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While it may not lick your hands and nuzzle your cheek like our ancient friend, the dog, the honeybee may top the list as the earliest domesticated animal. For millennia, it has motivated us with its discipline, captivated us with its supremely organized behavior, and endowed us with its goods and services. With its imagery appearing in the art, folklore and literature of the human species for thousands of years, the honeybee symbolizes the virtues of community loyalty and a strong work ethic. Now, for some unknown and troubling reason, its numbers are declining. The loss raises the specter, not only of lower supplies of honey and wax, but also of vastly reduced produce from our fields and the further crumbling of our environment.
The Anatomy of the Honeybee
The honeybee – originally imported to North America from Europe by English colonists in the 17th century to pollinate crops in Virginia and Massachusetts – counts wasps and ants among its closest cousins. Like all insects, the honeybee has an exoskeletal body with three parts: the head, thorax and abdomen. It has two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs. Like the wasps and ants, it has a pinched waist.
The honeybee’s triangular-shaped head has five eyes, two antennae, the mouthparts and the brain. Its thorax supports its wings, legs and muscles. Its abdomen contains vital parts, including heart, stomach, gut, reproductive organs and stinger. The worker honeybee’s body has numerous thick hairs to which pollen clings during visits to flowers. Its hind legs have surface depressions surrounded by long hairs, a feature that serves as a basket for transporting pollen to the hive. Its stinger – the only example of a barbed stinger among North America’s insects, according to Floyd Werner and Carl Olson, Insects of the Southwest – remains embedded and still venomous, difficult to remove from the skin, once the honeybee has driven it home.
The Life Cycle of the Honeybee
The honeybee begins its life as a pinhead-sized egg, one of 1500 to 2000 laid by the queen of the hive during the course of a typical late-winter or early-spring day. It and its siblings each occupy private, adjoining, six-sided cells that, collectively, serve as the nursery and the honeycomb of the hive.
Within three days, the honeybee hatches from its egg, the larva resembling “a grain of rice with a mouth, and its sole function is to EAT and grow,” said the Capital Area Honeybee Stewards Internet site. As it develops over the next five to six days, it will receive 7000 to 8000 visits from dedicated nurse bees, which deliver it food – bee bread – they make from glandular secretions and the hive’s honey and pollen stores. It grows rapidly, increasing its weight by 1500! times, according to William Atherton DuPuy in his entertaining old book Our Insect Friends and Foes. (A human child, growing at the same rate, would weigh five or six tons by the time it is a week old.) Perhaps with its voracious appetite satisfied for a few days, the larva, ensconced in its cell now capped by a nurse, spins a cocoon, said the Capital Area Honeybee Stewards Internet site. In about a week and a half, it hatches, emerging from its cell as an adult.
The honeybee’s role in the hive flows largely from choices made by the queen and the nurse bees. If – as is most likely – it hatches from an egg the queen chooses to fertilize, it will emerge as a female, likely a worker bee. If it hatches from an egg she leaves unfertilized, it will develop as a male, or a drone, a presumably happy (although short-lived) sloth and queen’s sex slave. If a newly hatched female arrives on the scene at a time when the hive needs a new queen, she may receive bee bread enriched by royal jelly, made from glands in an indulgent nurse bee’s head. The chosen infant will then develop into the new queen, ready to assume the royal duties.
The young worker honeybee, about half an inch in length, begins its adult life as you might expect, by cleaning up her birth cell. It then assumes the duties of nurse bee, a role that will last for a week or more. It spends the next week within the hive, constructing new honeycomb, producing wax, and repositioning food and nectar stores. It then spends several days guarding the entrance to the hive. Finally, when it reaches bee maturity, it takes wing, visiting many dozens of flowers in its every expedition, gathering pollen and nectar. Arriving back at her hive, she performs a sophisticated and highly structured dance that points the way to the source of her bounty. She, with perhaps 40,000 of her sisters, will fly tens of thousands of miles within their neighborhood to visit millions of flowers to produce a single pound of honey. In the event of a threat to the hive, she produces special scents to raise the alarm in the event of a threat to the hive. Her scout sisters produce a special scent to signal the location of promising flowers. If born in the spring, the female worker can expect to live for about six weeks. If born in the fall, she will live until the following spring.
