Re: Mystery killer silencing honeybees
What's the buzz?
For Marshall apiarist -- that's a beekeeper -- it's a hobby, but a nationwide decline in hives threatens some crops
Sunday, February 25, 2007
By Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Beekeeper Bob Jenereski placed his ear against the white hive sitting on the edge of a snowy cornfield in Pine.
"Can you hear that hum?" he asked. Faintly audible through the beehive's wooden wall was a steady whir.
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Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
Bob Jenereski checks on one of his bee hives in Marshall. Mr. Jenereski has been managing hives for more than 50 years.
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The outside temperatures was 6 degrees. Inside their hive, thousands of bees, fueled by stored honey, were flexing their wing muscles. Acting like a single organism, they were using their collective body heat to keep the core temperature at the center of the hive -- the bee cluster -- at a steady 95 degrees. Now Mr. Jenereski and the state's 2,000 beekeepers are worried that familiar sound may end abruptly. The culprit is still unidentified, but the result is being called Colony Collapse Disorder.
Those colony losses come at a time when both the number of beekeepers and number of hives are dropping in Pennsylvania. Penn State scientists estimate that the number of colonies has dropped to about 35,000, down from 80,000 in the late 1980s.
Those declines could have serious consequences for farmers across the state who rely on honeybees to pollinate many of their crops.
Pollination refers to transfer of pollen from the male portion of a plant blossom to the female part. That fertilization, which is done by wind, hummingbirds and a variety of insects, is necessary for plants to produce seeds and the fruits or vegetables that surround them.
Many plants, including crops as diverse as watermelons and almonds, require cross-pollination: pollen from one flower fertilizing the stigma of another flower. Honeybees are a critical element in cross-pollination. For some crops, like almonds, they are the only pollinator.
Early start
Mr. Jenereski, 65, has been an apiarist, or beekeeper, for more than 50 years. He began when he was a teenager growing up in Richland.
An accounting graduate of what is now Robert Morris University, he spent 36 years working in financial positions at Westinghouse Electric and other companies. During all those years of indoor work, he continued to keep bees. Since he retired 10 years ago, however, he has been able to devote much more time to his hobby. Over the past decade he has almost tripled the number of his hives from 125 to 350.
He said his wife, Jackie, doesn't share his passion for the insects, but has no fear of them and gladly helps with routine care when more than two hands are required.
All but a few of his hives have been placed next to farmers' fields, mostly in Allegheny, Butler and Lawrence counties. "Farmers get the benefits of pollination," he said during an interview at his home in Marshall. "I get the honey."
In a good year, the bees will produce 30,000 pounds of excess honey, or as much as 200 pounds per hive, which can be removed without harming the health of the colony. Last year, however, the honey yield was much lower, about 10,000 pounds. He estimated that he lost about $15,000 on his hobby in 2006.
Honey bees are generally docile creatures, he said, stinging only when they sense their hive is threatened. One reason for their reluctance to attack is linked to their anatomy. Each honeybee stinger is barbed and remains imbedded, along with a part of the insect's abdomen, in the victim's skin. The result is painful for the recipient, but it is invariably fatal to the bee, Mr. Jenereski said.
While he has been stung more times than he can remember, he had only one really bad experience.
Sometimes when a colony outgrows its hive, the queen and about half the inhabitants will abruptly leave. The black cloud of insects will swarm onto a tree branch, a fence rail or a bush, while scout bees search for a new home.
Having ingested and stored their fill of honey before departing from their old hive, the bees are nearly incapable of stinging when they first leave, he said.
Called in to help a neighbor who reported a swarm, Mr. Jenereski said he followed his standard approach, gently shaking the insects from the tree branch into a cardboard collection box. The box of bees, including the queen, could then be placed near a clean, empty hive.
Perhaps because the swarm had begun to perceive the branch as its new colony, this time some bees attacked.
He doesn't know how many times he was stung, only that he feared he would pass out from the pain. "I had to lie down for a while," he recalled.
