Colony Collapse Disorder

At press time, as spring warmed and beekeepers checked their hives, news came of yet another devastating winter die-off. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was first reported in 2006. Normal die-offs from overwintering of hives is about 10-15 percent, but since the spread of CCD, that has risen three-fold. An estimated 10 million hives have been lost in the past seven years, and whereas there were some 6.5 million hives in the US 60 years ago, today there are just 2.5 million. (Consequently, the commercial costs of commercial bee pollination services have more than tripled over this same period.)

There is some disagreement among scientists, government officials and certainly beekeepers about the specific causes of CCD, but most suspect it is a horrific-storm combination of varroa mites, stresses of industrialized farming (shipping sensitive bees back and forth across the country, or having them “work” the huge almond farms in California), and imidacloprid.

Imidacloprid is a neonicotinoid pesticide developed in the 1990s to replace far more toxic chemicals, and is used on corn. Neonicotinoids work by disrupting insects’ central nervous systems. Bees are insects, of course, and they come into contact with imidacloprid when it is used to dust nearby corn crops (imidacloprid began to be used in this way in 2005, one year before the first mass die-offs) and when bees ingest high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Bees in the wild survive off the honey they make, but commercial hives have their honey harvested, so farmers often feed their bees with less expensive HFCS. One of the distinctive aspects of neonicotinoids (note the root “nicotin”) is that they can spread through the entire vascular system of plants. HFCS from plants dosed with imidacloprid have been found to contain trace amounts of the pesticide, and a recent study showed that this can have an effect on bees that looks a lot like CCD.

The USDA feels the jury is still out on this issue, but the EU does not, and has banned the use of neonicotinoids for two years. If CCD drops off drastically in the EU, one can expect beekeepers to call this a smoking gun and press the USDA for a similar ban in the US.

“I think it is important to take responsibility for what is happening with the bees,” says Todd Hardie “and to note that their passing is not the fault of the mites or the viruses that are killing them. This is something that comes back to people. The bees are the canary in the coal mine for the environment.”

Canadian beekeeper and breeder Anicet Desrouchers agrees. “The bees are the best bio-indicator that we have in nature,” he says. “We should learn from them and see that if we have problem with our bees, it means that around us things are getting worse than it was.”*

* Both quotes from Jan Cannon’s 2008 film, Health and the Hive. jancannonfilms.com.