By NANCY VORIS
Indiana Correspondent

MARTINSVILLE, Ind. — Preliminary results of an online survey of U.S. beekeepers this winter showed managed honeybee colony losses were estimated at 30 percent. This holds steady with annual losses of the past five years of near or above 30 percent.

The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the USDA conducted the survey to estimate honeybee colony losses for October 2010-April 2011. A total of 5,572 beekeepers, or 20 percent of the estimated number in the country, responded. Collectively these beekeepers manage more than 15 percent of the country’s estimated 2.68 million colonies.

Previous survey results indicated 34 percent of total colony loss in the winter of 2009-10; 29 percent in 2008-09; 36 percent in 2007-08; and 32 percent in 2006-07.

“The lack of increase in losses is marginally encouraging, in the sense that the problem does not appear to be getting worse for honeybees and beekeepers,” said Jeff Pettis, an entomologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) who helped conduct the study. “But continued losses of this size put tremendous pressure on the economic sustainability of commercial beekeeping.”
Pettis is the leader of the Bee Research Laboratory operated in Beltsville, Md., by ARS, the chief scientific research agency of USDA. The survey was led by Pettis and AIA past presidents Dennis van Engelsdorp and Jerry Hayes.
Beekeepers reported that on average, they felt losses of 13 percent would be economically acceptable. Sixty-one percent of responding beekeepers reported having losses greater than this. Average colony loss for an individual beekeeper’s operation was 38.4 percent. This compares to an average loss of 42.2 percent for individual operations in 2009-10.

The losses are reflected in the sharp increases in rental fees for colonies used in pollination. Tracy Hunter and his wife, Chris, manage several hundred hives throughout the state to pollinate apples, melons, strawberries, pumpkins and other small crops. Hunter’s Honey Farm in Martinsville also produces honey products including beeswax candles, soaps and lotions and a line of honey-inspired sauces, snacks and candies.

“We lost about 90 percent, but we are back up to 400 now,” Tracy Hunter said of his bee colonies. “There is no one culprit, but several, including viruses, mites, beetles and environmental chemicals.”

For the past 20 years, parasitic mites have caused extensive damage to honeybees, reaching catastrophic levels in the seasons of 1995-96 and 2000-01. Colony deaths in those seasons reached 50-100 percent in northern states’ beekeeping operations.

In the 2006-07 and 2007-08 winter seasons about 25 percent of colony deaths exhibited symptoms that were inconsistent with mites or other known disorders. The term Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, was created to identify the syndrome, which has not been traced to a single cause.

A list of possible causes for CCD includes new pesticides, pesticide use patterns, nutritional deficits associated with extensive monocultures, beekeeper management practices, climate change, exotic parasites and pathogens, diminished immunity to pathogens and a combination of two or more of these factors.

Unfortunately, the losses are coming at a time when the need for pollination is growing in the United States. The almond crop alone requires 1.3 million colonies and is predicted to require 2.12 million by 2012, which is about 95 percent of all colonies currently in the nation.