The NEIU Independent

Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Features

Media Credit: greatsunflower.org A worker bee foraging for pollen.

Imagine if everyone you ever loved - family members, friends, or merely anyone you may have ever encountered - became extinct in large proportions due to an increasing epidemic. Fortunately, being human does have its advantages; we are not as susceptible to widespread outbreaks. Therefore this article is dedicated to the less fortunate and fairly minuscule honeybee.

All honeybees are social and cooperative insects. A beehive's inhabitants are generally divided into three categories, the first of which are workers, the only bees that most people ever see. Workers forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean, circulate air by beating their wings, and perform many other societal functions. The queen's job is simple-laying the eggs that will spawn the hive's next generation of bees. There is usually only a single queen in a hive. If the queen dies, workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the worker females a special diet of a food called "royal jelly." This elixir enables the worker to develop into a fertile queen.

Queens also regulate the hive's activities by producing chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees. Male bees are called drones-the third class of honeybee. Several hundred drones live in each hive during the spring and summer, but they are expelled for the winter months when the hive goes into a lean survival mode. Bees live on stored honey and pollen all winter, and cluster into a ball to conserve warmth. Larvae are fed from the stores during this season and, by spring, the hive is swarming with a new generation of bees. Normally that is how the life cycling continues, until recently when when agriculture researchers noticed a drastic decline in the bee-hive colony.

After thoroughly researching the epidemic it had been given a name-"colony-collapse disorder" (CCD)-although no one had any idea what was triggering the epidemic; beekeepers would open their hives only to uncover that the bees were rapidly and mysteriously disappearing. Honeybees have provided humans with honey and beeswax for long periods of time. So much so that honeybees' diligence has created economic foundations for this prosperous and assiduous industry with large beekeeping manufacturers. Beekeeping is a critical component of modern agriculture, and CCD not only threatens the beekeeping operations that provide pollination service and honey production but also has the potential to cripple the production of many crops that are dependent on honeybees for pollination. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The economic value of U.S. crops that benefit from honeybee pollination has been estimated at $15 billion annually. In 2006 the California almond-export crop alone was valued at $1.9 billion and required more than one million bee colonies for pollination (out of a total of about 2.6 million colonies in the U.S.)."

The Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has methodically arranged efforts to address the CCD crisis through surveys and data collection, samples analysis, and mitigation as well as preventive measures. A variety of possible causes of CCD have been suggested. They include chemical contamination of colony food stores or beeswax; poisoning from pesticides, including newly introduced insecticides based on nicotine derivatives; the introduction of genetically modified crops; possible lack of genetic diversity in colonies; and infection of colonies by pathogens or parasites, including known honeybee parasites such as the single-celled Nosema ceranae and the invasive varroa mite.

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