Bee Alert June 24, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Bees , trackbackWhen local West Cork Bee Guru Tim Rowe booked the a hall in Bantry a couple of weeks ago for a talk by Mary Coffey from the Oak Park Research Centre in Carlow, he hadn’t quite bargained on the huge amount of local interest. The chairs in the small room booked for the talk quickly filled up and we had to move into the hall next door as over 100 bee-keepers and bee-enthusiasts from the local area turned out to hear what Mary had to say about Varroa and Colony Collapse Disorder.
Tim asked Mary to come and speak to us after conducting a survey of West Cork Bee-keepers in which he has found that about half of 1000 hives he has surveyed have died out or “collapsed” this year. So serious and sudden are these losses that, along with stories of widespread and sudden “colony collapse” from Europe and the US, there are fears of some new and mysterious threat to the future of bees- and possibly dramatic consequences for the future of agriculture, so dependent as it is on bees for pollination.
Mary Coffey made it clear at the outset that her research brief for Teageasc- the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority- was confined to control of the Varroa mite, and gave a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of various methods for treatments, including chemical, bio-technical, and biological methods.
Mary didnt mention “Colony Collapse Disorder” as such until asked at the end. Her opinion was that this phenomenon was most likely stress-related and mainly an issue for large-scale commercial bee-keepers in the US who were involved in the long-distance transport of bees across the continent for pollination purposes. She also mentioned the prevalence of GM crops in the US as a possible factor, but when asked about the scale of losses in West Cork revealed by the Bee Survey, Mary said this was the first such data she had seen for Ireland; a couple of bee-keepers at the event I talked to also seemed to feel that this was most likely a result of failure to treat varroa correctly.
But can the sudden and unprecedented losses of up to 50% of hives in West Cork this year, including many from experienced bee-keepers who have been successfully controlling varroa for years, really be accounted for just by the mite?
One issue here that Mary emphasised was the issue of re-infection from your neighbours, who may not have treated adequately; ideally, all bee-keepers in an area should co-ordinate their treatment for varroa within the same week each year. As I looked around the assembled mixture of organic farmers,professional bee-keepers, amateur “bee-havers”, small-holders and back-to-the-land types I wondered just how likely such a co-ordinated approach would be.
Nevertheless, on chatting to people and to Mary after her talk, it seemed that there are still a lot of questions, and more research needs to be done. the fact is, Tim’s bee survey is the only one that we no of in the country; surveys elsewhere may reveal a similar pattern of abrupt colony collapse elsewhere.
Left: Tim installs hives in Derryduff
Bee-keepers are likely to be spread out through relatively remote and unpopulated areas, many of them not in bee-keeping organisations, and even if they lose all their hives, may not be using the internet or other sources of information that might alert them to a wider problem, especially as there as yet seems to be no official
recognition of CCD in this country. Apart from anything else, as was apparent from the huge interest Mary’s talk generated in Bantry, we have no real idea how many bee-keepers there are in the country.
To this end we would like to run more bee surveys in other parts of the country and try to collate the data and assess the likely causes. If you would like to help co-ordinate a bee-survey in your area please contact graham@zone5.org or timrowe@eircom.net
Comments»
More info on Varroa here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor
good read
I used to live with a german girl in Belfast who was studying bee populations and their decline all over Northern Ireland.
Perhaps the Queens University MBC can provide some helpfull info?
Quick search found some info here:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/bb/research/behav_projects.html
You really really need to link in with http://www.biobees.com, particularly the Forum. Here is a new, world-class website on natural approaches to beekeeping that pay far more careful attention to bees’ needs than the conventional approaches do. These people are researching ways of dealing with Varroa and CCD - several have taken up this approach to try to help the bee situation. There are several significant aspects of Top Bar hives that help bees far better to stay healthy - research is ongoing.