After the alarm, just a healthy buzz

BY TOM WEBB
Pioneer Press
TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

Article Last Updated:10/02/2007 11:47:52 PM CDT

When last we heard from honeybees, the buzz was bad.

A new ailment had emerged over the winter, causing bee colonies to mysteriously flee, and fueling scary stories about the vanishing honeybee - and the threat to crops that depend on bees for pollination.

But Minnesota's honeybees are still here. In fact, most honeybees thrived this summer, state beekeepers report. Minnesota's crops were richly pollinated. Apples, berries and pumpkins are abundant. There's even plenty of honey here in America's No. 5 honey-producing state.

To be sure, Colony Collapse Disorder remains a real worry. But for now, state bee experts can't identify a confirmed case of it here this summer.

"A lot of beekeepers lose colonies, but it could be a lot of things ... but the Colony Collapse specifically, I have not heard at all, no," said Katie Klett, a University of Minnesota bee specialist. "Drought was the biggest problem I heard about this year."

Dan Pasche is the state apiary inspector for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. If the syndrome were spreading through Minnesota this summer, he'd probably have seen it.

"I'm not aware of any this summer," he said. "There was at least one beekeeper who talked about some losses last year in his bees ... but they appear to have recovered pretty well over the summer."

Beekeeping is usually the quietest of ventures, and most Minnesotans probably don't realize the state ranks among the bee queens. Here are backyard hobbyists, huge commercial honeybee operations that truck bees nationwide, and everything in between. Despite the drought, many report good years.

"I got 80 pounds of honey this year, which is as much as I've ever gotten in the past," said Kris Miller, a Washington County beekeeper. Among her colleagues, "a lot of people actually had a pretty good honey harvest," she said.

David Ellingson, an Ortonville beekeeper and past president of the Minnesota Honey Producers, told Congress this spring about losing 65 percent of his bees while wintering in Texas. Now back in Minnesota, he's still having problems among his 3,400 hives.

"We did see probably 20 percent of our colonies go from excellent to poor, at the end of June and into July," Ellingson said. "Some of them have rebounded, and others have gone away."

Losing bee colonies is one of the gloomy facts of life for beekeepers, and over the years, bee losses have been worsening. Bee mites, viruses and pesticides have taken a toll.

"Twenty-five years ago, if you lost 5 to 7 percent of your bees (during the winter), that would be normal," Ellingson said. "But today, we look at normal as being 20 percent."

But what alarmed folks last winter were reports of spotty but enormous losses, in a pattern not seen before: eggs were laid, the queen bees remained, but the thousands of adult bees had simply vanished. Dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, it surfaced most often in the South and on the coasts.

Nobody knew the cause, but lots of theories were floated. The catchiest: Cell phones were somehow to blame.

"We know it's not cell phones," said Klett, who added that, "in the scientific community, that was never a possibility." But it did grab lots of media attention.

Honeybees play a crucial role in the U.S. food system, pollinating crops from alfalfa to zucchini. Based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data, there's no evidence of a falloff in crop production in Minnesota this summer. The crop of apples, which depends on honeybees, actually increased this year.

Since last spring, scientists have identified an imported virus that appears linked to collapsed colonies. They're also examining a long list of other suspects, including a class of insecticides and an array of bee diseases. Beekeeping practices are coming under scrutiny, too.

"We've got a 50-piece puzzle here, and we've only got 10 pieces that we know are going on," Ellingson said. "There's too many unknowns."

Klett, whose family runs a North Dakota farm breeding queen bees, said it suffered big losses in 2006. Yet 2007 was "the best year we've ever had," she said, with production "through the roof."

So it's a riddle and a concern. Winter will test the state's honeybees again. But thus far, they're hanging tough.

"What's great is that I'm getting a lot of questions from the general public that I'd never gotten before," said Miller, the Washington County beekeeper who also is president of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association. "It's nice to see people concerned about a bee - whereas before, they'd just kill it. So I like that part."