National Bee Database to be set up to monitor colony collapse

By Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:16PM GMT 09 Mar 2009

Britain’s 20,000 amateur beekeepers have been asked to register their insects on a national database in a bid to halt the dramatic decline of the honey bee…

The register, funded by the Department for the Environment, will be used to monitor health trends and help establish for certain whether the £30 million honey industry is under threat from the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder.

Theories about the cause of the decline in the bee population, which has seen nearly one in three hives collapse, include climate change and an infestation by the Varroa mite. READ REST at the Telegraph…

My Questions:

1. Would beekeepers in the u.S.A ever voluntarily join a national database managed by the U.S. Federal Government?
2. What does £4.3 million really buy??
   
3. Does registering with a government database include creating a GIS from this database? Who owns the data? Since it should be public data, will the database be available in real-time on the Internet for other researchers to use?
4. Making the data publicly available opens the research potential, but at what costs to the beekeeper’s privacy? How much data are they “invited” to submit to the database?
5. Don’t privacy concerns about “a beek’s girls” and business interests get trumped by the dire consequences of failing to understand what’s happening worldwide?
6. Will joining such a database subject the beekeeper to new regulation, oversight and intrusion by (presumably inept) government controllers?

The UK will provide lessons to the North Americans who still can’t get a dime from their government to do real research on the bees. I’m talking federal money for thousands of GPS tagged hives like the rest of the modern world uses to track anything. Basic logic says we need to know where (commercial) hives are going to analyze the data about what they were exposed to, for how long, with which other bees, from where (Australia?), etc. We need data for a GIS, and it can’t be chicken scratched on plastic bags with sharpies, only (dead bees). In the U.S., it seems that the privatized mind thinks that research money should only come from private interests, like Haagan Daaz or the Almond Industry, or the military. Does this opinion come from a jaded viewpoint that federal funding means loss of control and more potential suffocating regulation, a lack of trust in government?

This blog gets a fair amount of traffic, and this commentary on “colony collapse disorder” from a well-known pollination broker in California deserves attention. Also interesting is to read what he had to say about the idea of “beekeepers receiving government subsidies” almost 10 years ago in 1999. This topic is current again in the news.

–DNR

http://www.beesource.com/pov/traynor/bcdec2008.htm

DECEMBER, 2008 issue BEE CULTURE

Joe Traynor

The following is distilled from the reams of disparate dispatches from the CCD front. I have tried to condense this mass of information into a coherent whole. None of what follows is original — all has been expressed in one form or another by others.

When CCD first came on the stage in 2006-2007, a number of possible causes entered the stage at, or close to, the same time:

Drought in many areas
Difficulty in controlling varroa mites
Nosema ceranae (believed to be widespread since at least 2006)
Decreased bee pasture + increased corn acreage
Chemical buildup in comb
Neonicotinoid pesticides

A good argument can be made for any one of these as the main, or sole cause of CCD; a better argument for a combination of two or more. If only one of the above had occurred, it would have been much simpler to either designate or eliminate it as the cause of CCD.

Based on field reports, CCD can devastate a given apiary in a short period of time, sweeping from one end to the other, leaving previously populous colonies with only a handful of bees and a queen. Since rapid decline of an organism (consider, as many have, a honey bee colony to be an individual organism) is typical of a pathogen, current thinking is that a pathogen, either N. ceranae or a virus (or a combination of both) is the basic cause of CCD.

If a virus causes CCD, is it a new “super” virus, or one of the known bee viruses – Kashmir, DWV, APV et al. — or perhaps a mutation of a known virus to a more virulent form? We don’t know, but assuming that a virus causes CCD allows us to speculate on remedial measures.

Consider other CCD-like problems in humans and plants:

In each of the above instances, the Target can withstand the Vector in the absence of the Pathogen – mosquitoes are a minor concern to us if they don’t harbor a pathogen; without a READ THE REST…

THE BEST place to see classes is on the Calendar: http://pollinatethis.org/beeblog/sf-beekeepers-calendar/

March 7th Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo County
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING CLASS 9:15AM - 4PM
1st Congregational Church, 751 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont.
Cost: Free Bring your own bag lunch.
More info & pre-registration is required: http://www.sanmateo bee.org/class. html

March 14th Alameda County Beekeepers Assn
INTRODUCTION TO BEEKEEPING CLASS 10AM-12:30PM
2418 California St, Berkeley
Cost: ?
Registration required: Jim 510-845-2419
Do not wear scents, wool or dark clothes. A veil would be good to have.

