USDA Moving Too Slowly On Bee Crisis, Congressman Says

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has failed to grasp the urgency of a mysterious plague that has killed millions of honeybees, threatening billions of dollars worth of crops that depend on the insect pollinators, the chairman of a House subcommittee charged Thursday.

"We're going to need to have a lot more examination of how we can put some gas to this fire and get things moving," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif.

He said he had not decided what action Congress might take, but maintained that the government has responded too slowly to the threat to crops which, like the almonds grown in his district, do not produce without bees.

Witnesses appearing before Cardoza's subcommittee on horticulture and organic agriculture said that an ad-hoc coalition of scientists in Florida and other states are donating their time and even personal cash to support efforts to understand the honeybee die-off.

Known as colony collapse disorder, the problem occurs when worker bees stop returning to their hives, leaving juveniles and other bees to die, entomologists say. It has swept through 22 states and into Canada, and some beekeepers have lost as much as 90 percent of their hives.

Most threatened are crops — including Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, Texas cotton, North Carolina melons and many others — that depend on domesticated bees for most of their pollination.

"This could, indeed, be the 'perfect storm' for pollination services," said Caird Rexroad, associate administrator of the Agricultural Research Service. "With invasive pests and diseases of bees increasing over the last two decades, we may have now reached a tipping point where the bee colony can no longer fight back."

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum said "benign indifference" has led to an over-reliance on honeybees for pollination and under-investment in the science of managing them.

"Phalanxes of economists devote many hours to estimating and calculating our energy reserves, but there has been no comparable effort to calculate our pollination reserves," she said.

Another scientist, Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University, said she and other members of a "colony collapse disorder working group" have failed to pin down the cause of the die-off, despite tracking down numerous leads.

In an interview, Cox-Foster said it's possible that a new bee disease may have come to the United States last year when the law banning bees from other countries was changed to allow imports from Australia to service California's almond crop.

She said that since none of last year's bees are still alive, the only way to eliminate that possibility would be to study Australian bee diseases to see if any are present in insects from collapsed colonies.

She also noted that bees are particularly susceptible to a new generation of pesticides known as "neo-nicotinoids," which are now being widely used for insect control.

She was asked if the disorder had affected so-called "killer bees," the aggressive Africanized hybrids that have appeared in Florida, Texas and other Southern and Southwestern states.

"We are not seeing the collapse among Africanized bees in Arizona," she said, adding that the insects also appear resistant to a costly mite that has plagued hives since 1988.

"They are also great pollinators," she said. "It may be that we will find genes in the Africanized hybrids that will be valuable in dealing with this problem."