Researchers try to unravel cause of bee die-off

Subject: Researchers try to unravel cause of bee die-off
Date:     Mon, 27 May 2002 09:20:45 -0400
From:      Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)

To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation

'Every bee that flies through an orchard is like a $20 bill flying by' for apple growers: Pesticide prime suspect - Richard Foot rfoot@nationalpost.com

CHARLOTTETOWN - Jim Kemp keeps the strangest things in his office freezer at the University of Prince Edward Island: sacks of soil, clear plastic bags filled with wildflowers, and thousands of little frozen bees -- each one painstakingly collected from farms across the island in the hopes of solving an international, entomological mystery.

Honeybees have been dying in alarming numbers around the world since the mid-1990s. More recently, the problem has surfaced in North America, where the honeybee is not an indigenous creature, but was imported from Europe many decades ago.

Beekeepers in the Maritimes announced two years ago that they, too, were suffering high losses among their hives. While a 5% to 10% annual loss of bees is expected in the industry, beekeepers in P.E.I. and New Brunswick began reporting mortality rates of between 30% and 90%. Similar complaints have since emerged in Nova Scotia and Southern Ontario.

Dr. Kemp, a UPEI botanist, was enlisted by the provincial government to find out what is killing Canada's bees. Solving the riddle is crucial, he says, not because of the honey the bees make -- a sweet by-product -- but because of the plants they and their wild cousins pollinate. Nature, and farmers, both depend on bees to propagate much of what sprouts from the earth. Without these busy insects, clover would not flower and strawberry fields would not bear fruit.

The plants that bees pollinate make up about 80% of the food Canadians take home from the grocery store.

"You aren't going to have anywhere near the blueberry crops, the canola crops, or the apple crops you want without bees," Dr. Kemp says. "Every bee that flies through an orchard is like a $20 bill flying by, because of the amount of apples that its work will produce.

"And whatever is affecting honeybees," he adds, "could be affecting bumblebees and other wild bees native to this country."

Many in the beekeeping industry are blaming pesticides for the problem. Most apiaries, or hives, with high losses in recent years are located in or near potato fields, where farmers have since 1999 been applying a pesticide called Admire. The chemical is sprayed on the soil to protect spud crops against the Colorado potato beetle.

Bees do not forage on potato plants, but beekeepers frequently place hives in potato fields so the bees can feed on and pollinate clover -- a common rotation crop farmers grow between yields to put nitrogen back into the soil.

Admire is a long-lasting pesticide that could endure for years in a farm field, and some beekeepers complain that the chemical is finding its way into the clover, and being fatally ingested by bees.

"Last year, everybody said the culprit was Admire," says Daniel Ficza, who owns 500 hives and is president of the P.E.I. Beekeeper's Co-op.

Mr. Ficza remains suspicious of Admire, but is not certain it is to blame for the high and sudden honeybee deaths in his industry.

"It's hard to tell," he says. "There are a lot of chemical sprays here on the island for potatoes. It could be anything."

The active chemical in Admire -- imidacloprid -- has been called a hazard to bees elsewhere in the world. The pesticide has been banned in parts of France for several years, ever since honeybees there began showing signs of disorientation, and subsequently died, near sunflower fields treated with the chemical.

A beekeeper in North Dakota is also suing Bayer Inc., the company that makes Admire, claiming his bees suffered high losses after foraging on crops sprayed with imidacloprid.

The chemical was approved for use on Canadian potatoes in 1999. Dr. Kemp says it has the fastest growing sales of any insecticide in the world.

Heather Clay, national co-ordinator for the Calgary-based Canadian Honey Council, says the chemical exists in another Bayer product, Gaucho, which is becoming popular as a pesticide for canola crops on the Prairies.

"About 70% of Canadian honey comes from bees that feed on canola," she says. "No other country plants canola on as large a scale as Canada does, and produces honey from it to this extent. Our concern is we don't yet know if applying this chemical to canola will have any long-term effects on bees. We're afraid we may now have a big problem out West."

So concerned is Bayer about the complaints of beekeepers in Canada that last year it volunteered to fund Dr. Kemp's research on P.E.I. The company has, to date, pledged $360,000 toward the research. But despite all the money and high-priced analysis, the honeybee riddle remains.

Last summer, Dr. Kemp and a team of researchers including Dick Rogers, a Nova Scotian entomologist, searched P.E.I. for proof that Admire might be killing the island's bees. They gathered soil and clover samples from potato fields around the province. Then, with hand-held vacuum cleaners, they sucked up bees from nearby hives, froze the insects in dry ice, and extracted pollen and nectar already collected by the insects.

The samples were analyzed at a lab in Edmonton. Traces of Admire were found in the soil and the clover leaves, but not in the clover flowers, the pollen or the nectar. This shows, says Dr. Kemp, that while Admire residues may remain in potato fields, and even in clover plants years after the stuff is applied, there is no proof it is being picked up and ingested by bees.

Bayer has agreed to fund a second year of research, and this summer Dr. Kemp and his team are back in the countryside, examining 40 P.E.I. apiaries with new tests and fresh questions: Could Admire be lurking somewhere else inside bee hives, perhaps in the wax? Could other agricultural pesticides be harming the insects? Is a changing climate to blame? Could poor management by certain beekeepers be the problem? Are mites -- a bee parasite that has been blamed for wild bee deaths elsewhere in North America -- be suddenly killing high numbers of bees in hives around potato fields?

Dr. Kemp he hopes to have answers by the end of next year, in a report awaited not only by Bayer executives and Canada's 11,000 beekeepers, but also the potato industry, blueberry growers, a handful of provincial governments, the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Heather Clay of the Canadian Honey Council remains skeptical that Admire and other Bayer products can be ruled out as potential bee killers following only one summer of research. She says she is eager to see what Dr. Kemp turns up in his second summer of sleuthing.

"Something has happened," she says. "And it does seem really strange that in many places where potatoes have been planted and treated with this pesticide, bees have started dying."

A honeybee, gathering nectar from clover, was photographed last year during a study of bee die-off in the Maritimes. Beekeepers in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick say honeybee mortality ranges from 30% to 90%.

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