Recently, for the first time, the beekeeper invited me to don a white suit, long gloves, and helmet with face screen. He put on his own bee suit, fired up his smoker, warned me we had a 90 percent chance of being stung, then motioned to me to tramp across the lawn with him to meet the bees. A frisson of fear gripped me as the beekeeper pried off the top of the hive.
Irritated, buzzing bees swarmed around our heads. They were loud. But my panic soon turned into fascination with the drones and worker bees, with their complexity and industriousness, with the wax and pollen and bits of nectar and honeycomb. And yet there were far fewer bees than there might once have been.
When Bean first started beekeeping in town in 1993, he said he easily harvested 500 pounds of honey a year. Now he’s lucky if he gets any, because hives are dying, and new bee colonies need honey to survive the winter. Most winters, at least half or more die.
Across North America, I’ve read, up to 20 percent of beehives have always died annually. But in November 2006, reports started coming in from around the world of losses ranging from 30 to 90 percent of all commercial bee colonies, with surviving colonies so weakened they might no longer be viable to pollinate or produce honey. According to the National Agriculture Statistics Service, there were 2.4 million honey-producing hives in the United States in 2008 - down from 4.5 million in 1980 and 5.9 million in 1947.
Theories abound about the bee crisis, which is sometimes called “colony collapse disorder.’’ In North America and Europe, scientists and beekeepers believe that the global death of bee colonies has been caused by everything from parasitic mites to climate change and environmental stresses, to malnutrition, pesticides, urbanization, and even electromagnetic radiation from cellphone towers, which some say confuse bees so they can’t find their way home.
