Bees in Brooklyn Hives Mysteriously Turn Red by Susan Dominus - NYTimes.com

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David Selig of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a restaurant owner and amateur beekeeper, was disappointed that instead of honey his bees had produced a red concoction more reminiscent of maraschino cherries, or of cough syrup.

Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.

And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives forAdded Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

Cerise Mayo, a beekeeper in Red Hook and Governors Island, found that her wandering bees were returning with red coloring, probably acquired at the factory of a company that produces maraschino cherries.

It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice.

No one knows for sure where the bees might have consumed the dye, but neighbors of the Dell’s factory, Ms. Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually high numbers were gathering nearby.

And she learned that Arthur Mondella, the owner of the factory, had hired Andrew Coté, the leader of the New York City Beekeepers Association, to help find a solution.

Mr. Mondella did not return phone calls seeking comment, but in an interview, Mr. Coté said that the bees were as great a nuisance to the factory as Red Dye No. 40 was to the beekeepers. (No, Ms. Mayo was not alone: David Selig, another Red Hook beekeeper, also had bees showing red.)

A “honeycomb” from Mr. Selig’s hives.

“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” Mr. Coté said. While he has not yet visited the factory, he said that the bees might be drinking from its runoff, and that solving the problem “could be as easy as putting up some screens, or providing a closer source of sweet nectar.”

Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?

A story of the perils of urban farming, this is also a story of the careful two-step of gentrification. Red Hook embodies so much of Brooklyn culture — an infatuation with the borough’s old ways, just so long as those do not actually impinge on the modish design and values.

The maraschino cherries that emerge from the Dell’s factory have probably graced thousands of retro-chic cocktails and sundaes in Red Hook itself, or at least in Williamsburg. Finding some solution to the maraschino juice bee crisis — to all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New York, a wildly creative endeavor in and of itself.

All summer long, friends of Ms. Mayo were forever pointing out the funny coincidence that her first name means “cherry” in French; as a slow-food advocate with the last name Mayo, she was already accustomed to such observations.

Mr. Selig, who owns the restaurant chain Rice and raises the bees as a hobby, was disappointed that an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet.

He and Ms. Mayo also fear that the bees’ feasting on the stuff could have unforeseeable health effects on the hives.

But Mr. Selig said there was something extraordinary, too, about those corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.

“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings,” he said. “They were slightly fluorescent. And it was beautiful.”

E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com

Photos by: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Beekeeping in New York City at East New York Farms by Ella Morton - RocketboomNYC

Rocketboom NYC's Ella Morton gets the buzz on bee keeping at East New York Farms in New York City.

Link: East New York Farms

Big Apple Buzzing After Legalization Of Beekeeping - wcbstv.com

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It's the buzz in New York City: bees are back, and it's not by accident. The benefits of bees reach far and wide.

To bee or not to bee? That is the question, and New York City answered with a resounding "yes" when it legalized beekeeping, which had previously been banned.

Now, beekeepers will be allowed to keep and nurture their own hives.

"I thought it was a great idea," Vivian Wang said.

Wang is a bee advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped lead the push for more bees in the city in the wake of a declining bee population due to pesticide exposure, diseases and parasites, among other causes.

"Commercial beekeepers started noticing winter losses of 30 to 90 percent of their colonies, so it's a pretty substantial problem," Wang said.

With that decline came a pollination shortage, which can have an enormous effect.

Andrew Cote, who has six hives of his own, is the director of Bees Without Borders.

"The bees visit all trees, pollinate them, and help them grow and flourish, [and] help vegetables and fruits grow," Cote said. "Without them, one-third of the food we enjoy commercially would not be out on plates."

The New York City Beekeepers Association estimates there are now already 200 beekeepers in New York City since it became legal in April, with the majority in Brooklyn, and expect more soon – as the buzz spreads.

Experts say beekeepers must notify the Health Department about their hives, and that the danger of bee stings is minimal.

CBS 2's Scott Rapoport contributed to this report.

Urban Forager: ‘Oh My God, That’s 30,000 Bees’ by Ava Chin - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

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Recently, as I was walking across the southern end of my college campus, I encountered a giant, buzzing swarm of bees making drunken patterns in the air. Another professor, several yards ahead of me, stopped and asked, “What are they?”

I immediately called a friend, a tree surgeon who has relocated wild hives. His name is James Brochu, he goes by the handle Puma Ghostwalker, and I had just been texting him that morning about the island’s decimated bee population.

