HONEYBEES THREATENS U.S. FOOD SUPPLY

[Anonymous]

Honeybee Die-Off Threatens U.S. Food Supply
BELTSVILLE,
Md. (May 07) – Unless someone or something stops it soon, the
mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation’s honeybees
could have a devastating effect on America’s dinner plate, perhaps even
reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.About one-third of the
human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is
responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.Judi Bottoni, APAbout one-third of the human
diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is
responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.Honeybees don’t just make honey; they
pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among
them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery,
squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too,
including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries,
cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.In fact, about
one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and
the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Even cattle, which feed
on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up
being “stuck with grains and water,” said Kevin Hackett, the national
program leader for USDA’s bee and pollination program.”This is the
biggest general threat to our food supply,” Hackett said.While not all
scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs
have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and
alarming.U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter
of their colonies _ or about five times the normal winter losses _
because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The
problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with
similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists
are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early
results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or
parasite.Even before this disorder struck, America’s honeybees were in
trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do
not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because
their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands
of their close cousins.”Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees
can weather this perfect storm,” Hackett said. “Do they have the
resilience to bounce back? We’ll know probably by the end of the
summer.”Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective
work at USDA’s bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett
briefed Vice President Cheney ‘s office on the problem. Congress  has
held hearings on the matter.”This crisis threatens to wipe out
production of crops dependent on bees for pollination,” Agriculture
Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.
Of
the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, “honeybees are,
for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American
crops,” a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They
pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and
recruit other honeybees to visit, too.Pulitzer Prize-winning insect
biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature’s
“workhorse _ and we took it for granted.””We’ve hung our own future on
a thread,” Wilson, author of the book “The Creation: An Appeal to Save
Life on Earth,” told The Associated Press on Monday.Beginning this past
fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just
newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees
would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The
die-off takes just one to three weeks.USDA’s top bee scientist, Jeff
Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has
more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.The
top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria,
pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one
weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.A quick experiment
with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In
the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit
hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the
irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some
kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.The parasite
hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite
practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And
another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny
sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular
biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.However, Pettis
and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it
cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in
colonies that were healthy.Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if
mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs
came in two reports last October.First, the National Academy of
Sciences said pollinators, especially America’s honeybee, were under
threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in
the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in
2005.Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found
that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take
poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A
fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins,
University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.What the genome
mapping revealed was “that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to
disease and toxins,” Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee
expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and
found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few
weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a
hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.Yet
Bromenshenk said, “I’m not ready to panic yet.” He said he doesn’t
think a food crisis is looming.Even though experts this year gave
what’s happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it
may have happened before.Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s
and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something
like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And
Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman
of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.”The
problem is that everyone wants a simple answer,” Pettis said. “And it
may not be a simple answer.”

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May 3, 2007 at 11:31 AM