But such incidents are aberrations, he said. Mr. Jenereski has battled in the past with Marshall officials who have sought to stop him from keeping hives at his home.
"Anytime anyone gets stung, they see a hive and figure it was a honeybee," he said.
The much more likely culprits are hornets, yellow jackets or other wasps. Those are the stinging insects that most often buzz around cups of soda or beer at picnics. They also build their nests in lawns, on tree limbs or under building eaves. They can and will sting, sometimes several times, when disturbed and without deadly consequences for themselves, he said. Their stingers have no barbs.
Help from a veteran
Mr. Jenereski took up beekeeping in 1955 when his late parents, Stanley and Helen Jenereski, were having trouble getting an adequate harvest of cucumbers and zucchini at their half-acre garden in Richland. Honeybees, he said, are the perfect creature for pollinating many vegetable, fruit and grain flowers.
An older beekeeper who lived in Pittsburgh's Sheridan neighborhood, and whose name Mr. Jenereski remembers only as Mr. Miles, offered him his first hive. "He gave it to me at no charge, but made me promise to do the same every year for another new beekeeper."
The vegetable garden prospered, and Mr. Jenereski had found his avocation -- and has kept his promise to support beginners.
He is active in multiple apiary organizations around the state and the country. Even during the coldest days of February, he is attending meetings or giving seminars for novice beekeepers. Later this month he will travel to the Florida Keys to help a friend manage his hives before the start of lime blossom pollination.
"We'll make sure each hive has a queen, enough food and no signs of disease," he said.
Many professional beekeepers move their hives hundreds or even thousands of miles during each growing season, he said. They work their way north in the late winter and spring as trees and plants produce blossoms. For many beekeepers, the season starts with pollinating strawberry plants or citrus trees in Florida and ends five or six months later in Maine blueberry fields.
Other crops that depend largely on bees for pollination include alfalfa, cherries, pears and plums.
Pennsylvania produces about $45 million worth of apples each year. About 90 percent of the pollination for that crop is done by honeybees, according to Maryann Frazier, a honeybee extension specialist at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
A 2000 Cornell University study calculated that honeybee pollination increases U.S. agricultural production by almost $15 billion, according to the National Honey Board.
Most wild honeybee colonies have been wiped out by several varieties of parasitic mites, making farmers more reliant on managed colonies. But as beekeepers have retired, the number of managed colonies has declined.
Colony collapse
The latest blow bees and their keepers face is Colony Collapse Disorder.
While no single cause has been identified, the state Department of Agriculture had identified several likely factors. They include mites, viruses carried by the mites and pesticide contamination, according to Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the acting state apiarist.
While winter die-off is common among his hives, Mr. Jenereski said he has seen no early signs of collapse among his colonies. For example, among the 16 hives he visited earlier this month in Pine, just one showed no signs of life.
Other beekeepers, however, began reporting hive losses as high as 80 percent this fall. Ms. Frazier said state officials were worried that local beekeepers would discover much higher-than-normal death rates when they start to make their early spring inspections later this month.
Lack of honeybee colonies this spring could hurt farm harvests this summer and fall. "Apples, other tree fruits like cherries, raspberries, blackberries, pumpkins, squash and melons are all bee-pollinated crops," she said.
Mr. Jenereski sees himself as an advocate for bees. He also is a student of the long history of beekeeping.
The ancient Egyptians managed hives 4,000 years ago. "It still is as much an art as a science," he said. "The honey is such a small part of the story."
After more than 50 years spent observing and caring for them, he remains awed by the variety of their life cycles and by their ability to work together for the good of the hive.
He doesn't overlook the ruthless nature of their short lives. An aging or ill queen most often will be stung to death by her daughter- successor, he said. Exhausted or injured field bees will be carried out of the hive by house bees and left to perish. The insects make those sacrifices in an effort to keep the colony strong and healthy, he said.
"Their life cycle is fascinating," he said. "And the pollinating they do is critical for agriculture."
"They are almost perfect creatures," he said.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07056/764245-54.stm
