By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

MEDINA, Ohio — Concerns about tracheal mites, varroa mites and colony collapse disorder have given beekeepers headaches in recent years. Now, beekeepers everywhere have another worry – imported bees.

For the past four years Australia has been air-freighting the insects across the Pacific in order to replace hives devastated by colony collapse disorder. In those four years the bees have been trucked to all parts of the country. But now some ‘keepers in western states fear that some of these bees might carry a deadly parasite unseen in the U.S. And the fear has been heard throughout the Midwest.
Jeff Pettis, the USDA’s top bee scientist, fears that the aggressive bee species found near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could, indeed, carry a deadly mite.

“We have enough problems with our own bee diseases that we don’t know how to treat, and they open the border to a whole new species that could carry God knows what,” said Ken Haff, a beekeeper from North Dakota and a vice president of the American Honey Producers Association.

Domestic bee stocks have been waning since 2004, when scientists first got reports of the puzzling illness that has claimed up to 90 percent of commercial hives (now labeled colony collapse disorder.) That’s also the year the USDA allowed imports of Australian hives, and scientists have been investigating whether Australia was a source of a virus tied to this bee die-off.

Shipments proceeded for roughly four years. On Dec. 1, 2008 the Australian government abruptly stopped the shipments, saying it could no longer be certain the hives were free of a smaller, aggressive bee that has infested the Great Barrier Reef area of its country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed shipments of Australian bees to resume despite concerns by some of its own scientists. And that has some bee specialists upset.

Haff and others fear the foreign hives could kill off their apiaries.
But some say the panic is too soon and unnecessary. Shad Sullivan, a bee wholesaler in California’s Central Valley, said in the four years he’s imported bees from Australia he found the imports outlive domestic bees that have been weakened by pesticides, pests and diseases.

“If the bees were truly carrying something that bad I would have been the first to get it,” Sullivan said. “I just haven’t seen those kinds of devastation.”

Early last month the USDA decided to permit the bee shipments to resume with some precautions.

Kim Flottum, beekeeper and editor of Bee Culture magazine, says that this new species of honey bee discovered in Australia is otherwise known as the Asian honey bee. Those in the U.S. are known as the European honey bee.

“There’s not really a problem with this bee in and of itself,” Flottum said. “They’re smaller than our European honey bees and they’re pretty easy to tell apart. Except there’s this trade contract we have with Australia that says if they have (the deadly parasite), they can’t send bees to the U.S. It’s that simple.”

Those at the USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) are concerned about what kind of pests and predators come along with having these bees here and what viruses could be carried by the newcomers. Studies have indicated that Australian bees have similar viruses as those found in the U.S. APHIS has given the green light for bee imports at this time.

“But how do you find a virus if you don’t know what to look for?” Flottum said.

“The conventional way is decidedly limited in finding new viruses, but the new techniques developed by the U.S. Army and the BeeAlert Lab in Montana have that skill down pat.

Maybe they can send some of those bees along to see if they can find anything.

“It seems the majority of beekeepers in the U.S. are inclined to want Australian bees to stay in Australia for the time being, at least until there are no more unknowns about them.

Of course, there are bee businesses that have been built on the availability of these bees and they’d be in trouble if the Aussie bee faucet was shut.”

Flottum believes the problem is solely in the lap of APHIS. If it were his call, however, Flottum believes the organization should “trust, but verify.”

“When the U.S. and the Soviet Union were in the heat of it Ronald Reagan came up with the phrase ‘trust, but verify’.” Flottum said.
“That makes a whole lot of sense to me on the biological issues of trade. We should trust that the Australians to test and examine their bees but we should run tests ourselves when they get off the plane.”