for collapse later in the year.

Despite making some progress, cash-strapped scientists looking into CCD aren't likely to identify what causes it -- and ways to fend it off -- before the high-risk season for bee die-offs arrives with the onset of cold weather.

So what to do in light of this new, unsolved, and probably ongoing threat to our food supply? Don't panic. But do take time to slowly savor your next sweet, spicy slice of cantaloupe, watermelon, apple, peach, or pear.

The pure pleasure of it may get a lot rarer.

[Occult Means Hidden]

for those interested:

Is "ElectroSmog" Destroying the Planet's Bee Population?


"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." - Albert Einstein

Mobile phones, Wi-Fi networks, electric power lines are sources of "electrosmog" disrupting nature on an unprecedented, massive scale causing birds and bees to lose their bearings, fail to reproduce and die, according to controversial research by Dr. Ulrich Warnke, a lecturer at the University of Saarland, in Germany, who has been studying the effects of man-made electrical fields on wildlife for more than 30 years. Warnke believes that "an unprecedented dense mesh of artificial magnetic, electrical and electromagnetic fields" is being generated, disrupting the "natural system of information" on which the species rely. Bees are able to change the polarity of their antennae at will, which enables them to navigate using the Earth's magnetic fields.

"Man-made technology has created transmitters which have fundamentally changed the natural electromagnetic energies and forces on the earth's surface," Warnke says. "Animals that depend on natural electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic fields for their orientation and navigation are confused by the much stronger and constantly changing artificial fields." He adds that the world's natural electrical and magnetic fields have had a "decisive hand in the evolution of species".

Warnke's research, reported in the Independent has shown that "bees exposed to the kinds of electrical fields generated by power lines killed each other and their young, while ones exposed to signals in the same range as mobile phones lost much of their homing ability.

German research has long shown that bees' behavior changes near power lines. A limited study at Landau University has found that bees do not to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried out the study, confirmed this could be a possible cause of the beehive collapses.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is what scientists call the occurrence of a hive’s disappearance. Usually only queens, eggs and a few immature workers are left behind. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die individually, lost far from the hive. Another bizarre twist is that parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The West Coast has lost over 60 percent of its commercial bee population, and 70 percent of the population is now missing on the East Coast. It phenomenon seemed to start last autumn, and has now hit half of all American states. CCD has also spread from Germany all the way down to Greece.

No one knows for sure why it is happening, however the proposed theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops all have drawbacks, that the cell phone conclusion does not share. However, many question remain unanswered and more research is needed to conclusively determine the true cause.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... nic-s.html

[chiggerbit]

http://tinyurl.com/mzqlum

Monday, Aug. 24, 2009
New Clues in the Mass Death of Bees
By Bryan Walsh


In late 2006, something strange began to happen to America's honeybees. Colonies that were once thriving suddenly went still, almost overnight. The worker bees that make hives run simply disappeared, their bodies never to be found. Over the past couple of years, nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies have collapsed this way, which led to a straightforward name for the phenomenon: colony collapse disorder (CCD).

This might seem like little more than a tantalizing mystery for entomologists, except for one fact: honeybees provide $15 billion worth of value to U.S. farmers, pollinating crops that range from apples to avocados to almonds. Any number of possible causes for CCD have been put forward, from bee viruses to parasites to environmental triggers like pesticides or even cell-phone transmissions. Despite the Department of Agriculture's allotment of $20 million a year for the next five years to study CCD, it's still a mystery — and the bees keep dying. (Read "Why We Should Care About Dying Bees.")

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the causes of CCD may be more varied than scientists expect. The bees may be dying not from a single toxin or disease but rather from an assault directed by a collection of pathogens. A research team led by entomologist May Berenbaum at the University of Illinois compared the whole genome of honeybees that came from hives that had suffered from CCD with hives that were healthy. The sick bees exhibited genetic damage that could account for the die-off, and that damage indicated that they might be afflicted with multiple viruses simultaneously. This could weaken them enough to trigger CCD. "It's like a perfect storm," says Berenbaum.