March 15th Green Gulch Farm & Zen Center
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING 9AM-3PM
More information & Registration: http://www.sfzc. org/zc/search. asp?keyword= beekeeping& search.x= 16&search. y=3

March 21st Alameda County Beekeepers Assn
RANDY OLIVER BEEKEEPING CLASS 9AM - 3PM
Island Yacht Club, 1853 Clement Ave, Alameda (behind Svendsen’s Boat Works along the Marina…courtesy of Jayne Klugs’s family)
Cost: $10 members, $20 non-members Bring your own LUNCH. The bar at the Yacht Club will be open at lunch time - cash only.
More info & pre-registration, send email to: Sarachickbee@ aol.com

Various dates March, April, May & June BeeKind
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING WORKSHOPS
BeeKind, Sebastopol
More info & pre-registration: http://www.beekind. com/beekeeping_ classes_2009. shtml

(Beyond Pesticides, March 4, 2009) The Ontario government is set to announce sweeping new regulations that will prohibit the use of 85 chemical substances, found in roughly 250 lawn and garden products, from use on neighborhood lawns. Once approved, products containing these chemicals would be barred from sale and use for cosmetic purposes.

On November 7, 2008, the Ontario government released a proposed new regulation containing the specifics of the Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act, passed last June. Then, Ontario joined Quebec in restricting the sale and cosmetic use of pesticides but environmental and public health advocates said then that the new law preempted local by-laws and actually weakens protections in some municipalities with stronger local protections. There are over 55 municipalities in Canada where the residential use, but not sale, of pesticides is banned. The prohibition of these 85 substances is the latest step in this Act. The proposal contains:

• List of pesticides (ingredients in pesticide products) to be banned for cosmetic use
• List of pesticide products to be banned for sale
• List of domestic pesticide products to be restricted for sale. Restricted sale products include those with cosmetic and non-cosmetic uses (i.e., a product that’s allowed to be used inside the house but not for exterior cosmetic use), and would not be available self-serve.

The 85 chemicals to be prohibited are listed under “Proposed Class 9 Pesticides” of the Act. Among the 85 pesticides banned for cosmetic use include commonly used lawn chemicals: 2,4-D (Later’s Weed-Stop Lawn Weedkiller), clopyralid, glyphosate (Roundup Lawn & Weed Control Concentrate), imidacloprid, permethrin (Later’s Multi-Purpose Yard & Garden Insect Control), pyrethrins (Raid Caterpillar & Gypsy Moth Killer), and triclopyr.

However, golf courses and sports fields remain exempt. The use of pesticides for public health safety (e.g. mosquito control) is also exempt. The proposed regulation would also allow for the use of new ‘notice’ signs to make the public aware when low risk alternatives to conventional pesticides are used by licensed exterminators, such as the use of corn gluten meal to suppress weed germination in lawns.

The prohibition, once passed, would likely take effect in mid-April. Stores would be forced to remove banned products from their shelves or inform customers that the use of others is restricted to certain purposes. Residents must then dispose of banned products through municipal hazardous waste collection, and use restricted products for only prescribed purposes. Errant users would first receive a warning, but fines would later be introduced.

By 2011, stores will be required to limit access to the pesticides, keeping them locked behind glass or cages and ensuring that customers are aware of limitations on use before taking them home.

In light on impeding legislation to restrict pesticide use, the Canadian division of Home Depot announced on April 22, 2008 that it will stop selling traditional pesticides in its stores across Canada by the end of 2008 and will increase its selection of environmentally friendly alternatives. Other garden supply and grocery stores have already stopped selling certain pesticides in Ontario.

