Well Said

UC Davis bee specialists were well represented in a recent edition of The IPM Practitioner, which landed on our desk last week.

The edition, devoted to “Pesticides and Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder,” includes four photos from the UC Davis Department of Entomology.  They show bee specialist Michael “Kim” Fondryk tending his bees in the Roy Gill almond orchard, Dixon; a honey bee heading toward an almond blossom; a closeup of a bee frame with colony collapse disorder; and a photo of Susan Cobey, bee breeder-geneticist and manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis, checking the health of her bees.

As mentioned in the publication, “The exact cause of CCD has not been determined. A CCD task force has been established and a number of possibilities are being investigated.”

Bees continue to die in alarming numbers. Some of the nation's beekeepers report losing from one-third to 100 percent of their bees due to the mysterious phenomenon known as CCD, in which all the adult bees abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen, brood and stored food.  

As managing editor William Quarles says in The IPM Practitioner: "Despite our dependence on honey bees, we have lost about 45 percent of them over the past 65 years. According to the USDA, there were 5.9 million colonies in 1947 and about 2.4 million today."

Quarles, an IPM specialist who is executive director of the Bio-Integral Resource Center,  suggests a nationwide monitoring program to confirm or deny the role of pesticides in CCD.

Quarle concludes:  "If we do not take better care of our bees, there could be a significant impact on crop production. Some foods could become scarce and expensive. We should also treat our bees better because they are our friends, they enrich our planet, and it is the right thing to do."

Well said.  Well said, indeed.