The drone honeybee, slightly larger than the female worker, lives a pampered and indolent life, tended by his sisters. After a few weeks, he discovers sex, and lured by scents produced by new, virgin queens from other hives in his area, he rushes to join other drones in mating flights, a ritual that may last no longer than an hour. Having served his purpose in life, he will soon find himself an outcast, driven, by his sisters, from his own hive to die in the coming fall.
The queen honeybee, about one and a third times larger than the female worker, serves as the instrument of reproduction and cohesion for the hive. Tended and fed by five to ten worker bees, she may lay as many as 200,000 eggs in the course of a season, or about 400,000 eggs in the course of her two-year life span. From special glands near her mouth, according to the FAO Corporate Document Repository Internet site, she produces pheromones called “queen substances,” which help her attract drones during her mating flight, maintain her colony’s cohesion during a swarm, identify members of her hive, and inhibit ovary development in worker bees. Should she fail to produce queen substances, for instance, when she sickens or ages near the end of her life, her colony may fracture. Her worker bees begin to produce ovaries. Much to the old queen’s distress and anger, her faithless daughters prepare new quarters – a queen cell – to serve as accommodation for a newly laid egg, with the larva to be fed royal jelly to promote its development as the hive’s new sovereign.
The Contributions of the Honeybee
“Honeybees,” authority May Berenbaum told the House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture in hearings in March of 2007, “are in effect six-legged livestock that both manufacture agricultural commodities – honey and wax – and, more importantly, contribute agricultural services—pollination.” (The honeybee pollinates – and therefore fertilizes – plants by transporting pollen grains to female floral parts.) In the United States, “Close to 100 crop species…rely to some degree on pollination services provided by this one species—collectively, these crops make up approximately 1/3 of the U. S. diet, including the majority of high-value crops that contribute to healthy diets.”
“Honeybees,” long-time beekeeper Gene Brandi told the subcommittee, “are a critical component of the nation’s agricultural economy. The pollination work of honeybees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately $15 billion annually, including over $6 billion in California. The California almond crop alone [80 percent of the world’s supply] is worth over $2 billion and is dependent on nearly 1.4 million honeybee colonies from across the nation to set this crop.” Across the U. S., including our desert Southwest, the honeybee pollinates dozens of the nation’s major crops, including fruits, vegetables and livestock feeds.
“At one time,” the nation’s largest beekeeper, Richard Adee, told the congressional subcommittee, “honey drove this industry. Now it’s pollen. Every third bite we take is from a bee-pollinated nut or flower.”
“Farmers and beekeepers across the country,” said Subcommittee Chairman Dennis Cardoza, “are dependent on honeybees for their livelihoods.”
In addition to agricultural crops, the honeybee pollinates many of the native plants that serve as habitat and food sources for our wildlife across the nation, helping sustain the vigor and diversity of our environment.
The Plight of the Honeybee
The honeybee plays a vital role in enriching the foods of our dining table, improving the bottom line of our nation’s agricultural industry and sustaining the health of our environment, but, alarmingly, it now faces an unprecedented decline, a phenomenon first identified by scientists late in 2006. “An unknown enemy is destroying honeybee colonies across the nation, and researchers are scrambling to discover what is causing it and how it can be prevented,” said the Mississippi Agricultural News. Indeed, just as demand for pollination services is soaring for numerous crops, the honeybee population has declined across four continents, according to Berenbaum. Called “colony collapse disorder,” or “CCD,” the honeybee’s plight – if it continues – could hamstring the beekeeping industry within a matter of years. It could severely reduce pollination and production of fruits, vegetables and nuts—all nutritionally crucial to our diets. Similarly, it would reduce the pollination and production of livestock feed and forage, with adverse effects on the beef and dairy industries.