The PNAS team's work was possible only because the honeybee's genome is one of the few animal genomes that scientists have decoded in full. The researchers looked at the genes that were switched on in the guts of sick and healthy bees — the gut being both the place pesticides are detoxified and the main region for immune defense. The technique they used is what's known as a whole-genome microarray, and it's ideal for this kind of sweeping analysis. "It's a really powerful tool that lets us look at all 10,000 honeybee genes at the same time," says Berenbaum. "The causative agents [for CCD] might just leap out."

In the guts of CCD-afflicted bees, the microarray analysis showed unusual fragments of ribosomal RNA. Ribosomes are essentially the protein factories inside cells — they're vital to the health of the cell itself and the larger organism. Berenbaum believes that the presence of those genetic fragments inside the CCD-afflicted bees indicates that they may be under attack by a number of insect viruses — including deformed wing virus and Israeli acute paralysis virus — that damage the ribosomes. "It was the one factor that remained consistently associated with the CCD bees we tested, no matter where they came from or how severe the disorder was," says Berenbaum. "It doesn't have to be a specific virus, just an overload." Once the bees' systems get burdened this way, they are less capable of fighting off any other threat, from pesticides to other environmental causes. (See TIME's video "Bees Without Borders.")

Berenbaum is quick to point out that the microarray analysis is only correlative, meaning that while it can show evidence that certain viruses are present in CCD-afflicted bees, it doesn't reveal exactly what role the viruses play, nor how best to battle them. One approach might be to control infestations by varroa mites, which carry multiple viruses into the hives they attack. The good news is that the disorder may be on the wane, with the Apiary Inspectors of America reporting that deaths from CCD are below 30% for the first time since the crisis began. "The phenomenon seems to be in decline," says Berenbaum. "The most vulnerable populations might have already crashed." American farmers should be thankful; just think of trying to pollinate all those crops by hand.

[chiggerbit]

http://prosemiteundercover.phpbbnow.com ... hp?t=21392

Oops, here's the link to the article itself:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101842.html

An Israeli company has developed a revolutionary new drug that could solve the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder, the disturbing syndrome that has been wiping out bee communities and threatening agricultural production all over the world.



The drug, Remembee, which was developed by Beeologics, has completed successful clinical trials on millions of bees in North America. Not Advertisement


o Advertisement

nly has it proved effective in maintaining bee health, but it also improved the
longevity of bees and increased the honey in the hives.

Based on Nobel prize-winning RNAI technology, Remembee helps the bees overcome IAVP virus, also discovered in Israel, which has been associated with colony collapse in scientific literature.

"It's really a tug of war between the virus and the host. We are helping the bee tug the rope more strongly and beat the virus. We take
advantage of an immune system that the bees elicit for viral disease. But we are really using naturally occurring phenomenon. It's not a
pesticide and it's not toxic," says Nitzan Paldi, CTO of Beeologics.

The US Department of Agriculture has been accompanying Beeologics with its FDA certification process due to the urgency of the need for the drug.

Click here for more Israel science news at www.israel21c.org

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 082609.php

Public release date: 26-Aug-2009

Contact: Michael Woods
m_woods@acs.org
202-872-6293
American Chemical Society


Researchers have established the conditions that foster formation of potentially dangerous levels of a toxic substance in the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) often fed to honey bees. Their study, which appears in the current issue of ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could also help keep the substance out of soft drinks and dozens of other human foods that contain HFCS. The substance, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), forms mainly from heating fructose.

In the new study, Blaise LeBlanc and Gillian Eggleston and colleagues note HFCS's ubiquitous usage as a sweetener in beverages and processed foods. Some commercial beekeepers also feed it to bees to increase reproduction and honey production. When exposed to warm temperatures, HFCS can form HMF and kill honeybees. Some researchers believe that HMF may be a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that has killed at least one-third of the honeybee population in the United States.

