"(CBS News) Honey bees have been dying in large numbers in recent years, and there's new evidence of a drastic increase in the death rate. Some experts say the latest population drop poses a threat to our nation's food supply.

According to commercial beekeeper James Doan, 'A third of all our food is pollinated by honey bees.'

Doan makes a living renting out thousands of hives to farmers up and down the East Coast. His bees are part of a crucial lifeblood to U.S. agriculture. Doan said, 'I think people just need to really be aware that bees are so important, not just for honey production, but for pollination in the United States.'

Bees pollinate the majority of our fruit and vegetable supply: from apples and pears to green beans, pumpkins, and squash. And the list goes on.

But something is killing the bees at an increasingly alarming rate. Doan said, 'Every day and you'll look and you'll see 100 to 200 bees dead in front of the hive. Maybe even to the point of 40 to 50,000 bees laying out in the front of the hive, which is not normal.'

U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers say early indications suggest this winter will mark the highest death rate they've ever documented, and consumers could eventually feel the effects.

Doan said, 'Without them you're gonna have higher prices that you're going to pay for fruits and vegetables. And those higher prices are not going to mean better products.'

Bees used to die at a rate of 5 to 10 percent a year. Then, around 2006, that rate more than tripled in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Now, some beekeepers say they're losing up to 50 percent of their hives.

Many blame a class of pesticide called neonicotinoids, or 'neonics.' Doan said, 'They block the nerve endings of the bee, and so the bee is paralyzed and then what happens is they starve to death, so you see the bee shaking, and it's a very horrific way of dying for a bee.'

Doan joined a coalition of beekeepers, environmentalists and consumer groups that recently sued the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ban these chemicals. The lawsuit claims the 'EPA is well aware of recent studies and reports illustrating the risks to honey bees...but has refused to take any regulatory action.'

'We're finding these chemicals in the beehives,' Doan said. 'We know they're there. We're finding them in the bees. So we know they're killing bees.'"


Deepening honey bee crisis creates worry over food supply
CBS News

"AT THIS time of year Gordon Wardell loves to stand amid the almond blossoms in California's San Joaquin valley, listening to the “low-pitch, warm, happy hum” of millions of bees. But the bees are not as happy as they sound, which is why Mr Wardell, who has a PhD in entomology and is a de facto bee doctor, is here.

More than 80% of the world's almonds are grown in California and, to pollinate them, the 7,000 or so growers hire about 1.4m of America's 2.3m commercial hives. Thousands of trucks deliver the hives in February—from Maine, Florida, the Carolinas and elsewhere—and will soon pick them up again. The bees' job is to flit from one blossom to the next, gorging themselves and in the process spreading the trees' sexual dust.

Since 2006, however, bees have been suffering from 'colony collapse disorder' (CCD), a mysterious affliction that has drastically reduced their numbers. As a result, says Joe MacIlvaine, the president of Paramount Farming and the largest almond-grower in the world, the rental cost of a hive has tripled in the past five years to about $150. Bee rental now accounts for 15% of Paramount's costs.

So Paramount has hired Mr Wardell, who has been studying bees for 30 years and CCD since it broke out. Its cause may be mobile-telephony radiation, viruses, fungi, mites and pesticides—or none of the above. In the absence of a clear explanation, Mr Wardell is concentrating on something different: nutrition.

A healthy worker bee spends about four weeks in its hive, feeding on protein-rich pollen and nursing larvae, and then another two weeks in the field eating sugary honey until its proteins are depleted and it dies. For some reason bees are getting too little protein in the hive, thus dying after only about four weeks, almost as soon as they venture outside. So Mr Wardell is force-feeding them protein. He owns a patent for MegaBee, which he says 'looks like cookie dough'. He puts a bit of this into the hives, blocking the bees' entrance so that they have to chomp their way through it. As part of his new job, Mr Wardell is working with beekeepers across the country to supplement bee diets everywhere."


Almond pollination in California
Vitamin Bee A new attempt to save the most vital workers in the orchards
from: www.economist.com

"Honey bees are more effective at pollinating almonds when other species of bees are present, says an international research team in ground-breaking research just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research, which took place in California's almond orchards in Yolo, Colusa and Stanislaus counties, could prove invaluable in increasing the pollination effectiveness of honey bees, as demand for their pollination service grows."


