Like other Colorado beekeepers, Jeff Theobald knows that between 2 percent and 10 percent of his bees typically won’t survive winter, but this year, the loss rate is 40 percent and rising as entire colonies vanish without a trace.
“It’s just bizarre,” said Theobald, who runs Grand Mesa Honey Farm in Delta. “I’ve had hives that had dead bees in them – 4,000 to 5,000 dead bees – and hives that were completely empty. The bees were just gone.”
Regional disasters have afflicted beekeepers in the past, but baffled entomologists and agricultural experts call this the first national crisis, with potentially grave consequences. Approximately $14.6 billion worth of U.S. nut, fruit and vegetable crops depend on bee pollination.
Throughout the U.S., honeybee colonies, including approximately 30,000 colonies in Colorado, are affected by what researchers are calling colony collapse disorder. To date, the disorder has been identified in 24 states.
“The map changes almost daily,” said Jerry Bromenshenk, president of Bee Alert Technology, a research company affiliated with the University of Montana. “Almost every time the phone rings, we say, ‘Is that another state calling in with a problem?”‘
The accounts are eerily identical: A bee colony that appeared perfectly strong and healthy during a late 2006 inspection abruptly disappears when beekeepers make their first bee-yard rounds in 2007. One commercial beekeeper with hives in Oklahoma and Texas lost 80 percent of his 13,000 colonies.
“One day, you look at the bees and they’re good,” Bromenshenk said. “The next time you look in the box, you take a second look, pull the cover off, and you might have a queen and three young bees trying to keep things going. If it was a pesticide or a virus, you’d expect to find piles of dead bees in the box, and in the bee yard. But this looks like someone swept the bottom board clean.”
“We wish we knew”
Where are the missing bees? Nobody knows. What’s causing them to leave the hive? Nobody knows that, either. How many bees are missing?
“We wish we knew, and we wish we had a means of collecting statistics,” Bromenshenk said. “The problem is (that) the beekeepers we hear from are the ones who have a problem. And another problem is that we’re not hearing from the beekeepers who aren’t owning up, because they don’t want growers to know.”
Still, there are few secrets in the relatively small, close-knit beekeeping community, one of the last agricultural domains still dominated by family dynasties.
“Dad knows so many beekeepers, and a bunch of his friends have already had big losses,” said Jeff Johnston, whose Colorado Honey Company processes honey from Colorado colonies kept by relatives and friends with operations from the Eastern Plains to the Western Slope. His father, Lyle, is currently in California, where almond growers pay $125 to $165 per hive.
Lyle Johnston’s business is based in Rocky Ford. He normally stays close to home to serve the farmers and ranchers who hire his bees, but the California almond crop is too lucrative to ignore.
The Johnstons are among a handful of this state’s commercial beekeepers whose colonies pollinate Eastern Plains alfalfa crops, Western Slope peaches, Rocky Ford cantaloupe and other crops that depend on honeybees. Hundreds of other hobbyist beekeepers maintain an average of a few dozen hives each throughout Colorado.
As bees die, the price of replacement bees – which has already quadrupled in the past decade because so many bees succumb to mite infestations – is escalating.
“If we don’t have bees, then all (that) those folks in California have got is fancy shade trees,” Theobald said. “I’m afraid attention won’t be paid, and we’ll be going to South America for fruits and vegetables.”
Long-ignored regulations?
Theobald and his brother, Tom, a Niwot beekeeper for more than three decades, believe that colony collapse disorder is the result of long-ignored environmental regulations. When growers violate pesticide restrictions, the chemical residue poisons bees.
Until the disorder was identified, pesticides and parasitic mites were the chief causes of colony die-offs. When Colorado’s apiary program lost its funding in the early 1980s, government bee inspections ceased, leaving no one but the beekeepers to monitor the mite infestation or pesticide abuse.
“Until then, I did routine disease inspections, and since the program went under, there’ve been all kinds of problems,” said state entomologist Jerry Cochran.
Tom Theobald agrees. He refers to the existing system as “the (Hurricane) Katrina model of management.”
“We’ve known this problem was coming for a long time,” he said, “and the people in charge have not discussed the problems openly.
“It’s not colony collapse disorder. It’s industry collapse disorder, and it’s very serious.”
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
THE GOOD BUZZ ON BEES
$14.6 billion
Annual value of bee pollination to the agricultural industry.
80%
Amount of insect crop pollination estimated to be done by honeybees.
Source: National Honey Board
