By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

WOOSTER, Ohio — A recent survey of beekeepers may be giving false hope to thousands of apiarists across the nation. The survey, taken for the January issue of the Journal of Apicultural Research, found that the percentage of operations that reported having lost colonies, but without dead bees in the hives (a symptom of colony collapse disorder, or CCD) decreased to 26 percent last winter, compared to 38 percent the previous season and 36 percent the season before that.

The lead author of the recent study is Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania’s acting state apiarist. “Losses are shifting,” vanEngelsdorp said. “There are fewer operations with CCD, though they still lost a lot of colonies.”

But other bee experts, like Ohio Department of Agriculture State Apiarist Barbara Bloetscher, say the survey may be misleading. “A lot of people don’t even tally their bee illnesses until spring and even then it’s hard to tell what they died from,” Bloetscher said. “And a lot of these CCD occur over the winter months and there’s many causes attributed to these deaths.”

That survey has created quite a stir in the beekeeping community, going so far as to say the percentage of colonies that died that displayed the CCD symptom was 36 percent last winter, down from 60 percent three winters ago.

“There’s many reasons for CCD,” Bloetscher said. “When you have a loss of agriculture, a loss of forage and a loss of beekeepers as we’ve had you’re going to see less bees around. With the urbanization moving in and the loss of habitat we’re not going to see things as they were 20 years ago.”

Bloetscher will specifically address bee diseases in her speech at the Tri-County Beekeepers Assoc.’s spring workshop at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster, Ohio on March 6. That gathering is the largest beekeeping meeting in Ohio.

“We seem to have good years and bad years,” said Bloetscher, who has been a beekeeper the past 20 years. “I recently told an audience that back in the 1800s we had the same kind of descriptions of such symptoms. And every 10 to 20 years since then we’ve seen huge losses of bees. And you can’t blame insecticides, because we didn’t have such insecticides back in those days. It’s just cyclic.”

Both experts agree that winter months play havoc on bees. Bees rely on stored honey to survive the winter. Beekeepers can wrap colony boxes to provide extra warmth or try to provide sugar syrup for food if supplies are light, but they generally don’t work with bees in the cold.

This winter has been brutal on colonies across most of the nation, with storms producing record snowfalls and chilling winds in many part of the country. Freezing Arctic temperatures have pushed the cold from Canada as far south as Florida. The percentage of beekeepers citing weather as a leading winter concern jumped from nine percent to 18 percent this past year. Starvation is seen by many bee experts as the top cause of mortality, followed by poor quality queen bees and weather.

But CCD remains a mystery to this day. The earliest reports of CCD date to 2004, and scientists are still trying to find a cause. “The story is really complicated,” vanEngelsdorp said.

The Southwest Ohio Beekeeping School will be at the Oasis Conference Center in Loveland on March 27. To register, call Greg Meyer at the OSU Extension Service in Warren County at 513-695-1311.

The Tri-County Beekeepers Assoc.’s spring workshop will be at the OARDC in Wooster on March 5-6. Call Sherry Ferrell at 330-263-3684 to register.