By MEGGIE I. FOSTER
Assistant Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — While Americans are buzzing about the decline of U.S. honeybees, worries for Midwest farmers were only heightened during a recent Indiana State Beekeepers Assoc. (ISBA) news conference in Indianapolis on Aug. 15.

“In Indiana, we lost 50 percent of our bee population this winter, not to colony collapse disorder (CCD) but to other causes,” said Dave Shenefield, president of the ISBA and owner of Clover Blossom Honey, Indiana’s largest honey production facility located in LaFountaine, Ind. “We had a poor crop last year; then we went into a mild winter with a lot of old bees, followed by a freeze this spring and the bees just didn’t make it.”

Other causes to Indiana’s bee loss this year include parasite problems, nutrition and general stresses on beehives across the state.

While Indiana is currently facing tremendous bee loss to problems caused by an unruly winter climate, CCD is continuing to make headlines and cause headaches for apiarists across the state, affecting both honey production and crop pollination. The unknown influx of CCD, wiping out bees across the country, is raising countable questions among researchers and has many farmers wondering “where’d all the bees go” and “how can we stop this from coming to Indiana.”

According to Shenefield, no one has yet to discover the cause of CCD, how it originated, preventative measures and where the future of this problem will lead.

“CCD was found in Florida in 2006 and has wiped out as much as 50 percent of the honeybees on many farms across the United States,” Shenefield lamented.

While CCD has not yet migrated to Indiana, Shenefield believes its on the way up, most likely arriving within the next couple years.
To help prepare the state, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture and the USDA have earmarked $160,000 to research CCD and discover preventative measures for Hoosier beekeepers.

Buy local honey
Shenefield’s only advice to currently remedy the situation is to encourage consumers to purchase local honey.

“By buying and using local honey, we can all help keep beekeepers in business, as a result of high demand for our Hoosier honey,” he advised.

Along with being producers of honey, bee colonies are important to agriculture as pollinators, along with some birds, bats and other insects, Shenefield said. A recent report by the National Research Council noted that in order to bear fruit, three-quarters of all flowering plants including most food crops and some that provide fiber, drugs and fuel rely on pollinators for fertilization.

“Bees are both directly and indirectly responsible for everything we eat,” Shenefield added. “However, if we keep losing bees in Indiana, we’re going to lose a lot of producers and I really hope I don’t see that happen.”