This proposed prohibition would have the most impact on 2,4-D, the most popular and widely used lawn chemical. 2,4-D, which kills broad leaf weeds like dandelions, is an endocrine disruptor with predicted human health risks ranging from changes in estrogen and testosterone levels, thyroid problems, prostate cancer and reproductive abnormalities. A recent petition filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and supported by Beyond Pesticides calls for the cancellation of 2,4-D, its products and its tolerances in the U.S.

Other lawn chemicals like glyphosate (Round-up) and permethrin have also been linked to serious adverse chronic effects in humans. Imidacloprid, another pesticide growing in popularity, has been implicated in bee toxicity and the recent Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) phenomena. The health effects of the 30 most commonly used lawn pesticides show that: 14 are probable or possible carcinogens, 15 are linked with birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 24 with neurotoxicity, 22 with liver or kidney damage, and 34 are sensitizers and/or irritants.

Reference: http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/en/news/2009/030401.php

World View Radio Show 03/02/2009

“Eighty percent of the world’s crop plants depend on pollination. The fewer bees pollinating fields, the lower the yield from every acre of food crops we eat. Without bees, our food will disappear. The mass disappearance of bees, first reported in 2006, is referred to as colony collapse disorder or (CCD).

Dr. Gabriela Chavarria is Science Center Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. She’s a leading expert on pollinators.“

WBEZ Radio Chicago: http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=32496

NRDC Forced to Sue to Get Public Records on Bee Mystery

EPA Buzz Kill: Is the Agency Hiding Colony Collapse Disorder Information?

NRDC Forced to Sue to Get Public Records on Bee Mystery

WASHINGTON, DC (August 18, 2008) – The Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit today to uncover critical information that the US government is withholding about the risks posed by pesticides to honey bees. NRDC legal experts and a leading bee researcher are convinced that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has evidence of connections between pesticides and the mysterious honey bee die-offs reported across the country. The phenomenon has come to be called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, and it is already proving to have disastrous consequences for American agriculture and the $15 billion worth of crops pollinated by bees every year.

EPA has failed to respond to NRDC’s Freedom of Information Act request for agency records concerning the toxicity of pesticides to bees, forcing the legal action.

“Recently approved pesticides have been implicated in massive bee die-offs and are the focus of increasing scientific scrutiny,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA should be evaluating the risks to bees before approving new pesticides, but now refuses to tell the public what it knows. Pesticide restrictions might be at the heart of the solution to this growing crisis, so why hide the information they should be using to make those decisions?”

READ REST: http://anarchyapiaries.org/hivetools/node/28

(Mainichi Japan) March 4, 2009

There are too few honeybees in Japan. While one immediately associates the busy yellow and black insects with honey, Japan’s honey production is not the area of agriculture most threatened by the decline in the bee population. Fruit and vegetable farmers also depend on honeybees to pollinate their plants, and the shortage of bees has gone so far as to create fears of a produce shortage, one that could threaten dinner tables across Japan.

“I didn’t think for a moment that we would have a shortage,” laments Osamu Mamuro, president of Mamuro Bee Farm in Yoshimi, Saitama Prefecture, as he stands in front of one of the firm’s beehives. Mamuro Bee Farm supplies honeybees for pollination to farmers.

In a normal year, from now through spring, Mamuro would be busy buying up honeybees from beekeepers in and outside the prefecture and distributing them to farms. This year, however, Mamuro has found it difficult to meet demand, and deliveries to customers will drop to less than half the usual amount.

“If this keeps up,” Mamuro says, “it’ll be the end of my business.”
CAPTION: “The honeybees just don’t gather,” laments Osamu Mamuro, president of Mamuro Bee Farm in Yoshimi, Saitama Prefecture. (Mainichi)

Honeybees are essential in the pollination of fruit and vegetable plants such as strawberries, watermelons, melons, eggplants, Japanese pears, cherries, blueberries and so on. Fruit and vegetable producers buy honeybees just for pollination purposes and release them in their fields and greenhouses.

The honeybee shortage is attributable to a sharp decrease in the number of those kept by beekeepers. According to Maruto Tokai Co., a major supplier of honeybees to agricultural cooperatives all across the country, the crisis has become severe enough to “threaten the destruction of the industry.”

