Going for the Gold
Beekeepers rely on honey sales, which generated $125 million for a harvest of 209 million pounds in 1995, says Frazier, a senior entomology extension agent at Penn State. And, U.S. farmers routinely use bees to promote the growth of apples, blueberries, watermelons, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, peas, lima beans and many other crops. Nationwide, Frazier says, the value of honeybee pollination has been estimated at $10 billion each year. As bees fly from one flower to another, collecting pollen, they carry the sticky yellow dust from male to female plants, Caron explains.
Despite their many talents, however, "bees can't be trained to perform new tricks," he points out. Instead, he says, beekeepers have routinely imported different varieties of honeybees whenever they needed a species offering a particular characteristic. Honeybees originally were brought to the United States from Europe 400 years ago, he says, and now some 120,000 beekeepers maintain 3 million colonies across the country. When U.S. bees succumbed to bacteria in the mid-1880s, beekeepers imported a hardier Italian species.
Well-meaning South American bee breeders also brought the Africanized or "killer" bee to Brazil, Caron says. And, the varroa mite may have hitched a ride from Japan to South America, then hopped on the backs of bees headed for the United States, appearing in the United States in 1987.
"Our bees had little natural resistance to this imported mite," he says, "and losses started showing up immediately, particularly over the winters, when bees are clustered together with their honey."
Killer Bees Chill Out
When he isn't worrying about mites, Caron has been known to visit Bolivia in
search of killer bees. Notorious in t
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Contact: Ginger Pinholster
gingpin@udel.edu
302-831-6408
University of Delaware
1-Jul-1998