Mysterious disease baffles beekeepers
Beekeeping is a more challenging hobby than in years past, but the number in Butler County has held steady.
Some beekeepers, like Terry Shanor of Butler, have stuck with it after watching relatives tend to their own hives.
"I had an uncle who used to have some hives," said Shanor. "I worked there in the summertime and decided I'd like to try them. They're very interesting."
Shanor serves as president of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association chapter covering Lawrence, Mercer and Butler counties. Membership for that chapter exceeds 100.
Shanor's 25 hives are home to between 50,000 and 60,000 honeybees, which produce thousands of pounds of honey each year.
He extracts honey in mid-July and again in the fall, selling it to grocery stores and in the Amish community.Although in past years he has experienced the same losses from colony collapse disorder, or CCD, as many beekeepers in the nation, Shanor said he did not experience a big loss last winter."I've had losses, but I'm not sure if it was due to CCD or the weather that year," he said, adding that the bitterly cold winter and rainy spring were hard on the colonies."Some of them just ran out of honey over the winter and they starved," he said. "A lot of different things contributed to it."The phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is characterized by the abrupt disappearance of a beehive's worker bees, with little or no buildup of dead bees in or around the colony. The live queen bee is typically present, along with food stores of honey and bee pollen."Nationally, we lost 32 percent of honeybees last year," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture."This year, it's up to 36 percent. That's an astonishing number."The cause is unknown but there are three major theories: pesticide use, a new parasite or pathogen, or a "perfect storm" of stresses that weakened the population.The problem first became evident in the fall of 2006, but it is impossible to identify how and when it originated, vanEngelsdorp said.
Sometimes, honey and immature bees remain in the hive, which suggests that adult bees died suddenly outside the hive, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service."It used to be easy," said Tom Rea of Chicora, who has kept bees for about 50 years."You would put a colony of bees in a box and they'd still be making honey 10 years later. If you can keep a hive alive today for three years, that's really good."The combination of mites, viruses, and destruction from animals such as bears and skunks puts stress on the colonies, Rea said, which makes them more susceptible to any affliction."From what I gather, it's a combination of things coupled with excessive stress on the colonies," he said. "They are just unable to cope with it."People may not realize the magnitude of the problem, which has affected both private and commercially managed hives, said vanEngelsdorp."If we lost one in three chickens or one in three cows, there would be huge alarm bells going off," he said.In the last eight to 10 years, Rea has seen losses of up to 80 percent, but experienced a much smaller loss of around 10 percent last winter. Rea admits this is somewhat uncommon with today's conditions.Rea said the losses among his 30 hives were difficult, but the devastation increases exponentially for commercial beekeepers."I can't imagine someone who has 80,000 bees losing 80 percent of their hives," he said."The economics, the numbers and the work involved just boggles my mind."
<br>Rea cited last year's floral source as a possible explanation for the survival of his colonies."It could have reduced the stress in diet to the bees over the winter," he said.Varroa mites may also have been less of a threat, he said, although he avoids chemical pesticides and stays organic in his hives."In nature, things do tend to go in cycles," he said. "I do think that last year, the varroa mite cycle was on the low side, which would also reduce stress."Finding an explanation for CCD will be more difficult than with other diseases because the honeybees disappear from the hive, said Dave Schultze of Grove City, who keeps about 25 hives at his home."With CCD, the bees just aren't there. The queen and a handful of bees may be there, but the worker bees just go out and never come back," Schultze said."That's very different from the symptoms of any other disease and it makes it harder to pinpoint the problem when you don't have the bees to look at."Schultze has not seen any symptoms of CCD in his honeybees, but said they are generally fragile because they are not native to Pennsylvania. The cool climate is hard on them and their defense against disease is weakened, he said."There are just so many things putting stress on the bees, from pesticides to mites," he said.Herb Thompson of Slippery Rock Township keeps about a dozen hives and said he has seen no evidence of CCD and lost no more bees than usual."It's not unusual to lose a couple of hives over the winter," he said.
Thompson believes the problem has something to do with the Israeli acute paralysis virus, a pathogen researchers have linked to CCD. As a precaution, he stopped buying package bees, which can be ordered from various companies to start new colonies or replace lost bees."We started being very careful about the bees we brought in here," he said.Beginning beekeepers are required to register with the state Department of Agriculture. The startup costs vary widely depending on how equipment and bees are acquired, but beginners should obtain basic equipment such as a smoker and protective clothing.Beekeepers use hand-held smoke canisters to mask threatening scents and encourage bees to gorge on honey, which makes them less aggressive, while a suit, veil and gloves protect against stings. The typical rectangular beehive holds about ten frames of comb, where bees care for their young and store honey and pollen.When honey is extracted from the hives, it is placed in a tank, where the impurities rise to the top and honey is taken from the bottom.More important than honey production is the role honeybees play in pollinating crops.
According to vanEngelsdorp, honeybees help pollinate everything from Florida oranges and Pennsylvania apples to Maine blueberries and California almonds."Honeybees contribute $76 million dollars to the Pennsylvania economy with pollination," vanEngelsdorp said. "Basically, one in three mouthfuls of food come from pollinators."Such statistics led to two Congressional hearings, most recently on June 26. Bee experts and farmers testified and asked Congress to appropriate more money to fund research.President Bush has already authorized $20 million in funding to research the disorder, and private companies such as Haagen-Daz and Burt's Bees have pledged money for bee research because so many of their products rely on honeybee pollination.VanEngelsdorp has teamed up with other researchers to isolate the causes of CCD."We're doing a multifactual analysis, which is a fancy way of saying we haven't found one smoking gun, so what combination of things can cause collapse?" said vanEngelsdorp.
