Micah Albert | D.C. - California

Reportage: Colony Collapse

In California, the almond orchards are in blossom and millions of honeybees are at work pollinating.

Without the honey-bees the orchards will die. But something is causing bees to vanish by the thousands, affecting both the bee-keeping industry and California’s number one horticultural export, the almond crop, worth more than $3bn in US dollars.

  
Little is understood about the phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, but this year many bee-keepers have lost more than their hives. With more than 1.2m hives needed to pollinate California's almond orchards, which cover some 550,000 acres (222,577 hectares), bee-keepers from around the country are scrambling to get enough hives to the growers.
   
While Mike's own hives seem to have thrived, colonies close by have disappeared."We’ve been pretty lucky this year, others have lost over half of their entire colonies and have had to replace them with lower quality hives…I’m not sure what it will do for the coming almond harvest."
     
  
   
  
     
  
   
Mass disappearances like the current one have been documented as far back as 1896 but no cause has ever been established.Meanwhile researchers are scrambling to find answers and the Almond Board of California has given $200,000 towards research this year.Parasitic mites, pesticides, stress and virus have all been linked to what researchers have found to be a "compromised immune system".
   
     
  
Mike Mulligan, owner of Glory Bee from Shafter California and in the industry for more than 20 years, "has never seen anything like this".He has to drive around to check his own and other hives he looks after. He needs to check the condition of the colonies during the peak blooming period. One one day, he checked some 500 colonies and a third were either showing signs of problems or the colony had disappeared completely.
   
  
     
  
   
The worry for keepers is that bees can disappear so suddenly. With such a short period when the almond trees are in bloom, about two weeks, the bee-keepers must check on their hives daily.
   
Good weather has accompanied this year's almond blossom. Remarkably, all almond varieties across California came into flower at more or less the same time.It is an abundance of flowers but a scarcity of bees. The effect of this latest epidemic will come at harvest time later in the year.
     
  
Almond trees bloom early in the year. A healthy almond crop depends on the cross-pollination of most of the flowers, hence the importance of the bees.And for bee-keepers working in the almond orchards is an important source of income.