Crops need pollen -- and cross-country beekeepers

NANTUCKET -- Wes and Glenn Card gingerly eased two flatbed trucks wrapped in fine mesh screens off the 6 a.m. cargo ferry from Hyannis yesterday and slowly rumbled over a downtown cobblestone street, taking care to not shake loose their valuable payload.

In the cabs, the Cards ignored a handful of bees dancing on the dashboards -- escapees from the more than 4 million honeybees humming in hives stacked on the back of the trucks.

Eight miles later, the brothers began unloading the trucks in a cranberry field, unperturbed as the freed bees dive-bombed their ungloved hands before dispersing through the bog to feed on the blossoms.

The bees' arrival is an annual event crucial to keeping the island's cranberry crop robust. Without trucked-in bees, New England's $121 million crop of cranberries, blueberries, and apples would likely crash because there aren't enough wild bees to pollinate all the fields. But the honeybee is locked in a two-decade battle with a parasite that has sliced the nation's commercial hives by one-third and appears to have wiped out much of the wild honeybee population. Now, frustrated with the parasites' ability to develop widespread resistance to the chemicals designed to kill them, the US Department of Agriculture, scientists, and beekeepers are racing to develop new weapons.

``We are at a very critical period, it's very depressing," said Tony Jadczak, Maine's state beekeeper. ``We just keep losing bees."

Honeybee hives are trucked around the country to keep up with the blooming seasons for various crops. The Nantucket bees began their trip in Louisiana, with stops along the way in California, New Jersey, and Maine. Itinerant bees pollinate $6 billion to $8 billion worth of crops each year across the country, from Florida oranges to California almonds.

Since a tiny Asian mite was found in the United States in 1987, the number of beehives for hire has dropped from 3.6 million to 2.4 million, the US Department of Agriculture says. The decline has pushed up the price farmers pay to rent hives, and many fear there may eventually be too few bees to pollinate all the crops.

Maine has lost about half of its resident beekeepers, both hobbyists and those for hire, in the past 20 years in part because the honeybees are so difficult to keep alive, Jadczak said. And this year, higher fuel costs have added almost $1,000 to the price for bringing a truckload of hives from southern states to New England.

Bees, despite their nasty sting, are one of the most valuable pollinating insects in the world. Through hairs on their body and legs, they unwittingly transfer pollen from one flower to another as they forage for nectar and protein-rich pollen, allowing fruit to bloom. While birds, bats, and other insects also pollinate various crops, bees tend to favor the crops that humans love to eat: Nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables.

And of the thousands of species of bees, it is the honeybee that is agricultures' darling. Brought over from Europe by the settlers, hives about the size of a small suitcase can hold 20,000 to 50,000 bees. The bees in two hives can pollinate an acre of cranberries in about two weeks.

In the past , New England family farmers would keep their own hives to pollinate crops. But as single-crop farms grew larger, native bees weren't able to pollinate all the plants.

Even if they could, the bees would die out after the bloom faded because there would be few other flowering plants to feed on the rest of the year. It soon became less expensive for farmers to hire migratory beekeepers for a few weeks each year than to have their own hives.

Today, these self-styled ``bee cowboys" travel from bloom to bloom. The Cards, whose father owns the 15,000-hive Merrimack Valley Apiaries Inc. in Billerica, take the bees, housed in wooden boxes, across the country on a circuit that ends in June with honey-making.

``We round 'em up and herd them out," Wes, 25, joked as he stood in the Nantucket Conservation Foundation's 193 acres of cranberries. Nearby, Glenn, wearing a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a cowboy riding a giant bee, stuffed dry grass into a smoldering small steel can, then waved it near the hives to quiet the bees so they would be easier to move.

The Cards protect themselves only with the blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts they don when they begin to transfer the hives from the truck to the ground. They wear a beekeeper's veil to protect their faces and heads, but rarely wear gloves. They do get stung occasionally but say it's better than wearing hot gloves and a full-body beekeeping suit. Using a forklift, they unload pallets filled with hives onto a bog dike. The bees will forage several miles during the day before coming back every night to their hive.

The Card family has been trucking bees since 1958, but Wes says it's getting harder every year, because of the mite, called varroa destructor. The crablike mites attach themselves to bees and suck their blood, killing them or lowering the hive's population enough so the colony collapses. The mites transmit a host of diseases that can also kill the bees. Another deadly mite, which lodges in bees' airways, also has become a problem since the 1980s.

``It's a tenuous situation," said Nicholas Calderone, an associate professor of entomology at Cornell University, who studies honeybees.

The National Academy of Sciences, which conducts studies for Congress and government agencies, is expected to release the first-ever look at the decline of the nation's pollinators, including honeybees, in September. Calderone, along with 14 other specialists, is looking at loss of habitat, pesticides, disease, and invasive species such as mites that might be contributing to the decline.

Already in the wild, where it is nearly impossible to treat hives, most honeybees appear gone. In fact, some bee specialists say if you see a honeybee in a garden, it's more likely an escapee from a beekeeper's hive than a true wild one.

In commercial hives, US Department of Agriculture researchers and independent scientists are trying a suite of new methods to combat varroa's ability to build resistance to mite-killing chemicals. They are selectively breeding bees that seem to be able to sniff out mite-infested young and drop them out of the hive to slow an infestation. They are trying to use organic methods such as fungi to kill the mites. And they are trying to breed the mite-resistant Russian bee with the honeybees to create a natural defense . But, there has been no solution yet.

Bee prices are rising because of these costlier methods of thwarting mites and the high demand for the smaller number of surviving hives.

Bees were in such short supply in 2005 for the massive California almond harvest, the United States opened its borders for the first time to bees flown in from Australia. Hives, which normally go for $40 to $50 for a pollination season , went for as much as $130.

In New England, where fewer bees are needed, prices have risen only gradually in the past 10 years, but beekeepers say they will need to raise them soon.

``It's extremely frustrating because it's becoming harder and harder to raise a beehive," said Wes, as honeybees buzzed around his head in the bogs. ``We need something, more research, something to stop the mites."