Bee killer imperils crops~~A tiny parasite, ...... is devastating honeybees.

More than $15 billion in U.S. crops rides each year on the tiny legs of an insect.

The honeybee is the major carrier of pollen for seeded fruits and just about anything that grows on a vine. Everything, in other words, from apples to zucchini.

"If honeybees ceased to exist, two-thirds of the citrus, all of the watermelons, the blueberries, strawberries, pecans and beans would disappear," said Jerry Hayes, apiary inspection chief with the state's Division of Plant Industry.

Under attack from a Southeast Asian parasite, vast numbers of the creatures are dying off, worried industry experts say. More than 50 percent of the bees in California, critical to the success of the Golden State's almond crop, have died during the past six months. Frantic growers there have sent out the call around the world, including Florida, for hives.

Not only California is suffering the ravages of the determined pest. As many as 40 percent to 60 percent of the bees nationwide have perished during the same six-month period, experts say.

"It's the biggest crisis that has ever faced the U.S. beekeeping industry," said Laurence Cutts of Chipley, president of the Florida State Beekeepers Association and a retired apiary inspector with the state Department of Agriculture.

Cutts lost two-thirds of his beehives to the predator, an eight-legged animal no bigger than a grain of salt that attaches itself to a bee and slowly sucks out its internal fluids.

The pest is the varroa mite, which has been in the United States since 1986, when it first showed up in Florida. But the pace of devastation has increased only during the past year. An entire hive can be wiped out within less than a year as the parasites, colloquially known as "vampire mites," lodge in a hive and begin to reproduce.

"The varroa mites have become resistant to the chemicals we use to kill them," said Loxahatchee beekeeper Mark McCoy.

McCoy is one of hundreds of beekeepers from around the country and as far away as Australia who responded to California's need for an additional 400,000 hives. He packed up more than 1,500 hives, housing 30 million-plus bees, last month and shipped them west on two flatbed semis.

"The bees are the only tool we have to pollinate the trees," said Colleen Aguiar, a spokeswoman for the California Almond Board, based in Modesto.

The state grows about 80 percent of the global almond crop, which is some 1 billion pounds of nuts a year. It takes 1.2 million hives to pollinate those groves, Aguiar said.

And almonds are only the beginning of the crisis. Apple growers in Virginia normally call on their own state's beekeepers for pollination help, but not this year, said Troy Fore, executive director of the 1,200-member American Beekeeping Federation Inc., based in Jesup, Ga.

"Now those apple growers have also turned to Florida beekeepers to provide pollination because they have lost bees in Virginia to the mite," Fore said.

But Florida itself needs its bees, and some industry observers suggest it might already have given away too many.

"I really think you will see a crunch here in Florida in a couple of months," said David Hackenberg, who operates hives in Dade City and Lewisburg, Pa. "A lot of guys have lost a lot of bees. The watermelon guys are just starting and they are already scrambling for bees."

Hackenberg and others in the business said the state's largest beekeeper, Horace Bell of DeLand, sold his more than 40,000 hives to companies in California this year and went out of business. That automatically reduces Florida's 200,000 bee colonies by 20 percent.

A spokeswoman at Bell's office said she could not confirm that Bell had left the business, but did say he was "semi-retired." Bell did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Hundreds of researchers across the globe are looking for a solution, either through new treatments or by breeding mite-resistant bees. So far, the search hasn't yielded much success, said Jay Evans, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Research Lab in Beltsville, Md.

"Beekeepers need something this year or next to keep their colonies going," Evans said. "For the longer-term focus, we need to understand how the mites are so successful as parasites and breed bees that have a defense against them."

The loss of bee hives during the past year has been so catastrophic, Evans said, that researchers are questioning whether factors other than the varroa mite are at work.

The state Agriculture Department is seeking $300,000 from the legislature for bee research. As of Thursday, the request was heading for a conference committee, said Carolee Howe, assistant director of agriculture policy at the Florida Farm Bureau in Gainesville.

The American Bee Federation has asked the federal government for help. The group wants the USDA to spend $16 million a year, twice what it now allocates, on bee research.

"These mites are getting stronger," she said. "One day you will have a healthy hive. The next day your hives can be dead."

Those who work in the bee industry feel that the crops that don't need bees sometimes get more attention than they do. It's also admittedly difficult to evoke a passion for bees in the public mind, which often views them only as a stinging nuisance.

"We have this wonderful insect that can do marvelous things. It's not warm and fuzzy," said Hayes, the state apiary inspection chief. "It's not like a manatee. You can't cuddle and pet it.

"Yet without it, we have a negative impact on how our society eats. Maybe we can help people not love the bee, but at least appreciate it more."

What kind of weed control methods do you use?

Our invasives seem to be becoming resistent to our normal cut and drip techniques.