The scientists measured levels of HMF in HFCS products from different manufacturers over a period of 35 days at different temperatures. As temperatures rose, levels of HMF increased steadily. Levels jumped dramatically at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. "The data are important for commercial beekeepers, for manufacturers of HFCS, and for purposes of food storage. Because HFCS is incorporated as a sweetener in many processed foods, the data from this study are important for human health as well," the report states. It adds that studies have linked HMF to DNA damage in humans. In addition, HMF breaks down in the body to other substances potentially more harmful than HMF.


###

ARTICLE #3 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Formation of Hydroxymethylfurfural in Domestic High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)"

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/pre ... /jf9014526

CONTACT:
Blaise W. LeBlanc, Ph.D.
Carl Hayden Bee Research Center
Agricultural Research Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Tucson, Ariz. 85719
Phone: 520-792-1296
Fax: 520-792-1296
Email: blaise_LL@hotmail.com

[annie aronburg]

Island beekeepers warn of crisis: 90 per cent of colonies wiped out

Almost 90 per cent of colonies wiped out over winter, some say

Vancouver Island beekeepers are reeling from the worst commercial honeybee die-off in recent memory, with some estimating almost 90 per cent of colonies have been wiped out in the last few months.

Many blame a harmful parasite called varroa mites that has become immune to some pesticides, and fear the shortage of bees could affect spring pollination.

“The amount of bees that have been lost is just phenomenal,” said Sol Nowitz, a veteran commercial beekeeper who breeds bees and produces honey at the Jingle Pot Apiary in Nanaimo. “It’s the biggest catastrophe to kill bees on the Island ever.”

He estimates there are between 2,000 and 3,000 colonies on the Island, about a quarter of the 12,000 colonies that flourished a few years ago. In 2007, Nowitz had 275 colonies. Now left with 15, he is sold out of honey and can no longer afford to sell bees to other beekeepers.

Steve Mitchell, owner of Bee Haven Farms in Duncan, said he started out the winter with 18 colonies and came out with one. “Other [farmers] lost their whole stocks,” he said.

Nowitz said the hardest-hit areas are in Nanaimo and the mid-Island.

The last major die-off was in 2007 and 2008, when some breeders lost 55 to 65 per cent of their stock. This year, however, the almost total depletion is a full-blown disaster, Nowitz said.

The mites were first discovered on the Island in 1997 and have wreaked havoc on honeybees since. They infect the bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to viruses and deformed wings.

But Stan Reist, president of the B.C. Honey Producers Association, said a variety of factors contribute to the deaths — including a late fall harvest that tires out the bees and the timing of pesticide treatments.

Some fear honey producers will be forced to raise prices or abandon the business altogether.

Reist dismissed the notion of skyrocketing honey prices, but did say the latest crisis could cripple some Island beekeepers.

“We have had three successive years of problems and there are going to be some people who are not going to be able to rebuild,” he said.

Nowitz fears the recent problems plaguing the industry are going to scare away young people contemplating careers as apiarists.

“We have a vibrant bee-keeping industry on Vancouver Island, but it’s under threat at the moment,” he said.

Vancouver Island has been quarantined as a separate bee-breeding district since the early 1990s, meaning it can’t import replacement bees from other parts of Canada. Island beekeepers have been importing more expensive bees from the Southern Hemisphere.

Reist recently brought in about 637 packages of bees from New Zealand and is expecting a shipment of another 600.

But Nowitz argues bees from the Prairies or Ontario are heartier and better accustomed to our climate and thinks incremental imports of queen bees should be brought in from other parts of Canada to replenish stocks.

Reist, however, said the majority of beekeepers support the quarantine.

“We don't have the diseases that exist in the rest of Canada,” he said. “This [recent die-off] is where the freak of nature takes over and sometimes you just cant beat nature.”

[elpuma]

Bees in more trouble than ever after bad winter
By GARANCE BURKE and SETH BORENSTEIN


In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, Zac Browning, owner of Browning's Honey Co. Inc, shows a queen bee at a bee farm east of Merced, Calif. Browning keeps his hives in Idaho Falls, Idaho, through the winter, then brings them to California each year for the almond crop pollination. He said so many of his bees died in recent months in Idaho but weren't discovered dead until they arrived in California that he resorted to calling friends and colleagues on the East Coast and begged them to replenish his stocks so he could meet growers' demands in California.

