-This might be one of the most interesting,
disturbing and puzzling stories to come along in a long time.
In early 2007, the news broke that beekeepers across the United States
had made a surprising discovery.
-Bees are mysteriously dying.
-It’s called colony collapse disorder.
Beekeepers in 27 states report disappearing honeybees.
-Pollination by bees produces 30 percent of our food.
-Congress is holding hearings. Even the vice president has been briefed.
-The end of honeybees,
the end of pollination – a dire threat to crops the world over.
Today, what’s happening to the bees, and what’s really at stake?
-The buzz began with these bees at Dave Hackenberg’s bee farm,
ground zero for the mystery of the missing bees.
In November of 2006,
Dave Hackenberg discovered that nearly all of the 400 beehives
in his Florida bee yard were empty.
-So this is what you call a dead hive?
-Yup. Empty box. No bees.
The veteran beekeeper had seen bees die before, but never like this.
-I keep asking myself, what am I doing wrong? I mean, it’s, it’s uh,
it’s a mind-boggling thing. I mean it really is a mind-boggling thing.
Hackenberg contacted scientists at Pennsylvania State University.
They were intrigued by the beekeeper’s story.
-And I said, well, bring up some bees and we’ll check it out. So indeed he
brought up some bees and those bees got sampled and we found all
these things I couldn’t explain and I didn’t understand, and certainly nothing
popped out. And then it became
apparent that this was happening in different parts of the country.
VanEngelsdorp helped give the dieoff a name: colony collapse
disorder, or C.C.D. Suddenly bees were big news.
-The population of honeybees down roughly 25 percent across this country.
-It’s a simple equation. Without bees to pollinate many plants, the plants
just don’t grow.
-The fear is, most of the honeybees will be dead.
-Dad, we have to do something. All the bees are dying.
-Oh no. No bees?
-Colony collapse disorder.
The mystery fascinated the public,
and strange explanations soon began to spread.
-Do you buy that this could be a Russian plot?
-Not really.
-The Rapture? God calling all the bees back to heaven?
-Uh, I don’t think he needs ’em up there.
But much of the television coverage missed an important bit of backstory.
Beekeepers had been struggling to maintain their hives ever since
the 1980s, when the invasive Varroa mite arrived in the U.S.
-We have a saying: Before Varroa mite, you could be a bee haver; after Verroa mite,
you had to be a bee keeper, because you had to manage your bees.
Verroa mites infest and slowly weaken colonies, but Hackenberg’s
C.C.D. losses came quickly to colonies that appeared healthy.
-A number of us thought that we may be dealing with a new pathogen,
a novel pathogen. So if we could find that novel pathogen – let’s say a virus
or something – then that might explain, that was the missing link.
-The only thing we could say about C.C.D. bees, and it was a very distinct
thing, was they were really sick. They sort of had every disease going.
One theory was that stress was making bees sick. To meet the growing pollination
demands of large-scale agriculture, commercial beekeepers truck their bees
from state to state to pollinate crop after crop.
-Some of us are running these bees to two, three, four crops a year, pollinating, and so
they don’t get a chance to ever get rejuvenated.
And it used to be you could get them onto some clean food for two or three weeks and away
they’d go, but pasture land in general is running out because of land being turned into crop land,
and so we are running out of places to go with the bees.
More crops mean more pesticides,
and many beekeepers have blamed C.C.D. on neonicotinoids, widely used chemicals
that are absorbed by plants and can accumulate in pollen and nectar.
-The European Union voted to suspend the use of neonicotinoids because of
possible links to bee collapse.
The E.P.A. is reviewing these pesticides,
but a direct link to C.C.D. has not been established. Indeed, most scientists now
believe that no single factor can fully explain the phenomenon.
-We’re probably dealing with multiple factors coming together to cause a set of symptoms
that we call C.C.D. Personally, I fall back to nutritional stress and maybe pesticide stress
leading to pathogen outbreak, I’ll call it. And so the pathogen, or the types of pathogens
that are there, don’t really matter that much, but the bees are in a weakened state, and that
allows these pathogens to, to multiply and cause, cause the bees to die.
-Bees have this behavior called altruistic suicide.
What happens is that the bee somehow knows she’s sick,
flies away from the hive so she doesn’t
infect her nestmates.
So we think that explains this behavior of collapse, why we are not finding
dead bees and why we are seeing this quick spiral down in the population.
-In South America right now, and moving north toward North America,
there’s a new strain of bees.
Colony collapse was not the first time bees had captured the public’s attention.
-This is the African killer bee. In the last
four years, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in South America.
In the 1970’s fears over the spread of Africanized honeybees . . .
-Do as I say, señor, or your wife dies!
. . . gave bees a bad name.
-That’s right gringo, the killer bees!
But since the onset of colony collapse disorder,
bees have become a symbol of environmental protection.
-If you couldn’t understand that, they were singing
all we are saying, give bees a chance.
-When people saw the bees they said uh-huh,
here’s something that I can really do something
significant, you could save the bees by actually getting some bees.
Hobby beekeeper Jim Fischer keeps about two dozen beehives on Manhattan rooftops.
-They call it urban beekeeping and it’s getting a ton of buzz.
-Pre-media blitz, pre-C.C.D., beekeeping was a hobby taken up by retired, white,
blue-collar guys, for the most part. The demographic immediately became a lot
younger, a lot more female.
-They’ve got a good home, they’ve got lots of combs.
Before I started I was nervous because of all the diseases, but as a community
across the country, we’re eventually
going to figure it out, and being part of that process I think is for the common good.
-There’s been a couple of silver linings on the C.C.D. story. One is just public
awareness about the role that pollinators play in the food supply. It’s also brought
new researchers from other areas.
-Scientists are attaching tiny backpacks to honeybees in order to study them.
In 2014, scientists used radio frequency I.D. tags
to track bees to help better understand
the causes of colony collapse disorder.
At Harvard University, scientists took a different approach.
They’ve engineered the robo-bee to possibly assist with crop pollination.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also approved a vaccine for bees, the first
ever vaccine for any insect,
to protect against one pathogen known to decimate bee colonies.
-The bee world is buzzing right now. Scientists have created a vaccine that
protects honeybees from American foulbrood,
which is a type of fatal bacterial disease that can spread quickly from hive to hive.
-A huge threat to the food supply.
Cases of colony collapse disorder have declined substantially, and while dire
predictions of falling bee populations leading to a food crisis have not come
to pass, honeybee colonies continue to die off in large numbers.
-We’re still losing a lot of colonies. And that can be for a variety of reasons:
parasitic Varroa mite, pesticide exposure, poor nutrition, nutritional stress, and in
particular, we’ve been seeing a lot of queen loss.
There’s a multitude of things that beekeepers are facing to try to keep colonies alive.
All of this means that beekeepers have to work harder than ever, like dividing their
hives and buying new queens, in order to keep the bee population steady. Thanks to
efforts like these, there are just as many
honeybee colonies in the U.S. today as there were in 2006.
-We are not worried at all that bees are going to go extinct in this country, or in
the world. What we’re worried about is, will we have the beekeepers?
- It’s not the basic beekeeping that I remember as a kid and as a young guy
running bees, you know. It’s just there’s a whole lot of things that have changed.
There’s lots of days that I would like to pull the plug, you know, and just walk away,
but I like what I’m doing. I mean, you know,
it’s something that gets into your system and doesn’t go away.