Beekeepers and Scientists Join Forces to Protect the Pollinators

TEXT ON SCREEN: April 4, 2007

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 4-4-07):
BRIAN WILLIAMS: This might be one of the most interesting, disturbing and puzzling stories to come along in a long time.

NARRATION: In early 2007, the news broke that beekeepers across the United States had made a surprising discovery.

ARCHIVAL (FOX, 2-9-07):
NEWS REPORT: Bees are mysteriously dying.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 4-4-07):
NEWS REPORT: It’s called colony collapse disorder. Beekeepers in 27 states report disappearing honeybees.

ARCHIVAL (C-SPAN):
NEWS REPORT: Pollination by bees produces 30 percent of our food.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 5-16-07):
ANDERSON COOPER: Congress is holding hearings. Even the vice president has been briefed.

ARCHIVAL (ABC):
NEWS REPORT: The end of honeybees, the end of pollination – a dire threat to crops the world over.

NARRATION: Today, what’s happening to the bees, and what’s really at stake?

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 5-17-07):
RANDI KAYE: The buzz began with these bees at Dave Hackenberg’s bee farm, ground zero for the mystery of the missing bees.

NARRATION: In November of 2006 Dave Hackenberg discovered that nearly all of the 400 beehives in his Florida bee yard were empty.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 5-17-07):
RANDI KAYE (REPORTER): So this is what you call a dead hive? DAVE HACKENBERG: Yup. Empty box. No bees.

NARRATION : The veteran beekeeper had seen bees die before, but never like this.

DAVID HACKENBERG (COMMERCIAL BEEKEEPER): I keep asking myself, what am I doing wrong? I mean, it’s, it's, uh, it’s a mind-boggling thing. I mean it really is a mind-boggling thing.

NARRATION: Hackenberg contacted scientists at Pennsylvania State University. They were intrigued by the beekeeper’s story.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP (FOUNDING MEMBER, COLONY COLLAPSE WORKING GROUP): And I said, well, bring up some bees and we’ll check it out. And so indeed he brought up some bees and those bees got sampled and we found all these things I couldn’t explain and I didn’t understand, and certainly nothing popped out. And then it became apparent that this was happening in different parts of the country.

NARRATION: VanEngelsdorp helped give the die-off a name: colony collapse disorder, or C.C.D. Suddenly bees were big news.

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS, 7-29-07):
NEWS REPORT: The population of honeybees, down roughly 25 percent across this country.

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS):
NEWS REPORT: It’s a simple equation. Without bees to pollinate many plants, the plants just don’t grow.

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS, 2-11-07):
NEWS REPORT: The fear is, most of the honeybees will be dead.

ARCHIVAL (THE SIMPSONS TV SHOW):
LISA: Dad, we have to do something. All the bees are dying.
HOMER: Oh no. No bees?

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS): NEWS REPORT: Colony collapse disorder.

NARRATION: The mystery fascinated the public, and strange explanations soon began to spread.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 5-17-07):
RANDI KAYE: Do you buy that this could be a Russian plot?
DAVE HACKENBERG: Not really.
RANDI KAYE: The Rapture? God calling all the bees back to heaven? DAVE HACKENBERG: Uh, I don’t think he needs ‘em up there.

NARRATION: But much of the television coverage missed an important bit of backstory. Beekeepers had been struggling to maintain their hives ever since the 1980s, when the invasive Varroa mite arrived in the U.S.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: We have a saying: Before Varroa mite you could be a bee haver; after Verroa mite you had to be a bee keeper because you had to manage your bees.

NARRATION: Verroa mites infest and slowly weaken colonies, but Hackenberg's C.C.D. losses came quickly to colonies that appeared healthy.

JEFFERY PETTIS (BEE RESEARCHER): A number of us thought that we may be dealing with a new pathogen, a novel pathogen. So if we could find that novel pathogen – let’s say a virus or something – then that might explain, that was the missing link.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: The only thing we could say about C.C.D. bees, and it was a very distinct thing, was they were really sick. They sort of had every disease going.

NARRATION: One theory was that stress was making bees sick. To meet the growing pollination demands of large-scale agriculture, commercial beekeepers truck their bees from state to state to pollinate crop after crop.

DAVE HACKENBERG: Some of us are running these bees to two, three four crops a year, pollinating and so they don’t get a chance to ever get rejuvenated. And it used to be, you could get them onto some clean food for two or three weeks and away they'd go, but pasture land, in general, is running out because of land being turned into cropland, and so we are running out of places to go with the bees.

NARRATION: More crops mean more pesticides, and many beekeepers have blamed C.C.D. on neonicotinoids, widely used chemicals that are absorbed by plants and can accumulate in pollen and nectar.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 5-6-13):
NEWS REPORT: The European Union voted to suspend the use of neonicotinoids because of possible links to bee collapse.

