Missing Bees

I had run across information on planting spearmint under the hives to help prevent mites of all sorts. (the varroa mites were specifically mentioned)

I had a few minutes today, and a quick google search revealed that some keepers are adding essential oils to help control the mites and disease (as well as save the thousands of colonies that are in danger)- mints being one of the oils.
I also ran across some info on planting all sorts of mints, as well as thistles, thyme, and other herbs.

Keepers abuzz over vanishing bees
By MIKE DUNNE
Advocate staff writer
Published: May 14, 2007

CENTRAL -- The bees are still buzzing and returning to Alva Stuard’s 28 hives, and they are busy making honey — and pollinating plants along the way.

But in more than 27 states across the country, beekeepers are alarmed to find that often the bees fly off to collect nectar for the hive
and never return. No one knows why the bees are dying and disappearing.

“We have not seen it in Louisiana,” Stuard said of what is now being called “colony collapse disorder.”

“It is going to get to us. It is just a matter of time,” said the president of the Louisiana Beekeepers Association. A map shows cases in all the states that border Louisiana.

“If starting tomorrow there would be no honeybees, we would be scrambling for food,” Stuard said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it began investigating the bee disappearance during the fall of 2006.

“Beekeepers became alarmed that honeybee colonies were dying suddenly across the continental United States. Beekeepers reported losses of 30-90 percent,” the agency says on its Web site.

“Subsequent investigations suggested that these outbreaks of unexplained colony collapse may have been occurring for three or more years.”

USDA operates several bee research labs across the country, including one in Baton Rouge on Ben Hur Road. The Baton Rouge lab focuses on studying breeding and genetics. Once a cause for colony collapse disorder is found, the scientists there may be able to find a way to selectively breed bees that would be resistant to whatever the cause may be. The Baton Rouge lab was honored in 2003 for producing a mite-resistant strain of honeybees for agriculture.

Jeff Harris of the Baton Rouge lab said he often tells schoolchildren that one in three mouthfuls of food come from agricultural products that rely on insects for pollination and most of that is by honeybees. The USDA says bee pollination “is responsible for $15 billion in added crop value, particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables.”

While some Louisiana crops, like fruits, are dependent on bees for pollination, many, such as sugar cane, are not, said Allen Sylvester of the local bee lab. Grain crops rely on wind pollination, so they are not in jeopardy, either, he said.

Lanie Bourgeois of the local bee lab said, “At this point, all we have are the symptoms” of colony collapse disorder. “We don’t have a solid candidate on what is causing it.”

She said she suspects multiple factors could be playing into the disorder.

Harris said each colony has a queen bee, who only mates for a few days and returns permanently to the hive to lay eggs. Most of the bees are sterile females known as worker bees. They perform housekeeping chores when they are young and then fly out and gather nectar for making honey, which sustains the colony as a food source. As they collect nectar from blossoming plants, pollen rides from flower to flower.

A healthy hive may have as many as 50,000-60,000 workers at the peak of spring pollination season, Harris said.

José Villa of the Baton Rouge lab said that in colony collapse disorder, the workers fly off and never return and beekeepers find just the queen and some of those young workers.

One puzzling aspect is once the worker bees disappear and leave the hive open to poachers, normal honey robbers, like some species of moths and beetles, are also staying away from the vacant colonies, Villa said.

The scientists said honeybees came to this country with colonists and are not native. But, they have become an increasingly important supplement to native bees as agriculture expanded.

Stuard also heads up the Capital Area Beekeepers Association. He said there are about 120 members in the Baton Rouge area, but only three of them are commercial beekeepers.

“We have a lot of hobbyists,” Stuard said. He includes himself in the latter group.