Bees and colony collapse

There was a hearing today by the House Agriculture Committee, hort subcommittee on "pollinator health and colony collapse disorder." See the opening statements from the hearing.

Here is an excerpt from the written testimony of Steve Godlin, S.P. Godlin Apiaries, Visalia, Calif.

Currently there are 660,000 acres (of almonds) producing and would be more if not for the water crisis in our state. This eequires about 1,300,000 hives of bees to pollinate them. The number of managed hives in California has dropped to around 400,000 hives despite beekeepers’ efforts to meet growers’ demands. Bees are now being shipped into California from everywhere in the U.S.; even Australia is trying to get in the game. Now I have to go to national bee conventions and defend my state as beekeepers from New York or Montana disparage us and call us a gutter for bees. We have created the biggest experiment ever performed on the honey bee. Take bees from all over the continent and stick them in the valley to mingle and forage together with mites and diseases and apparently a list of viruses as long as your arm and see what happens. Or maybe this isn’t what is wrong -- haven’t we been hearing that bees around the world are having a problem? And beekeepers here in the U. S., who do not ship bees to California are losing hives as well.

We began to notice these losses in recent years. We have had rough years from time to time with higher than usual losses, and in history there have been a few epidemics in the bee world. But nothing has been on the levels we are facing now. This is why there has been all this attention on us. People now realize that the $15 billion dollars worth of food that requires pollination to exist is a lot of pretty delicious stuff. We appreciate this attention and have been encouraged by the legislations actions. At home, the Bee Lab at U.C. Davis is up and running again thanks to generous contributions by beekeepers, almond growers, and companies like Haagen Daz Ice Cream who donated $250,000 to honey bee research and is running a priceless “save the bee” ad campaign. Researchers across the country have been collaborating on projects in an attempt to find answers. Beekeepers themselves have put aside their differences and are working with the scientific and governmental communities as well as each other on an unprecedented level. I know the fact that our two national organizations had a shared conference this year speaks volumes to the importance of this issue. I am here today to ask that you would vote to continue helping to fund honey bee research. There are some very important projects just getting up and started, and we really haven’t time to waste, or money. We need results. We need a united effort by all and shared knowledge from a variety of fields.

I hope we are getting there; the middle of July is looming and I am more than a little worried. We are providing our bees all the supplemental nutrition and fresh queens we can. We are treating for nosema ceranae aggressively and hope for a better fall than this last one.