Why So Many Crashes of Bee-Carrying Trucks? 255
Hugh Pickens writes "Interstate 15 in southern Utah has been reopened and officials say 25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for after a flatbed truck heading for California carrying 460 beehives overturned near a construction zone. The bees were on their way to Bakersfield, California for almond pollination next spring. 'The driver lost control, hit the concrete barrier and rolled over,' says Corporal Todd Johnson with the Utah Highway Patrol. 'Of course we then had bees everywhere.' But a similar incident happened in July, when 14 million bees, as well as a river of honey, flowed out of a wrecked semi in Idaho; and 17 million bees escaped a fatal truck crash in Minnesota last year. Why so many highway accidents involving bees? The uptick results from more and more honey bee colonies being transported around the country via highways in recent years. Local bee populations are rapidly dying off from a little-understood disease called 'colony collapse disorder': 'The number of managed honey bee colonies [in the U.S.] has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today,' says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Unfortunately, some honey bee scientists suspect that the rise of migratory beekeeping may be contributing to the species' decline as transporting hives from farm to farm spreads pathogens to local bee populations."
France knows about colony collapse disorder (Score:2, Informative)
Colony collapse disorder is caused by the pesticides we put on our grain seed. Scientists figured out how to make the whole plant resistant to pests. Our EPA / FDA tested the stuff with adult bees and approved it. They didn't check to see what happens to the bee larvae - the new bees (as opposed to nubies) have no sense of direction and can't survive outside the colony for more than 24 hours.
France knows this. France has banned the pesticides. The USA needs more proof.
Too much misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
Having married into a beekeeping family, I couldn't help but notice that the writer of this article seems fairly uninformed.
For one thing, TFA mentions the rise in the trucking of bees and attributes it without explanation to CCD. Bees are subject to a number of well understood diseases and parasites that beekeepers spend lots of time and money to protect their bees from. CCD is the blanket term for all the less well-understood diseases, parasites and harmful environmental factors. It strikes me as odd to assert that beekeepers would move their businesses around the country in an effort to combat an unknown threat, especially since for all they know, the new location (or the act of moving itself) could contribute to CCD.
AFAIK, there are two primary reasons for migratory beekeeping:
1) To protect bees from *known* diseases and parasites. Wintering bees involves letting the hives power down for a few months. Unfortunately, during this time of lowered activity, they have an increased susceptibility to problems like wax moths and other parasites. Moving the bees in the winter to places where pollination needs to occur means getting the bees to a warmer and healthier environment and let's them end the winter stronger.
2) Financial incentive. Trucking your bees across the country means moving your entire business at least twice a year and is a large personal and financial burden. However, because demand for pollination services is so high, doing so actually ends up being profitable, and businesses that do not engage in this practice end up being less viable and more vulnerable to the random setbacks that plague any agricultural endeavor.
In other words, migratory beekeeping is a matter of survival rather than preference. Moving your bees is a pain in the butt and often involves being away from your family for months at a time, but it is deemed necessary to stay competitive with both domestic and international (e.g. Argentina & China) producers.
Another troubling phrase in the article is "industrialized hives." I'm not really sure what this might refer to, since economies of scale don't apply as much to beekeeping as they do pig farming or corn growing. You can't just create a mega-honey factory with millions of hives. The bees have to be distributed across a large area. Bees live as hives of a size governed by biology, and because bees have a well-understood range, only so many hives can be put in any one place. I am sure that very large honey outfits do exist, but in my experience, very small businesses (less than 10 people) is actually the norm, and these small businesses are as affected by the various diseases and parasites as anybody else.
Any finally, I just have to say something about this assertion, "Transporting the hives from farm to farm then spreads the pathogens to local bee populations." This may be true, but these pathogens spread even before migratory beekeeping became common. In fact, they spread in spite of a universal desire to keep them from spreading and international and interstate restrictions on moving bees. The irony is that the spread of these pathogens was one of the factors that made migratory beekeeping necessary. On the other hand, maybe keeping all hives local would slow the spread of new diseases and disease variants. That would be a good thing, I suppose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_the_honey_bee