A sudden drop in the honeybee population is not an experience limited to Japan. In fact, a similar shortage began in the United States three years ago. The autumn of 2006 to the spring of 2007 saw a particularly alarming decline in bee numbers, when around 30 percent of American bees suddenly disappeared, a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The underlying cause of CCD is as yet unknown.

In Japan as well, in the past several years there have been instances of sudden mass die-offs and disappearances in honeybee colonies in Iwate Prefecture and Hokkaido.

The Japan Beekeeping Association (JBA), composed of 2,500 honeybee professionals, undertook a survey of its membership to determine the breadth of the honeybee population decline. The survey, which received responses from 36 percent of the association’s membership, was conducted by a three person team, including Kiyoshi Kimura, head researcher at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science, and Tatsuhiko Kadowaki, associate professor at Nagoya University, from August to December last year.

The survey revealed that one in four respondents had “experienced sudden losses of honeybees.” The scale of these losses varied, but “the number of beekeepers to lose large numbers of bees was more than we expected,” says Kimura.

Kimura visited the United States in December last year to observe the American situation.

“There have been small-scale honeybee losses for many years, but a massive collapse like they had in the U.S. is very unusual,” says Kimura, comparing the Japanese problem with the American CCD crisis of three years ago. “We must investigate the situation in Japan.”

Japan is home to many small-scale beekeeping operations. Unlike their American cousins, beekeepers in Japan do not often transport their honeybees long distances, meaning there is less stress that could affect the survival of the insects.

According to the JBA, Japan imports the vast majority of its honey, with only around 6 percent coming from domestic producers. As such, the honeybee population crisis “will not interfere with domestic honey production.”

However, the shortage of honeybees means real problems for fruit and vegetable farmers, who need the insects to get on with the vital work of pollination.

“From now on, it is possible that it will be increasingly difficult to secure honeybees for the purposes of pollinating eggplant, melon, watermelon and other produce plants,” says the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

“We are desperately trying to collect enough honeybees,” says the Inba agricultural cooperative in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, as its members prepare for the watermelon pollination season in April. Uneasy voices can also be heard among strawberry, Japanese pear and melon farmers in nearby Tochigi Prefecture. The honeybee shortage means that these and other farmers may have to resort to pollinating their produce plants by hand.

READ STORY http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090304p2a00m0na002000c.html

It’s been almost a year since I began my CCD Mapping website, which has yet to launch… Nice to get motivated by another fantastic mapping project, the Feral Bee Project, “a site focused on creating a national database of feral honey bee populations.” Ronnie Bouchon built the site himself from the ground up using Google’s API and Google spreadsheets. Hat’s off to this committed human being! Some people in my beekeeping club actually thought it was a bad idea to map feral colonies, out of some fear that people would go mess with them now that they knew where there were. Overprotective bee lovers?

The possibilities of using the Feral Bee Project’s data to build heat maps and do other analysis excites me to get my participatory CCD mapping site off the ground. As Ronnie has done, I am ever-evaluating the mapping technologies and Google’s tools are tempting. I like the benefits of his site design: no “user log-in” or “registration” to thwart the average nature-not-computer lover, no submission approval process (not yet warranted, he reports), and a nice interface for finding your place on the map. But I’ve always been partial to hosting all of my project data on my own sites, instead of relying on Google spreadsheets hosted who knows where. It is fantastic to have all the data in an accessible spreadsheet, however, instead of buried in some SQL database, IMO.

The sensitivity about mapping colony collapse disorder events makes such an open methodology difficult to gain acceptance, I’ve assumed. Perhaps that assumption is wrong. Now that we have something of a definitive list of symptoms and patterns being published this month about how to recognize CCD, perhaps a community-generated dataset won’t be filled with speculative points that may dilute the value and accuracy of the data collected. What do you think? I’ll invite Ronnie Bouchon to comment. His site, Savethehives.com lists another project in the works and it would be great to get an update on how that is going.

“With all the media coverage and public awareness of Colony Collapse Disorder, there is still not a single database of reported cases of CCD. The CCD Map would be provide a web-based approach for collecting and presenting reported cases of CCD in a way that could help researchers and government agencies understand this national crisis. This national database of information will be centrally maintained and available to research programs and universities.”

