Blueberry crop gets some help from visiting bees

The covered trucks rumble up Interstate 95 every spring, carrying a precious cargo: millions of honeybees to blanket Maine's blueberry barrens.

The hives are sent north to help pollinate the blueberry, cranberry, and apple crops in New England - worth more than $120 million - that native bees cannot do alone.

But the traveling bees are becoming dramatically more expensive as honeybees continue to disappear. Something called colony collapse disorder has killed an estimated one in three US honeybee colonies since December 2006.

Wyman's of Maine, the largest US-owned blueberry producer, has seen an 80 percent spike in the cost of pollination over the past three years.

"This problem isn't going away, although the first wave of headlines is over," said Ed Flanagan, president of Wyman's. His company recently gave Penn State researchers $50,000 to study the die-off. "Our crop is at risk without bees."

According to a recent US Department of Agriculture news release, although the decline of colonies has leveled off, it was still around 29 percent between September 2008 and early April.

It's unclear what the future will bring for the bees, but in Maine the buzz is a welcome spring sound. There are 10,000 hives - with around 20,000 bees each - pollinating Wyman's land. And it means fresh wild blueberry pie is coming soon.

Understanding how homes harm nature

Intuitively, it makes sense. Plop a home in the middle of a forest and it's going to be much more disruptive to species around it than, say, a new two-family house squeezed into a spare lot in Somerville.

Now, the Massachusetts Audubon Society has placed a value on development's ecological impact, using a tool researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst developed. It scores the landscape, based on each area's ability to support plants, animals, and the natural processes that sustain them.

Researchers looked at everything associated with a new home lot, including habitat loss, the introduction of dogs and cats, and even nonnative plants and earthworms.

In a Mass Audubon report, the scores spotlight lands primarily in Western Massachusetts and around Quabbin Reservoir, in Southeastern Massachusetts, just south of Worcester, and in some parts of the North Shore.

The message? Officials should prioritize the most important ecological lands for conservation.

BETH DALEY