Weather May Account for Reduced Honey Crop

That the 2007 honey crop has been disappointing won't surprise anyone who has picked up the newspaper in recent months. Since early spring, colony collapse disorder (CCD), a disease that causeshoneybees to suddenly, mysteriously disappear from their hives, has made headlines around the world. Without honeybees to pollinate, experts warn that one-third of the food supply -- from apples and peaches to cucumbers and squash -- is at risk.

It's a frightening prospect. And though signs of CCD were first reported in the United States and most cases have been reported here, European beekeepers have recently observed a similar phenomenon, and possible cases have been reported in Taiwan.

Scientists and beekeepers have floated a variety of theories for the collapses -- from stress caused when commercial beekeepers move their hives long distances to disorientation caused by cellphone radiation. Last week, the journal Science published a report that found a new virus, Israeli acute paralysis virus, appeared to be associated with CCD.

But some experts say the more likely reason for this year's weak honey crop, which the NationalHoney Board says is on track to be smaller than last year's below-par 155 million pounds, is something much more obvious: the weather. In the South, drought and wildfires have prevented flowers from blooming. In the Midwest, a late freeze brought nectar flows in many areas almost to a halt. And in California, the country's No. 2 honey producer, coastal beekeepers reported that there were almost no flowering plants in July. The bees were fed sugar water to keep them from starving.

"It's more weather than CCD," said Ted Dennard, president of the Savannah Bee Company, which sells specialty honeys. "The reports I'm getting is that everywhere is under-producing. Tupelo was somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of normal production, and there's not a drop of star thistle in Idaho."

Extreme weather is becoming increasingly common across the globe, numerous studies suggest. That's why new research by Wayne Esaias, a Maryland biological oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who keeps bees as a hobby, has piqued enormous interest among bee experts and honey lovers. By taking simple measurements on when his bees started and stopped collecting nectar near his home in Highland, Esaias has shown that flowers there are blooming three weeks earlier than they did in 1992 and a month before they did in 1970. (The research, which has not yet been published, is posted at http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sites/regional_map.htm.)

Even with a limited data set, it's a potentially significant climate shift. If backyard beekeepers collected similar data at sites across the country, the results could offer clues about how to manage bee colonies to maximize honey production and, potentially, help keep bees healthy enough to resist diseases, such as the mysterious CCD.

"What this has demonstrated is that with simple measurements, you can bring all the information together and get a sense of the bigger picture," said Dewey Caron, a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. "I'm kind of ashamed I didn't think of it first."

Esaias, though, is the first to admit that it took him a long time -- 15 years -- to see that there might be a useful connection between his professional knowledge of weather and climate and his after-work beekeeping hobby.

It all started in 1991 when, without asking permission, his 12-year-old son offered to make a home for the hives of his Boy Scout troop leader, who was leaving the area. Along with the hives, the Esaias family inherited an old platform scale. At the troop leader's instruction, Esaias placed the hives on the scale in the back yard.

Each night in honey season, they would record the hives' weight. The heavier the hive, the more nectar had been collected. "I'd never kept bees before, so it was a good management tool," Esaias remembered. "It helped you figure out when to get ready for the honey and when to take the honey off."

His two children became avid beekeepers, keeping records for their 4-H club and selling honey out the back door. Over the years, Esaias, who today has 17 hives, noticed that the bees behaved differently during El Ni?o years, when the winter is milder and the summers are wetter.