- Savethehives.com

Ronnie, any news about the CCD mapping project? What have been your biggest hurdles and what do your collaborators in the beekeeping world say about creating a CCD map? Comment here for us.

The magic of RSS delivers news to me that I used to only get by sitting in the local diner in smalltown USA reading the local paper. But we still never know how long the online news links will last, so I’m copying this little story for the record about another “sideline” beekeeper and his need for California almond contracts. If beekeepers were to receive government subsidies, as may happen with this recent “stimulus” bill, I wonder how many beekeepers would still haul their bees all around the country for pollination services. I wonder… if they could stay at home with the reassurance of government checks (as Farm Bill subsidies provide to other agricultural activities), if California would be forced to evolve its local hive capacity to the point of keeping the migratory pollination services for the almond crop LOCAL. What would our pollinator landscape look like if we invested in local capacity building of beekeepers and pollinator maintenance? Would we still have diesel semi trucks hauling bees imported from Australia and, uh, Wyoming, USA? With peak oil now an obvious reality, it is not sustainable to rely on a struggling trucker community to bring bees everywhere? I know, I know, there isn’t enough bloom and habitat to sustain bees in many places… Well, let’s imagine a different reality. CHANGE. PLANT. SOW. -DNR

Ranchester beekeeper rents pollinators to California almond growers

By JUDY HAGEROTT
Star-Tribune correspondent
Casper Star-Tribune Online, WY - Feb 2, 2009

Monday, February 2, 2009 7:03 PM MST
RANCHESTER — Clifford Reed remembers looking over the sweet clover-covered hills near Ranchester last spring and thinking, “This should be a great year for honey.”

A strong dose of reality hit Reed once mites were discovered in his bee colonies.

“I didn’t treat for mites and it cost me,” the owner of Tongue River Honey said.

He won’t make the same mistake this year.

“I had to pull off 320 dead colonies,” Reed said. “With 25,000 to 30,000 bees per hive, that’s a lot of dead bees.

“Once mites reach a certain threshold in a colony of bees, the bees just take off for greener pastures. For those bees that remain, if they catch a virus from the mites, the bee offspring turn into runty, pitiful bees with a short lifespan.”

The timing was terrible. Last year, more…

The Co-op today became the first UK supermarket to ban the use of a group of pesticides implicated in billions of honeybee deaths worldwide.

It is prohibiting suppliers of its own-brand fresh produce from using eight pesticides that have been connected to honeybee colony collapse disorder and are already restricted in some parts of Europe.

The Co-op said it will eliminate the usage of the neonicotinoid family of chemicals where possible and until they are shown to be safe. The Co-op has over 70,000 acres of land under cultivation in England and Scotland, making it the largest farmer in the UK. Since 2001, it has already prohibited the use of 98 pesticides under its pesticide policy.

Simon Press, senior technical manager at the Co-op group said: “We believe that the recent losses in bee populations need definitive action, and as a result are temporarily prohibiting the eight neonicotinoid pesticides until we have evidence that refutes their involvement in the decline.”

Laboratory tests suggest that one of the banned chemicals, imidacloprid, can impede honeybees’ sophisticated communication and navigation systems. It has been banned in France for a decade as a seed dressing on sunflowers. Italy, Slovenia and Germany banned neonicotinoids last year after the loss of millions of honeybees. And the European Parliament voted earlier this month for tougher controls on bee-toxic chemicals.

Read rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/28/bees-coop-pesticide

Fox News gets some points for actually interviewing a beekeeper about the current pollinator crisis and dedicating five minutes to it, with a cute studio backdrop with props and all (you go, David Burns!)… My question to Fox News host, Neil Cavuto, “if the Corn (syrup) industry can get paid NOT to grow corn in U.S. through the subsidy programs for decades, and the obscene pork riders can go unchecked, unreported, unchallenged during the Republican Congressional bills for your War, etc, isn’t it obtuse to challenge the nation’s beekeepers in their attempt to find financial relief along with Wall Street and Detroit?!” Beekeepers literally put food on your table! Oil Industry/U.S. automakers flew in private jets to D.C. to get a giant taxpayer handout for actually failing to produce a product that meets modern needs (sustainability, fuel efficiency, etc.). $150 million is a drop in the bucket to protect the food supply.