The honeybee’s decline could mean, said Berenbaum, higher prices for agricultural products, reduced exports of domestic commodities, increased imports of foreign commodities, and expanded imports of foreign honeybees. That means, of course, a hit in the American pocketbook, exacerbation of our already horrendous trade deficit, and the risk of new inadvertently imported honeybee pests. At worst, the honeybee’s falling numbers could place at risk the safety and security of much of our nation’s food supply.
“While no cause or trigger for the disorder [CCD] has been identified,” said the Mississippi Agricultural News, “researchers have several suspects,” including, for example, agricultural insecticides, bee mite control chemicals and microbial diseases. Additionally, the honeybee may have suffered stress from reduced pollen production during recent droughts. “The scientists haven’t yet decided what is causing the problem,” Harry Fulton, a state entomologist, told the Mississippi Agricultural News, “but it may be a deadly combination of stress on the bees and one of these other factors that normally is not pathogenic.”
The plight of the honeybee raises formidable challenges for American science.
The Search for Solutions
Specialists from federal and state departments of agriculture have marshaled forces to address the problem of CCD. “They’re finding a lot of pathogens in the adult bees,” entomologist Clarence Collison told the Mississippi Agricultural News. “Most of these pathogens are related to stress diseases. We firmly believe the bees are under some type of stress, and a scientist at Penn State has been able to show that these bees have suppressed immune systems.” Although biological scientists have begun to understand the plight of the honeybee, they still lack the resources and information they need to produce a solution to the problem.
Berenbaum and other researchers, from the U. S., Canada and Mexico, have recommended, for example:
- reallocating federal and state budgets to support new innovative approaches to protecting the health and genetic stock of honeybees;
- establishing a permanent surveillance program for monitoring the parasites and diseases of the honeybee;
- utilizing the recently completed definition of the honeybee’s genetic makeup to diagnose and solve the insect’s problems;
- investigating the potential for increased reliance on native pollinators, for instance, the bumble and mason bees (“Collectively,” said Berenbaum, “native bees are more versatile than the honeybee”);
- monitoring and assessing the abundance and effectiveness of native pollinators; establishing programs to identify potential new pollinators; and
improving pollinator habitat in agricultural acreage removed from cultivation.
Unfortunately, to date, as Berenbaum notes, “Investment in honeybee research has hardly been commensurate with the economic importance of this species. Certain elements of contemporary apiculture [beekeeping] have remained essentially unchanged for the past century”
Hopefully, that is about to change, perhaps with the growing realization that wisdom, as said in Proverbs, is the honey of the soul. “It is imperative that we move swiftly to get to the bottom of this,” said Subcommittee Chairman Cardoza, “before the problem becomes even more serious.”
My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul.
The Bible, Proverbs Chapter 24, Verses 13 and 14
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September 2007 A new report says that a virus known as “Israeli acute paralysis virus,” or IAPV, may trigger honeybee colony collapse disorder, or CCD. University of Arizona scientists Nancy A. Moran and Vince Martinson issued the report following collaborative studies with scientists from Columbia University, Pennsylvania State University, National Institutes of Health, and the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory. Moran said that DNA analysis had indicated that the virus is a candidate for the cause, and she indicated that extensive field and laboratory work will be required to confirm the hypothesis.
Study of the CCD has “involved an unusual partnership between entomologists and scientists working at the leading edge of human genetic research,” said Andrew C. Revkin, writing for The New York Times, September 6, 2007. “It employed the same technology being used to decode Neanderthal DNA and the personal genome of James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA.” Scientists still suspect that other factors, for instance, drought-induced poor nutrition, cross-country transportation stresses, and environmental degradation, may play roles in the collapse of honeybee colonies.
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Honeybees 
