In a follow-up about what led to a significant loss of honeybee colonies, a Feb. 28 webinar hosted by Project Apis m. revealed the short answer is beekeepers, researchers, scientists and a multi-organizational working group that includes Project Apis m., the American Beekeeping Federation and the American Honey Producers Association don’t know — yet.
“If you like food, you need bees,” said Danielle Downey, executive director of Project Apis m., kicking off the webinar that provided updates on two nationwide surveys of beekeepers. The initial survey, fielded Jan. 28, revealed a staggering 62% loss of commercial honeybee colonies across the U.S., while a follow-up survey two weeks later aimed at determining the cause.
Critical to the food chain, honeybees are valued for much more than their honey, said Downey, who has worked with honeybees and the parasites that plague them for 30 years.
“Honey is valued at about $350 million, but pollination is the real important thing we get from bees, and that’s valued at $18 billion every year — just in the U.S.A., and globally between $235 [billion] and $577 billion,” Downey said.
What’s more, an estimated 75% of food crops and 35% of global agricultural production volume depend on pollinators.
Administered by Project Apis m., the initial survey gathered data from 702 beekeepers, covering colony losses, management practices and potential contributing factors. Almost 800 beekeepers have now participated in that survey, says Downey. The beekeepers surveyed represent more than 68% of the nation’s bees.
Conservatively, Project Aphis m. estimates the total economic impact of the honeybee colony loss at $634.7 million.
While the recent colony loss was more dramatic, honeybees have been in decline for some years now.
“Bees are losing their numbers for a number of reasons — all of which are interrelated,” Matthew Mulica, senior project director of the Keystone Policy Center, which facilitates the Honey Bee Health Coalition, told The Packer.
A lack of good forage and nutrition, not enough flowers, pest and disease pressures and the impact of pesticides collectively “make it really hard for beekeepers,” he said.
The Honey Bee Health Coalition was born a decade ago out of need for a centralized group that brought together beekeeping associations, researchers, agribusiness, government agencies and independent nonprofits, says Mulica.
“There was a lack of communication between mainstream, commodity agriculture and the beekeeping sector on a national, leadership level,” he said. “So, we bridge that gap and we’ve worked across all levels of bee health decline.”
The most recent losses, which surpass historical trends, could significantly impact U.S. agriculture, particularly crop pollination for almonds, fruits, vegetables and other essential food sources, says the Honey Bee Health Coalition.
With 1 in 3 bites of food reliant on pollination, Mulica says the catastrophic bee loss could mean “walking into your grocery store and not having melons and cucumbers and apples and pears and jalapeño peppers and almonds.”
“We still don’t know what caused this recent collapse,” he said. “It could be the usual suspects, or it could be a new, novel disease, an environmental stressor that we hadn’t thought about or a combination of many things.”
Busy bees
As Downey describes it, bees are essentially guns for hire — trucked in 18-wheelers from crop to crop that need pollinating once in bloom. At this time of year, that means almonds. Project Aphis m. says over 2 million hives are moved annually for almonds alone.
Prior to the almond bloom, honeybee colonies are stored for the winter in either indoor or outdoor facilities, so many beekeepers don’t know the condition of the hive until they’re ready to move them out of storage.
“This year, there were a lot of beekeepers who got surprised by the number of dead and dwindling colonies, and as those mounted, the beekeepers started to call researchers and say, ‘We need some help. We don’t know what’s going on,’” said Downey.
A working group was quickly mobilized to field a survey to determine if the honeybee loss was widespread or regional, to assess the severity of the damage and if there was a common cause, Downey explained.
A team of scientists and researchers from USDA and university labs were also mobilized to analyze the data, mite and disease trends, nutrition and landscape impacts, economic damage estimates, and pesticide concerns.
The goal of the first survey was to determine if it was regional or widespread and was focused on known challenges bees face, such as parasites that kill colonies, pathogens, viruses, pesticides and poor nutrition, said Downey.
The surveys have revealed beekeepers are short about 85,000 bee colonies for almonds this year.
Surveying for answers
The colonies represented in the survey were about 1.8 million, or 68% of the U.S. total bees, and showed a loss of about 41% of the nation’s bees, said Downey, who attributes high survey participation to level of concern among beekeepers.
Survey questions were designed to reveal commonalities that would identify a cause.
One question asked about indoor versus outdoor wintering.
“So many beekeepers have moved to a practice of storing their colonies in a climate-controlled building in the winter. We wanted to see if there was a pattern connected to these losses based on those winter conditions,” said Downey.
While there were slightly higher losses among commercial beekeepers who wintered outside, the disparity was not so great to reflect the cause of significant losses, said Downey.
Another question asked what percentage of queens were replaced. Queen health is a key concern to keep healthy hives, said Downey. But again, the data didn’t explain the losses.
Honeybee nutrition is another important factor in beekeeper management, says Downey. When the landscape doesn’t support sufficient nutrition, beekeepers often feed supplemental carbohydrates and supplemental protein to the bees. The survey asked if such supplemental nutrition was provided, and if so, what and when?
Despite some “slight differences,” there was “not a smoking gun,” said Downey.
Another question explored the presence of Varroa mites, which if beekeepers don’t kill, will kill the bees. The survey asked beekeepers what their mite counts were in the fall heading into winter. No smoking gun in the results here either, Downey said.
California almond study
Another important part of the project, says Downey, were samples gathered by the USDA Beltsville researchers who went to California, where bees destined for almond orchards were captured before they were dead. The researchers also took samples of dead outs — hives that were completely dead. They took nearly 500 samples in about 155 colonies and dead outs in nine different operations, said Downey.
“They collected live bees because that’s a snapshot of the current exposure of the colony. If the bees have pathogens — if there’s pesticides in those bees — it’s fairly recent exposure, and you can see their health through the virus analysis and many things that are attacking the colony right now would be seen in that live bee sample,” she said.
Samples collected in California will be an ongoing study, says Downey. The USDA Agricultural Research Service Bee Lab’s four-tiered investigation is exploring potential causes through:
- Pathogen screening — Testing for all known honeybee pathogens using molecular methods.
- Pesticide residues and pollen diversity — Examining stored pollen for pesticide examination and plant diversity.
- Metagenomic analysis — Identifying previously unknown pathogens in colonies with high disease prevelance.
- Microbiome and host-pathogen interactions — Assessing gut bacterial diversity and potential links to colony health.
Researchers are also looking at the bee bread, the stored pollen that the honeybees have in their hive, for contaminating residues and pollen diversity. They are also examining the wax.
Just the pesticide residue analysis alone will take two to four months to analyze, said Downey, explaining there are few labs that do this work.
“After the survey results come out, we should really have a good sense of what happened,” said Mulica of the Keystone Policy Center. “While we wait on those test results to determine what we can do, for now, we know we have to support beekeepers and do everything we can to keep them in business.
“We have to keep working together — beekeepers, farmers, policymakers — have to work together to support honeybee health,” Mulica continued. “We need to continue funding the research for new tools and improve management practices. And we also need policy solutions incentivizing farmers to plant flowers for bees and forage and to better understand impacts from pesticides. These are all the things that will help sustain this industry and help it rebound from these devastating losses.”
Another survey will be deployed April 1, and Project Aphis m. is encouraging strong participation from the beekeeping community.
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