Thank you, for creating the dialog, Fox News. However, you supported giant government for the War Industry for 8 years, plus. You can’t backpedal now when a truly important industry needs 100% bailout relief and subsidy. Cavuto, taxpayers should fund and are happy to fund beekeepers because of their role in farming and food. Your free market is a myth, get over it. Let the auto industry collapse and support the industries that we really need: farmers, pollinators and other sustainable enterprises.

The Obama Team should be setting benchmark goals of doubling or tripling the nation’s beekeeper population, which has been dwindling steadily ever since the 1950s’ suburban sprawl of monocultural, agri-chemical food production began spreading here. I’ve suggested in the past that the Veterans’ Administration deploy a program to train returning Vets to become beekeepers! Pay them, train them, redeploy them - in the peaceful fields of the united States. They will heal. They will rediscover the meaning and beauty of being human through nurturing this magical relationship with these insects, and our society needs to heal them to heal us. -DNR

Related: http://townhall.com/news/business/2008/12/26/the_latest_buzz_for_beekeepers_is_crop_insurance

WATCH VIDEO: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,488487,00.html

www.mymapsplus.com/kml/colonycollapsedisordernews.kml

This snapshot of Colony Collapse Disorder news stories comes from 2007. It’s been the only Colony Collapse Disorder news .kml file on the Net for a long time. Why is that?… It’s become stale, some of the original website source links are broken, but the the summaries exist and it’s interesting none the less. David Grogan was a student at Tufts University when he manually created this map using RSS and google. I’m working on an updated version that automagically updates the map with new stories from google news, similar to how www.healthmap.org works.

From Chris Heintz, Project Apis m, http://www.projectapism.org/

To All Beekeepers -

The Governor has ordered furloughs that will result in the closing of general government operations on the first and third Friday of each month beginning February 6th, 2009, and projected to end on June 30, 2010. CDFA headquarters and field offices, including our Plant Pest Diagnostics Laboratory, will shut down operations on the days specified.

CDFA facilitates quick movement of bee colonies at border inspections by providing identification services Monday through Friday, and as deemed necessary on weekends and holidays. Due to the furloughs and inability to schedule overtime, CDFA is forced to reduce the hours of identification services to Monday through Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. during the weeks with a furlough day. Please note that border stations will remain open.

This new schedule may cause delays beyond our control. The Governor and CDFA are committed to do everything possible to continue to facilitate timely movement of bee colony shipments. We will relay pertinent information as it becomes available. Please visit our site
at http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/phpps/pe/InteriorExclusion/bees.html for updates.

The 2009 scheduled closures are as follows:
February 6 and 20
March 6 and 20
April 3 and 17
May 1 and 15
June 5 and 19
July 3 and 17
August 7 and 21
September 4 and 18
October 2 and 16
November 6 and 20
December 4 and 18

============

Anyone have any comments about this? Relying on government for anything honey/bee related doesn’t seem to look promising. Any bee shippers have any reaction to this news?

The First Full Accounting of Colony Collapse Disorder
Kim Flottum’s Daily Green - Jan. 1, 2009

“A new study comprehensively describes the early and late symptoms, the visual signs and the progression of the mysterious affliction decimating U.S. beekeepers.

In a full report prepared by this team to be released in the February issue of Bee Culture magazine, Bee Alert’s Scott Debnam and Jerry Bromenshenk from Missoula Montana, David Westervelt from Florida’s Apiary Inspections Bureau, and Randy Oliver, a commercial beekeeper with real-world honey bee research experience from Grass Valley, California detail the symptoms of CCD with respect to where it hits, and when it hits.

To review what’s commonly known:
Colony Collapse Disorder Symptoms: Final Stage

In collapsed colonies

• Complete absence of older adult bees in colonies, with few or no dead bees in the colony, on the bottom board, in front of the colony, or in the beeyard.
• Presence of capped brood in colonies during time of year when queen should be laying.
• Presence of food stores, both honey and pollen, unless a drought or time of year restricts availability of food resources.
• Absence of pest insects such as wax moth and hive beetle.
• Lack of robbing by other bees
• Robbing and return of hive pests is delayed by days or weeks.

In collapsing colonies

• Too few worker bees to maintain brood that is present.
• Remaining bee population predominately young bees.
• Queen is present.
• Queen may lay more eggs than can be maintained by workers, or is appropriate for the time of year.
• Cluster is reluctant to consume supplemental food such as sugar syrup and pollen supplement.

However, these are the terminal symptoms. By the time colonies reach this point it is far too late to do anything but bury the dead. What’s needed is being able to spot colonies that are in the early stages of CCD. This could be a real plus because perhaps beekeepers could turn them around if they were discovered early enough. Even though they still don’t know the cause, proper and appropriate management techniques go a long way in helping.

Here’s what the team has found:

Colony Collapse Disorder Symptoms: Early Stages

One year out:
Colonies are “just not doing well” with few other visible symptoms. They seem healthy, but have lackluster honey production.

Six months out:
Symptoms are vague and easily missed. Monthly inspections and careful comparisons are needed. Brood nests are slow to expand, with most in a single hive body. Mid-day inspections show bees dispersed in the colony, but this varies. Population growth slows to stops during growing season when compared to other colonies in the same yard. Honey stores remain untouched, bees are feeding on nectar recently collected. These symptoms are difficult to spot due to the careful comparisons needed.

Three months out:
CCD colonies appear slow to grow and are outpaced by non-CCD colonies in the apiary. There is a noticeable population decrease going from 3 to 2 boxes, or 2 to 1, and often the bees are on only a few frames in the bottom box…and they appear restless. Brood patterns are shot gun pattern because of dead brood removal, and honey stores begin to diminish if it’s late in the season, but if early, the honey remains untouched. Routine maintenance goes undone and no propolis seals are noticeable.

One month out:
Usually 8 frames of bees or fewer remain and they decline rapidly. Brood is produced, but can’t be supported, queen replacement is often tried, and abandoned brood is common. Stored honey depends on the season … in summer it may all be depleted, in winter untouched.

Finally:
Remaining bees fail to eat supplied food or medications, and it’s mostly young bees that remain now, as the older bees are gone. Queens continue to lay excessively, and the colony usually lacks any aggressiveness at all.

14 Visual Symptoms of a Colony with Colony Collapse Disorder

1. Just days before its collapse the colony seemed to be strong and fully functional
2. Mostly young bees remaining in the hive
3. Bees are not aggressive
4. Queen is present
5. Eggs are present
6. Full frames of brood may be present
7. Brood may show signs of “shotgun” pattern
8. Capped honey and fresh nectar are often present, although not in summer collapses, which are uncommon
9. Fresh pollen has been stored in the hive recently, if external resources are available
10. Supplemental feed (syrup and extender patties) if supplied, are ignored
11. No robbing occurs
12. No secondary pests (small hive beetles, wax moths or ants) are found
13. No dead bees are noted around entrance of the hive
14. Bees do not show any signs of winglessness, paralysis or other adult bee diseases.

Colony Collapse Disorder: Management Notes

CCD tends to travel like a wave through a beeyard, and combining affected and unaffected colonies usually gives 2 dead colonies. Adding a package may help, and may not. There is a time lag until secondary pests will move in … using equipment before that time for more bees is risky and the colony may die again. Once these secondary pests move in the equipment seems fine for bees, too.

The Cause of Colony Collapse Disorder remains unknown, but the diagnosis is getting better all the time.

For the full article with additional information see the February issue of Bee Culture on our web site www.BeeCulture.com.

Thanks to Scott, David, Jerry and Randy”

By: www.BeeCulture.com

Researchers in Connecticut, during the 2007 growing season monitored pesticides found in pollen collected in pollen traps. Colonies studied were under normal conditions and were not collapsing or in any other way ill. No colonies died during the experiment.

The researchers collected the pollen twice a week from four locations in Connecticut during the season. 102 Samples were collected and analyzed using HPLC/MS. (High Performance Liquid Chromatography/ Mass Spectrometry)

Results: 37 pesticides were detected. 15 insecticide/ acaracides, 11 fungicides, 10 herbicides and 1 plant growth regulator. All samples had at least one pesticide detected.

The most commonly detected pesticide was coumaphos. Carbaryl and phosmet, both highly toxic to bees were the most commonly detected field pesticides. Imidacloprid was detected 30 times, mostly at low levels. The pesticides found at the highest levels were both fungicides: myclobutanil and boscalid.

- www.BeeCulture.com

I’ve read in trade journals and forums about China dumping honey in the U.S., and it’s nice to see some investigative journalism on the subject! Curiously absent from the wonderfully long story is Brazil. (Has anyone else noticed Brazilian honey in U.S. stores?) Brazilian honey sits on the shelf at the Berkeley Bowl (like Whole Foods, but local) for $1.99 labeled “organic” from the USDA. It’s the cheapest honey in the store among many lovely, local honey jars, and supposedly the USDA was in Brazil following the bees to ensure they didn’t land on any sprayed flowers… yeah right. How does it happen that Brazilian honey makes it way into the U.S. more cheaply than local honey, and can even have a USDA organic stamp on it? Certification acceptance, secretly negotiated trade agreements, blah, blah. (Brazil doubled its honey exports in 2008!) When the state of California was planning to spray all of the San Francisco Bay Area with chemicals to prevent spread of the allegedly dangerous Light Brown Apple Moth, I was told at a public meeting that the USDA would have just given “waivers” to all of the organic farms sprayed with chemical agents, thus allowing them to continue selling their products as organic. Truth in labeling? The USDA Organic brand proves again to be adulterated and green washed. Shame on Berkeley Bowl for putting their own name on it, too.

I’ll take this opportunity to post my own photo survey of the honey market I did back in November ‘08 at the Berkeley Bowl. You’ll see French and Indian honey labeled organic as well, with prices. Perhaps a followup on the “honey laundering” story will reveal something about Brazilian honey imports. -D

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/394053_honey30.asp

Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Last updated 3:01 p.m. PT

Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime

Country of origin no guarantee on cheap imports

By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
P-I SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

SULTAN — Seven cars with darkened windows barreled east toward the Cascades, whizzing past this Snohomish County hamlet’s smattering of shops and eateries.

The sedans and sport utility vehicles stirred up dust as they rolled into the parking lot of Pure Foods Inc., a Washington honey producer.

Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds — agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.

The man who runs the business, Mike Ingalls, was stunned.

“I just sell honey — what the hell is this all about?” he remembered asking, as he was hustled into a tiny room with his office manager and truck driver.

Three days before the April 25 raid, customs had persuaded a federal judge in Seattle to issue the search warrant shoved in Ingalls’ hands. But it wasn’t until Ingalls read “Attachment D” that he understood why investigators were seizing his business records, passport, phone logs, photographs, Rolodexes, mail and computer files — almost anything that could be copied or hauled away.

	Mike Ingalls, owner of Pure Foods in Sultan, was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on April 25, but no charges have been filed against him.

He was suspected of trafficking in counterfeit merchandise — a honey smuggler.

A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue.

In the U.S., where bee colonies are dying off and demand for imported honey is soaring, traders of the thick amber liquid are resorting to elaborate schemes to dodge tariffs and health safeguards in order to dump cheap honey on the market, a five-month Seattle P-I investigation has found.

The business is plagued by foreign hucksters and shady importers who rip off conscientious U.S. packers with honey diluted with sugar water or corn syrup — or worse, tainted with pesticides or antibiotics.

Among the P-I’s findings:

• Big shipments of contaminated honey from China are frequently laundered in other countries — an illegal practice called “transshipping” — in order to avoid U.S.import fees, protective tariffs or taxes imposed on foreign products that intentionally undercut domestic prices.In a series of shipments in the past year, tons of honey produced in China passed through the ports of Tacoma and Long Beach, Calif., after being fraudulently marked as a tariff-free product of Russia.
• Tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export.
• The government promises intense scrutiny of honey crossing our borders but only a small fraction is inspected, and seizures and arrests remain rare.
• The feds haven’t adopted a legal definition of honey, making it difficult for enforcement agents to keep bad honey off the shelves.

Read the rest of the story, see the maps…

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/honey/

Andrew Schneider’s Secret Ingredients blog