Honey bees are more effective at pollinating almonds when other species of bees are present
from: phys.org

"Getting stung by a bee can hurt, but losing bees forever can hurt even more. It may be hard to see why bees are so important to us, but did you know that 1 of every 3 bites of food we take comes from a pollinated plant or an animal that depends on bee pollination? And yet, since the mid-2000s, bees have been mysteriously vanishing.

A world without bees would be a different place. A lot of crops currently depend on them, including fruits like almonds and cherries, vegetables like onions and pumpkins, and field crops like soybeans and sunflowers. A loss of bees could mean economic hardships for farms and the food industry and would lead to a rise in food costs.

In 2006, beekeepers started reporting that seemingly healthy bees were simply abandoning their hives in mass numbers, never to return. Researchers call the mass disappearance colony collapse disorder (CCD). Since then, around one third of honey bee colonies in the U.S. have vanished."


How Are Dying Bees Affecting Our Lives?
by Drew Hendricks 

"Honey bees are big money makers for U.S. agriculture. These social and hardworking insects produce six hive products – honey, pollen, royal jelly, beeswax, propolis, and venom – all collected and used by people for various nutritional and therapeutic purposes.

Honey, of course, is the most well-known and economically important hive product. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agriculture Statistics Service, honey bees made more than 148 million pounds of honey last year. With the cost of honey at a record high at about $1.73 per pound, that’s a value of over $256 million.

After honey, beeswax is the second most important hive product from an economic standpoint. The beeswax trade dates to ancient Greece and Rome, and in Medieval Europe, the substance was a unit of trade for taxes and other purposes. The market remains strong today. Beeswax is popular for making candles and as an ingredient in artists’ materials and in leather and wood polishes. The pharmaceutical industry uses the substance as a binding agent, time-release mechanism, and drug carrier. Beeswax is also one of the most commonly used waxes in cosmetics. The U.S. is a major producer of raw beeswax, as well as a worldwide supplier of refined beeswax.

But the greatest importance of honey bees to agriculture isn’t a product of the hive at all. It’s their work as crop pollinators. This agricultural benefit of honey bees is estimated to be between 10 and 20 times the total value of honey and beeswax. In fact, bee pollination accounts for about $15 billion in added crop value. Honey bees are like flying dollar bills buzzing over U.S. crops.

Luckily for the honey bees and the many crops that depend on them for pollination, FDA recently approved a new drug to control American foulbrood, a widespread bacterial disease that kills bee larvae."


New Drug Approved to Help Agriculture's Helpful Honey Bees
By Melanie McLean, DVM, Center for Veterinary Medicine, FDA

"For decades, Mike Buckley has farmed his family place with hard work and the help of millions of native pollinators: alkali bees.

Smaller than a honeybee, with metallic blue, green or orange stripes around their abdomens, they are the only successfully managed, native, aggregating, ground-nesting solitary bee species used for pollination in commercial agriculture in the world. And with 17 million tiny fliers, the Touchet Valley is the largest aggregation anywhere.

Growers manage about 120 acres of bee beds they carefully irrigate with pipes buried in the ground, to provide the moist soils the bees need.

They salt the surface of the beds each spring, to draw the moisture up through ground, and discourage vegetation so roots won't invade bees' nests.

The bees are well worth all the trouble: They can increase alfalfa-seed yields as much as 70 percent with their superior pollination performance.

They are the secret to success for Buckley and 15 other alfalfa-seed growers in an 84-square-mile area in the Touchet-Lowden agricultural district of Walla Walla County.

They farm about 12,000 acres of alfalfa seed, making Walla Walla County the second-largest alfalfa-seed producing area in the U.S., with retail sales exceeding $50 million in 2009.

As for switching pollinators — you can forget it, growers say. The alternative to alkali bees is importing nonnative leaf-cutter bees from Canada, Wagoner said, but that's expensive, driving up farmers' production costs.

