By By KATHIE HEMPEL / Niles Daily Star
NILES – For those looking forward to their perfectly glazed Easter ham, the news has been disturbing.
Never has the humble honeybee created such a buzz.
National and local television newscasts are suddenly taking interest. Colony Collapsing Disorder (CCD) is an ominous title that has been assigned the bees vanishing act.
Ask the experienced beekeeper if the bees will all disappear. Chances are his look will be patient, yet amused.
Mike Hansen is the State Apiarist for Michigan, headquartered in St. Joseph. He notes beekeepers across the state have been reporting an abnormally high loss of bees for the last several years.
"Bees disappearing from colonies isn't new. This has happened before. Last year was a boom or bust year for the beekeeper," he said.
A very hot July combined with record rains in August and September stressed many colonies. Much of December and January had usually spring-like conditions.
When the freeze did come, many colonies had no honey stored they could access easily. This led to many bees' starvation.
"Bees disappearing from colonies is something else. When a bee is overly stressed, it will try to take a cleansing flight. It will not be a burden to the colony. If it is too weak or ill, it dies," Hansen said.
If beekeepers look closely they will often find a mass of dead bees within several yards of the hives. This could explain some of the disappearances.
Researchers are investigating a number of different possibilities.
In past years they have found infestations of varroa and tracheal mites doing a lot of damage.
Kim Flotum, is publisher of Bee Culture magazine and a number of books including his most recent, 'The Backyard Beekeeper."
"Experts are trying to find a correlation between bees care, their food sources, trucking for pollination and chemicals used on crops," he said.
Flotum reports a new nosema (bacterial infection) is also being investigated. It is not generally fatal but adds additional stress to colonies.
Beekeepers are looking hard at a new chemical being used. Bees gathering the tainted pollen can bring it home and feed it to the brood thus destroying an entire hive.
"The bottom line is nothing really jumps out as the culprit," Flotum said.
Buchanan beekeeper and owner of Blossomland Bee Supply, Phil Hempel, explains honeybees are a very good barometer for measuring the condition of our environment.
"The recent movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' points out how the ecological balance of the world is out of sync. Honey bees' normal life cycle has been affected," he said.
Jim Baerwald, a commercial beekeeper out of Eau Claire, has 1,100 hives returning from pollinating crops in California. Another 900 to 1.000 are expected back from Florida.
"Most of the problems we have with the bees have been imported. The two major parasite infections (mites) were brought in from across the border.
Some were smuggled into the country. Now due to the losses, some bees are being imported from Australia, just to meet the U.S. demand for pollinators," Baerwald said.
Groebs Farms is one of the largest honey packing plants in the world. The
operation is located in Onsted.
"Right now, 65 to 75 percent of all bees in the United States are in California. This is critical. Predominant in one area, every disease that can affect hives there will soon be returning to locations across the country and can infect other hives," Ernie Groebs said.
According to Groeb a few years ago the U.S. produced 255 million pounds of honey a year. This had decreased to approximately 155 million currently causing increased imports to meet the demand for the approximate 400 million pounds of honey consumed by Americans each year.
Still the U.S. is one of the largest producers of honey in the world. So what does it all mean to the person who just wants to be sure honey will still be there to sweeten his afternoon tea?
Were the bees to disappear, one-third of all the groceries Americans assume to be on the shelves, dependent on the little honeybee for their production, would disappear. Or the imported replacement would be priced out of range for the average family.
Local farmer Steve Lecklider of Lehman Farms on Portage Road of Niles rents his hives from two beekeepers.
During the peak season he has 50 hives pollinating his orchards.
At this point, Lecklider says all his crops are looking good.
"We just have to see how this plays out. So far we don't anticipate any problem getting the bees into the orchards," he said.
There is no doubt that the plight of the honeybee is newsworthy. Why the current problem?
The final word is nobody knows. The honeybee has yet to reveal the answer.
Honeybees have been training beekeepers since the time of the Caveman. In spite of the current situation, one thing is sure.
Bees will adjust once more and continue to fascinate and sweeten our lives throughout many years to come.