“I’m in the middle of a swarm of bees,” I said when Mr. Brochu picked up, as one flew by my face. “You want to come and get them?”

The College of Staten Island is perhaps the greenest campus in CUNY, and I mean literally green: its 204 acres border the Greenbelt — the borough’s large, linked system of parks — and one could almost argue that it’s an honorary member of the Greenbelt. It’s not unusual to find shaggy mane mushrooms, lambsquarters and dandelions growing on the grounds. But a swarm of bees circling the footpaths? Several students and faculty members stared as they walked by.

Ava Chin for The New York Times Although loud and frenetic, swarms are relatively docile.

The bees settled on a small tree, first in three vertical clumps, and then, within an hour, into two. The clumps were so alive, they appeared to be dripping, like succulent meat turning on a spit. By the time Mr. Brochu arrived with bee suits and a carrier in the back of his Dodge Durango, the swarm was a three-foot-long teardrop formation hanging off a single branch.

Mr. Brochu, who favors Australian-outback oilskin hats, said, “Oh my God, that’s 30,000 bees.” We zipped up our bee suits and got to work.

The insects were loud and frenetic. They were everywhere — landing on my facial netting and the shoulders and front of my suit. I’m allergic to everything from mosquito bites to pine nuts, and so I was afraid of getting stung, but I knew that the general campus procedure was to spray bee swarms to prevent attacks on students. If we didn’t remove it, the swarm might be jeopardized.

Moreover, swarms are relatively docile, and Mr. Brochu was quick about maneuvering the carrier bucket underneath them. I partially covered the top with a lid with a mesh cutout, until, in one swift movement, Mr. Brochu sawed through the branch and lowered it — bees and all — into the bucket.

It took about 30 seconds to contain the entire swarm, give or take the few hundred bees still circling around us.

Swarming, which often occurs in spring, is a hive’s natural means of reproducing. Once a queen and her colony have successfully produced a new virgin queen, the swarm — a majority of the workers, with the original queen in the center — alights on trees like temporary tenants before moving on to more permanent digs.

Mr. Brochu speculated that the original hive was probably living in the woodland that abutted campus. But Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers’ Association, thought it came from a beekeeper’s overcrowded hive, saying, “The possibilities of it being a feral hive are almost impossible.” (Honeybees are not native to the United States.)

Honeybees across the country have increasingly been at risk since 2007. According to a study by the Apiary Inspectors of America, American hives decreased by 33.8 percent from October 2009 to April 2010. The report cited poor weather conditions, starvation and weak colonies as the main factors. But bees are increasingly at risk globally as well, and scientists continue to ponder why.

Ava Chin for The New York Times The swarm is contained in a bucket.

Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, also lists many problems, including colony collapse disorder (where entire hives go missing), parasitic mites, loss of natural habitat, a one-trick diet (trucked-in bees pollinating single crops, like corn or blueberries), and an increase in pesticides.

These larger issues made it feel important to save this free-roaming swarm, so with the bees in the back seat, we drove to a private, woody area on the South Shore where Mr. Brochu could easily tend the hive.

As we sat in a field of mugwort, cleaning out an old hive box whose inhabitants sadly perished this year, Mr. Brochu said, “I’ve seen wild hive after wild hive destroyed this winter — gone.”

So when I called him about the swarm on campus, he was thrilled.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this,” he said, whacking the debris off a honeycomb frame before placing it back in the box.

After Mr. Brochu weeded the rangy mugwort away from the hive’s entrance, we zipped up our suits again and got to work.

Inside the carrier, the bees were clinging to the lid and one another. As Mr. Brochu carefully tipped them into the waiting hive box, I wondered about the queen. I couldn’t see her through the throngs of workers and drones, but I knew she was there in the middle, like some centripetal force drawing everything to her.

It was getting dark, and Mr. Brochu placed the lid back on the hive box. We watched the several hundred bees remaining outside the entrance of the hive wobble around in confusion. “They’ll settle and hopefully take to their new surroundings,” Mr. Brochu said.

In the fading light, we sat and talked, and minutes later saw the powers of the queen at work: the remaining honeybees filed into the bottom opening of their new home, just like operagoers receiving the call that intermission was over.

Salon.com: Hives Among Us by Lenora Todaro...

July 8, 2007 - Nothing will stop urban beekeeping fanatics from making their own organic honey -- not traffic, not smog, not even the law.