This land, this crop and these bees are prefect for each other, growers say, and they want a solution that preserves their bees and their industry, not a buyout."

Farmers worry that road project will turn productive bees into roadkill
By Lynda V. Mapes

"Felix Munk gets stung up to 20 times a day but that doesn't stop him from regularly clambering up to the roof of the Vienna Opera and other city landmarks to check on the bees living above the heads of unsuspecting music lovers and government ministers.

Munk is a member of Vienna's Stadtimker, one of a growing number of urban beekeepers' associations who are trying to encourage bees to make their homes in cities, as pesticides and crop monocultures make the countryside increasingly hostile.

Bee populations are in sharp decline around the world, under attack from a poorly understood phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, whose main causes are believed to include a virus spread by mites that feed on haemolymph - bees' 'blood'.

As well as making honey, bees are important pollinators of flowering plants, including many fruits and vegetables. A 2011 United Nations report estimated that the work of bees and other pollinators was worth 153 billion euros a year.

'Bees do very well in cities,' says Stephen Martin of the University of Sheffield, an expert on the deadly Varroa mite that has wrought destruction on honey bee colonies around the world since being exported from its native Asia in the 1960s.

'There are lots of plants and flowers in cities for bees to live on. Keeping them on rooftops is a great idea because it keeps them out of the way of people.'"

Vienna pitches urban chic to beleaguered bee colonies
By Georgina Prodhan

"Bee and bat populations alike experience a sharp decline in North America. Whereas, however, the dying of bees remains a bit of a mystery, the cause of the collapse of bat populations has been given a name: It is a fungitic disease labeled WNS, White Nose Syndrome, that has infected and killed an estimated 5 to 7 million individuals so far and is still rampaging, from North Carolina to Tennessee up to Quebec, through 16 US states and four Canadian provinces.
"Very much like bee's Colony Collapse Disorder, WNS has caught the attention of a wider public primarily because, just like bees, bats are also vital for the agricultural industry and so their decimation and possible extinction would and already does have a great economic impact: in the tropics, they are important pollinators; in North America, they are essential for pest control, consuming many thousands of metric tons of insects each year. According to an article published in Science (sciencemag.org March 13, 2011), the estimated average value of bats to the North American economy is 22.9 billion dollars a year. A large-scale loss of bat populations (Adding to the problem of WNS, many thousand bats a year belonging to species that are not cave- but migrating tree-dwellers die from wind turbines) would lead to a further intensification in the use of pesticides: maybe an additional financial burden to agriculturalists, but the real costs caused by the so-called 'downstream effects' of increased pesticide use can not even be calculated and damage, especially long-term ecological impact, might be immense."

Bats and bees dying.
by Angelika Windhofer

"For most people, the buzzing sound of bees is a caution to keep your distance.

"Even though they are armed with intimidating stingers, bees play an important role in our ecosystem by pollinating flowers, fruits and vegetables and keeping our crops growing from year to year.

“'I have never been stung by a honeybee. The only thing I have ever been stung by is a brown hornet if I disturb their nest. Other than that, they will never sting you,' she said. 'If you are stung by a bumblebee, it is because it went down your shirt and got confused; it did not attack you. Yellow jackets are nasty creatures, but you will only get stung if you go near one of their nests. Honeybees are just so nonaggressive.'"  Carver's Claire DeLoid.


Carver's Claire DeLoid encourages residents to preserve bee habitats
By Brittany Burrows

"The honeybees prefer a highly structured society of drones, workers, queens and hives. A hive consists of the matriarch, the queen, and her 30,000 to 50,000 subjects, the male drones and the female worker bees. Older worker bees are tasked with foraging for food and usually work themselves to death. A teaspoon of honey requires a visit to a million flowers. Their loss is our gain, since our gardens and fields thrive from their labor.

While honeybees prefer the metropolitan atmosphere of the hive, native bees, on the other hand, are solitary introverts that do their jobs and go back home to get away from the crowds. Compared to the belligerent African bees, native bees are even-tempered hard workers that do not attack unless provoked."

Bees sweeten deal for native plant nursery
by Maria Sonnenberg, For FLORIDA TODAY