NARRATION: The E.P.A. is reviewing these pesticides, but a direct link to C.C.D. has not been established. Indeed, most scientists now believe that no single factor can fully explain the phenomenon.

JEFFERY PETTIS: We’re probably dealing with multiple factors coming together to cause a set of symptoms that we call C.C.D. Personally, I fall back to nutritional stress and maybe pesticide stress leading to pathogen outbreak, I’ll call it. And so the pathogen, or the types of pathogens that are there, don’t really matter that much, but the bees are in a weakened state, and that allows these pathogens to multiply and cause, cause the bees to die.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: Bees have this behavior called altruistic suicide. What happens is that a bee somehow knows she's sick, flies away from the hive so she doesn't infect her nestmates. So we think that explains this behavior of collapse, why we are not finding dead bees and why we are seeing this quick spiral down in the population.

ARCHIVAL:
HARRY REASONER: In South America right now, and moving north toward North America, there’s a new strain of bees.

NARRATION: Colony collapse was not the first time bees had captured the public’s attention.

ARCHIVAL:
NEWS REPORT: This is the African killer bee. In the last four years, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in South America.

NARRATION: In the 1970’s fears over the spread of Africanized honeybees…

ARCHIVAL (NBC, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE):
JOHN BELUSHI: Do as I say, señor, or your wife dies!

NARRATION: …gave bees a bad name.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE):
ELLIOT GOULD: That’s right, gringo, the killer bees!

NARRATION: But since the onset of colony collapse disorder, bees have become a symbol of environmental protection.

ARCHIVAL (FOX, 8-1-13):
JOHN STOSSEL: If you couldn't understand that, they were singing, “all we are saying, give bees a chance.”

JAMES FISCHER (NYC BEEKEEPING): When people saw the bees they said uh-huh, here’s something that I can really do. Something significant, you could save the bees by actually getting some bees.

NARRATION: Hobby beekeeper Jim Fischer keeps about two dozen beehives on Manhattan rooftops.

ARCHIVAL (CNN):
NEWS REPORT: They call it urban beekeeping and it’s getting a ton of buzz.

JAMES FISCHER: Pre-media blitz, pre-C.C.D., beekeeping was a hobby taken up by retired white blue-collar guys, for the most part. The demographic immediately became a lot younger, a lot more female.

MARGOT DORN (BEEKEEPER): They’ve got a good home, they’ve got lots of combs. Before I started I was nervous because of all the diseases, but as a community across the country, we are eventually going to figure it out, and being part of that process I think is for the common good.

JEFFERY PETTIS: There’s been a couple of silver linings on the C.C.D. story. One is just public awareness about the role that pollinators play in the food supply. It’s also brought new researchers from other areas.

ARCHIVAL (KRON4.COM):
NEWS REPORT: Scientists are attaching tiny backpacks to honeybees in order to study them.

NARRATION: In 2014, scientists used radio frequency I.D. tags to track bees to help better understand the causes of colony collapse disorder. At Harvard University, scientists took a different approach. They’ve engineered the robo-bee to possibly assist with crop pollination.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also approved a vaccine for bees, the first ever vaccine for any insect, to protect against one pathogen known to decimate bee colonies.

ARCHIVAL (SCRIPPS NEWS, 1-18-23):
NEWS REPORT: The bee world is buzzing right now. Scientists have created a vaccine that protects honeybees from American foulbrood, which is a type of fatal bacterial disease that can spread quickly from hive to hive.

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS, 2-9-07):
SHEPARD SMITH: A huge threat to the food supply.

NARRATION: Colony collapse disorder disappeared a few years after it began. And while dire predictions of falling bee populations leading to a food crisis have not come to pass, honeybee colonies continue to die off in large numbers.

JEFFERY PETTIS: We’re still losing a lot of colonies. And that can be for a variety of reasons: parasitic Varroa mite, pesticide exposure, poor nutrition, nutritional stress, and in particular, we’ve been seeing a lot of queen loss. There’s a multitude of things that beekeepers are facing to try to keep colonies alive.

NARRATION: All of this means that beekeepers have to work harder than ever, like dividing their hives and buying new queens, in order to keep the bee population steady. Thanks to efforts like these, there are just as many honeybee colonies in the U.S. today as there were in 2006.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: We are not worried at all that bees are going to go extinct in this country, or in the world. What we’re worried about is, will we have the beekeepers?

DAVID HACKENBERG: It’s not the basic beekeeping that I remember as a kid and as a young guy running bees, you know. It’s just, there’s a whole lot of things that have changed. There’s lots of days that I would like to pull the plug, you know, and just walk away, but I like what I’m doing. I mean, you know, it’s something that gets in your system and doesn’t go away.

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