"Beekeeping is a completely sensuous experience," says Roger Repohl, a beekeeper at the Genesis Community Garden behind St. Augustine's Catholic Church in the South Bronx, in New York. "You touch and taste the honey, listen to the bees hum, smell the smoke." Clad in his "vestments" -- a white beekeeper suit, veiled hat, thick canvas gloves -- he squeezes a "smoker," a bellows attached to a can that he's filled with pine needles and lighted with a match. The smoke warns the bees that the keeper is approaching to inspect the hive, but the aroma evokes Christmas. "I use pine needles," he says, "because they smell good and you might as well be an aesthete about the experience."

Repohl's hives are not the natural conical ones that inspired 1960s hairstyles, but square wood boxes stacked five high, like file cabinets, or dresser drawers. He harvests about 300 pounds of honey a year at this peaceful outpost in the middle of auto repair shops, hardware stores and a mom-and-pop slaughterhouse.

Beekeeping is illegal in New York City. The law lumps honeybees together with alligators, lions and ferrets as "wild and ferocious animals." The city's urban beekeepers, then, form an unofficial secret society of asphalt naturalists -- romantics drawn to the beauty of a beehive's intelligent design, epicureans seeking the delectable taste of locally procured honey, and off-the-grid types keeping nature alive in the city. Restrictions on beekeeping like those in New York City are uncommon, however. "Chicago has beehives on top of City Hall," says Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine. "Chicago, along with Dallas, Boston, San Francisco and Portland, actively promote beekeeping for pollinator health."

After years in which they seemed like charming throwbacks -- rooftop denizens and community gardeners procuring raw honey and making beeswax candles, tending to insects that inspire fear and awe and irritation -- beekeepers and their bees are having a moment. The current national interest in locally grown and organic food and low-impact city living is inspiring people to look into ways to have their hands in their own food production, whether by joining CSAs (community-supported agriculture), raising chickens, or keeping bees.

There are 513 beekeeping associations across the United States, according to Bee Culture magazine. Of its 12,000 readers, Flottum says, "Fifteen percent live in cities with more than 100,000 people." However, trying to put a number on how many hobbyist beekeepers there are "is like asking how many people garden," he laughs. "From our surveys, we estimate about 75,000."

Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation, which provides educational programs about bees for children and scholarships for graduate students of apiculture, says he feels the increased interest in beekeeping. "The further people get from the agrarian life and the more media attention to bee losses there is, the more people say, 'Well, maybe I'll get into beekeeping.'"

This interest, coincidentally, puts urban and backyard beekeepers on the cutting edge of one of agriculture's biggest dilemmas: colony collapse disorder -- the "AIDS of bees," as Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, puts it. VanEngelsdorp is part of the CCD research team at the University of Pennsylvania. With CCD, the honeybees, highly organized, predictable creatures with finely tuned homing instincts, leave their hives to gather pollen and never return, like sailors drifting into the Bermuda Triangle.

More than a quarter of the country's 2 million commercial bee colonies have been wiped out, according to the Apiary Inspectors of America, and the hobbyists are not necessarily immune. At stake, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is one-third, or $15 billion annually, of the food we eat -- everything from almonds and apples to cherries and pears.

Explanatory theories abound, from pesticide and pathogen to radiation from cellphone towers and the onset of the Rapture. Losses by backyard beekeepers have been estimated only anecdotally, but the beekeepers are fearful of the implications. VanEngelsdorp says "pollinators are canaries in the coal mine," and their disappearance is a referendum on the state of our environment -- a reminder of the brilliant and frightening interdependence of our ecosystem.

Bees stroll along Repohl's neck like parrots on a friendly pirate's shoulder. He has an intimate knowledge of their ways and a knack for reading their moods. Still, he says, "Sometimes I stand there looking at them just paralyzed and I don't know what to do. It's like looking into the mind of God."

Repohl is a choir director who lives in the St. Augustine rectory in the South Bronx, providing an ecological education to local kids and sweet honey to those in the know. Each month the honey he procures takes on the flavor of the flowers in bloom: In June, linden flower; in July, clover. No bland-tasting honey pumped into supermarket plastic bears here. He's dealt with mites, but thus far has been spared CCD.

During a hive inspection, Repohl uses a tool similar to a chisel to pry open the top and assess the health of his hive. In a hive of some 60,000 bees, workers and drones, only one queen rules. Inside the honeycomb's hexagonal shapes, connected like so many votive candles, worker bees deposit pollen for making bee bread and nectar for curing honey. Deeper down in the hive we see the brood: brownish-tan in color, capped with wax from side to side indicating a strong colony. