Search Maine Yellow Pages 
Log In | Register | Help
Morning Sentinel
Missing bees could affect pollinating season for crops
By STEVE CARTWRIGHT, Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel Tuesday, May 01, 2007

AUGUSTA -- For farmers who depend on honeybees, this spring could be too quiet.

Bees pollinate blueberries, apples, strawberries and cranberries, plus many vegetable crops in Maine. And for more than 20 years, the bee population has been shrinking.

Now it's in free-fall: Bees are dying in droves, weak and disoriented. Scientists are conflicted about the cause of the decline.

Pollinating season for Maine crops is likely to begin in a couple of weeks, and prices for hives, set out on blueberry fields and apple orchards, are rising. Growers say the price of renting a hive has doubled -- from $50 a few years ago to more than $100 today.

Maine state bee inspector and apiarist Tony Jadczak said parasitic mites are a major cause of the dieoff.

He said the mites arrived years ago from Asia, but bees seem more vulnerable than ever to the blood-suckers. Why bees are succumbing could be complicated, and could involve manmade stresses.

Honey producer Marc Plaisted of Pittston, a fourth-generation beekeeper, said that while honeybees were first brought to America by early settlers, later species brought the parasitic mites.

He said using bees to pollinate crops around the country spreads disease, even though he recognizes these same bees are essential to growing fruits and vegetables.

Jadczak, with 35 years of experience in the bee business, said the situation is far from hopeless, but may require human behavioral changes.

"We're the biggest problem," he said, citing stresses put on bees by moving them around a lot, by exposure to chemical pesticides, and by development.

Rick Cooper, a beekeeper in Bowdoinham, dismissed some of the recent media attention to bees as "hype."

He also scoffed at a report that cell phone transmission towers might be disorienting bees.

What's bothering bees, he said, is being trucked around the country from Florida citrus groves to California almond plantations to Maine blueberry barrens, and back to Florida.

"They're stressing the bees beyond belief," said Cooper, who said he takes his bees only short distances for pollinating. "It's absolutely about how the bees are being treated. We're doing more and more with fewer and fewer bees," he said.

Cooper calls himself a small producer, with 78 hives. But as the price of honey has been depressed by foreign competition, he said, more beekeepers have been pushed into the pollinating business.

Bees may be in short supply today, but Jadczak, who works for the state Department of Agriculture, expects enough bees will be brought to Maine from other places assure good pollination of major crops such as blueberries and apples.

In some ways it's not a new problem.

The first big sign of trouble came in 1985, when a blight blamed on mites delivered what Jadczak called a "knockout punch" to American bees. One million managed colonies of bees died at the time, out of some 4.5 million.

In 2005, there were 2.5 million colonies facing increasing demand for pollination, Jadczak said.

Parasitic Mite Syndrome, as it's called, cut the nation's honeybee population in half in the 1990s, Jadczak said. Mites on bees are showing up everywhere except Australia, he said.

Whether it's mites, cell phone towers of something else muting honeybees, Plaisted, vice president of the Maine State Beekeepers Association, put it this way: "We, as mankind, do it to ourselves."

Steve Cartwright -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

scartwright@centralmaine.com


Reader comments

Sort by: Oldest first | Newest First

Dennis of Farmington, ME
May 1, 2007 8:13 AM
Quite frightening to think about this when you realize the work that bees do for us.

Last summer was the first time I had ever seen a varroa mite.

I was in my yard and a bumblebee lumbered past me and dropped to the ground. Sort of an odd occurrence in itself. I looked down to see the bumblebee waddling along the ground. I knelt down to see what had just dropped out of the sky. To my surprise, the poor creature was covered with the strangest looking creatures. There really must have been 20 or 30 tick-like critters crawling over this little black bumblebee. I watched in further amazement as the bumblebee ever so slowly got airborne again. I then watched in near slow motion as the bumblebee chugged along in the air carrying his heavy load of passengers. He flew off into the woods and I was left wondering whether I should have euthanized the little guy and destroyed what were clearly some sort of parasite colony he was covered with.

Following that strange sighting, I spent hours researching mites on the internet. I finally identified them as varroa mites. Made me wonder whether last year's low bush blueberries didn't pollinate because of all of this. Should be interesting to see what happens this year.

Global warming? Pesticide overuse? Cell phone noise? Wouldn't it be nice to have some answers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor


report abuse

You must be a registered user of MaineToday.com to post a comment. Register or log in.