ENV - Pests, weather devastating Maryland's bees

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FARM SCENE: Pests, weather devastating bee populations; wipe out half of Maryland's bees

By Stephen Manning, Associated Press, 7/18/2001 01:09

DUNKIRK, Md. (AP) With bare hands, Bob Cory reaches into the swirl of bees around the hives he keeps in his back yard.

Wearing a protective white suit, he pulls out a white board and scans it closely, ignoring the buzzing cloud that jumps when he disturbs the bee colony.

Cory is hunting for the tiny red dots that are varroa mites, a voracious pest that latches onto honey bees and sucks their blood like a tick. They can decimate an entire colony in less than a year.

''Imagine you had a tick on you the size of a softball,'' he said. ''That's what it's like for the honey bee.''

Cory was lucky this year. Varroa and other mites destroyed only seven of the 15 hives he tends in southern Maryland. But that's more than the usual two that Cory, 75, loses over the winter.

A combination of pesticide-resistant mites and wet weather has devastated bee populations, wiping out more than half of Maryland's bees and clobbering hives in many regions of the country.

Beekeepers now struggle to rebuild their colonies, while farmers who rely on the insects to pollinate their crops have difficulty finding available hives to place in their fields.

Bee colonies from Massachusetts to Illinois were socked by varroa and mites that infest the bee's breathing tubes. Vermont, the largest honey producer in New England, lost 20 percent of its hives. Along the East Coast, some keepers' losses have approached 90 percent.

The losses have been especially tough on Maryland's 898 recreational and commercial beekeepers, who rent their hives to farmers and tap them for honey.

''It was one of the worst seasons we've experienced in the past 30 years and the worst I've seen in my 20 years of beekeeping,'' said Dean Burroughs, president of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association.

Burroughs and other commercial beekeepers have been scrambling to meet the demand from farmers who depend on bees to pollinate their watermelon, apple, strawberry and other crops.

Burroughs lost roughly 60 percent of his 110 hives last winter, and he has been busy spreading the remaining colonies on fields around Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Even with modern farming equipment, bees are the most efficient pollinators of crops, producing healthier and larger fruits and vegetables. They can average 20,000 per hive.

A recent Cornell University study estimated that regular honey bee pollination adds between $5 billion to $20 billion of value to crop production each year nationally.

The bee shortage started last summer, when heavy rains washed away much of the flower nectar that bees collect to make honey, the food they depend on during winter months.

Many colonies weren't able to store up the roughly 60 pounds they need to survive the winter, leading to starvation. Beekeepers like Cory fed sugar to their hives, but couldn't make up for the honey shortage.

Bees heading into the winter already were weakened by infestations of mites. Imported to the United States from Asia in the mid-1980s, varroa had been kept in check by chemically treated strips placed in the hives. This year, though, many farmers found the mites had developed a resistance to the pesticide.

Varroa are especially destructive because they also attack bee larvae, either killing developing bees or causing serious deformities when they hatch.

Keepers like Burroughs have tried to replenish their hives by buying new queen bees through the mail. They then split their surviving hives among the new queens.

''Most beekeepers have built up their strength this spring, but they're not going to make much of a crop of honey this year,'' said I. Barton Smith, the Maryland Department of Agriculture's apiary inspector.

On the Net:

Maryland State Beekeepers Association: http://iaa.umd.edu/mdbee/mdbee.html

-- Anonymous, July 18, 2001

Answers

Although I've seen few honey bees, I've been encouraged to see more bumble bees this year.

-- Anonymous, July 18, 2001

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