The hive detectives By: Loree Grifin Burns

LXIII/LXIII

I have finished reading this book. The book helped me understand what I will have to do to protect  my bees as I have them. In my last blog post you could have read that Dave has not found the COD(Cause of Death) of his his colonies. The American beekeepers have lost 38% of there colonies over the 2006-2007 winter. Because all three types of mites were not proved the beekeepers called in Diana Cox-Foster who is an expert on honey bee viruses. Diana was working to determine which of the known bee viruses could be found in the CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). She found out that the bees were very sick and that in their dead bodies were huge numbers of viruses. The viruses spread very quickly (it is the same like a human flu virus). The bees bring the virus from the nature and leave it with their spits everywhere. Diana begun to suspect a fast-spreading and very powerful virus to cause the bee disaster. She concluded that it must have been a virus called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. To prove her theory she was obliged to build an airtight greenhouse not to endanger the healthy bee hives outside. In the greenhouse it was also easier to find the dead bodies and to make the experiments. It seems that many things have changed in agriculture and due to that also in bee life. The farmers grow the mono-cultures on the field for several years and to protect their yields they use huge quantities of fertilizers and also deadly pesticides that kill insects which harm their work. Now, imagine a bee coming to the field where the farmers grow only one type of plant which means only one type of nectar and pollen for the bee. It would be the same for YOU going every day three meals  a day to McDonald for Big Mac.. it s not healthy and you would lack the nutrients. Your immune would fail after some time. It is what has happened to Dave's bees.

After one year Dave Hackenberg and his son have started again and have built their beekeeping operation back up. They are trying to give the bees a rest so they can recover. They feed them with a high protein bee feed and they co-operate with farmers to use only pesticides that are proven safe for honey bees.