MERCED, Calif. – The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides.

Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides used in fields and orchards. Federal courts are even weighing in this month, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overlooked a requirement when allowing a pesticide on the market.

And on Thursday, chemists at a scientific conference in San Francisco will tackle the issue of chemicals and dwindling bees in response to the new study.

Scientists are concerned because of the vital role bees play in our food supply. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini.

Bees have been declining over decades from various causes. But in 2006 a new concern, "colony collapse disorder," was blamed for large, inexplicable die-offs. The disorder, which causes adult bees to abandon their hives and fly off to die, is likely a combination of many causes, including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition and pesticides, experts say.

"It's just gotten so much worse in the past four years," said Jeff Pettis, research leader of the Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. "We're just not keeping bees alive that long."

This year bees seem to be in bigger trouble than normal after a bad winter, according to an informal survey of commercial bee brokers cited in an internal USDA document. One-third of those surveyed had trouble finding enough hives to pollinate California's blossoming nut trees, which grow the bulk of the world's almonds. A more formal survey will be done in April.

"There were a lot of beekeepers scrambling to fill their orders and that implies that mortality was high," said Penn State University bee researcher Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who worked on the USDA snapshot survey.

Beekeeper Zac Browning shipped his hives from Idaho to California to pollinate the blossoming almond groves. He got a shock when he checked on them, finding hundreds of the hives empty, abandoned by the worker bees.

The losses were extreme, three times higher than the previous year.

"It wasn't one load or two loads, but every load we were pulling out that was dead. It got extremely depressing to see a third of my livestock gone," Browning said, standing next to stacks of dead bee colonies in a clearing near Merced, at the center of California's fertile San Joaquin Valley.

Among all the stresses to bee health, it's the pesticides that are attracting scrutiny now. A study published Friday in the scientific journal PLOS (Public Library of Science) One found about three out of five pollen and wax samples from 23 states had at least one systemic pesticide — a chemical designed to spread throughout all parts of a plant.

EPA officials said they are aware of problems involving pesticides and bees and the agency is "very seriously concerned."

The pesticides are not a risk to honey sold to consumers, federal officials say. And the pollen that people eat is probably safe because it is usually from remote areas where pesticides are not used, Pettis said. But the PLOS study found 121 different types of pesticides within 887 wax, pollen, bee and hive samples.

"The pollen is not in good shape," said Chris Mullin of Penn State University, lead author.

None of the chemicals themselves were at high enough levels to kill bees, he said, but it was the combination and variety of them that is worrisome.

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum called the results "kind of alarming."

Despite EPA assurances, environmental groups don't think the EPA is doing enough on pesticides.

Bayer Crop Science started petitioning the agency to approve a new pesticide for sale in 2006. After reviewing the company's studies of its effects on bees, the EPA gave Bayer conditional approval to sell the product two years later, but said it had to carry a label warning that it was "potentially toxic to honey bee larvae through residues in pollen and nectar."

The Natural Resources Defense Council sued, saying the agency failed to give the public timely notice for the new pesticide application. In December, a federal judge in New York agreed, banning the pesticide's sale and earlier this month, two more judges upheld the ruling.

"This court decision is obviously very painful for us right now, and for growers who don't have access to that product," said Jack Boyne, an entomologist and spokesman for Bayer Crop Science. "This product quite frankly is not harmful to honeybees."

Boyne said the pesticide was sold for only about a year and most sales were in California, Arizona and Florida. The product is intended to disrupt the mating patterns of insects that threaten citrus, lettuce and grapes, he said.

Berenbaum's research shows pesticides are not the only problem. She said multiple viruses also are attacking the bees, making it tough to propose a single solution.

"Things are still heading downhill," she said.

For Browning, one of the country's largest commercial beekeepers, the latest woes have led to a $1 million loss this year.

"It's just hard to get past this," he said, watching as workers cleaned honey from empty wooden hives Monday. "I'm going to rebuild, but I have plenty of friends who aren't going to make it."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100324/ap_on_sc/us_food_and_farm_disappearing_bees