Our property contains plants from three major bioregions: North Coast, Central Coast, and an island of inland species usually found 150 miles away in the Sierra Foothills. As such, it's an interesting place to study. We have identified and photo-documented nearly 200 native plant species on the property and 91 exotics. Our weed control methods include, spot spray, hand weeding, mulching, light control (by means of graduated overstory removal), solarization, cut and treat, carbo depletion, heavy equipment... you name it, not to mention how we deploy natives to help us out.

The ability to make an early identification is our most valuable process knowledge. Things happen fast in meadows, as you know. So, if we can identify weed seedlings as early as possible then there's more time to treat them before they seed and more time to plan coordinated attacks on multiple species. Sometimes I have to do successive processes because herbicide injury to a species that will surivive the hit can kill my opportunity to get it later with something more effective. For example, hit catsear with a 2,4-D/dicamba/mecoprop mix (which is supposed to kill it but doesn't) and it turns brown all righty, and then sends up a nearly invisible shoots with tiny flowers on them. At that stage the plant lacks the green material to adsorb and translocate glyphostate, so it will blow seed no matter what you do. See below.

See the brown leaves at the bottom? Normally you would see a rosette about three inches across on the one on the right. Herbicides failed to kill it when treated as specified. Catsear is the dandelion from hell.

Given that the catsear hides under (and sometimes within) bunch grasses, I still have to get the "overstory weeds" (such as cranesbill) early enough for the catsear to recover and leaf out while it's still too cold for the weed to bolt. That means I have to know where I will be spraying, for example cranesbill, when the cotyledons are all that is visible.

Then there are the grass weeds. I have to distinguish weeds such as Bromus hordeaceus, diandrus, secalinus, madritensis, or commutatus versus natives such as Bromus carinatus and vulgaris, long before boot stage. That means I either have to know a visible difference, or have such a detailed knowledge of what weeds are where that I can make a prescriptive decision. When these annuals are hiding out inside native bunch grasses, removal has to be done very carefully by hand for several years. Early treatment with pre-emergence herbicides would preclude germination of the groundcovers between bunches. I therefore have to decide whether to weed it once early, and then apply pre-emergents or to rely upon the longer dormancy of most native seeds and sterilize between the grasses with pre-emergents while supplimenting their nutrition artificially. I plan to be experimenting with spot application of pre-emergents directly in the bunch grasses early in the season to save time and improve yields. Most broadleaf weeds that I have seen before on the property I can distinguish from their cotyledons, which means that I can get away with a lot less herbicide if I can spot spray them early. Early isn't necessarily the best time to weed as too often the taproot breaks at that stage, better to get them at early bolt. That of course means that the spraying merely reduced the numbers to the point that hand operations aren't fruitless.

Together, these tradeoffs mean that I am usuall spraying very early, in narrow time slots in December and January as temperature permits, so that by February and early March I can clean up the problem weeds with spot applications of glyphostate. Handwork starts in February and March and progresses until mid June.

Reliable information is hard to come by. I have found the claims of most herbicide manufacturers too often suspect. Their testing regimens are directed to turfgrass or farming, which have little in common with what we are doing. The botany keys (such as the Jepson Manual I use) are overwhelmingly set up for the convenience of biologists making fine distinctions, not for people looking to identify whether or not to kill a patch of unknown seedlings. Distinguishing plants by seeds may be easy, but it's too late for me to begin developing a control process.

Ultimately, establishing healthy natives is the best way to gain control, but one has to get the situation sufficiently in hand to even contemplate attempting it. There is a huge body of process knowledge involved and nobody in the business is apt to share it, particularly with respect to propagation techniques. To complicate things further, there are apparently succession processes in soil that make certain native pioneer species particularly effective at grabbing a niche before the weeds do. For example: Just after thinning an oak forest, as the duff rots, the purslane species such as miners lettuce or red maids are good at keeping down chickweed or annual blue grass (at least around here they do). As the process progresses (and the as mycorhizae get going) we install Satureja douglasiana, lotus species, and other groundcovers to preclude the re-emergence of (for example) French Broom. Needless to say, we have dozens of strategies that vary according to light, soil chemistry, moisture, wind exposure, seed dormancy, and the characteristic mode(s) of seed transmission, whether weed or native.

All of that was, of course, grossly oversimplified. I think habitat restoration is one of the least understood bodies of knowledge found in agriculture. The tools and equipment are terrible (something I intend to do something about). The propagation processes and popular planting techniques are unaffordable. The best thing that could happen is to get the damned government out of it. They bring me more weeds with their road maintenance equipment than anybody else.

I hope that gives you a feel for what we are doing. It's a lot more involved than that, as I am sure you know.

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A tiny parasite, colloquially known as a 'vampire mite,' is devastating honeybees. That worries experts because honeybee-pollinated crops are valued at more than $15 billion a year.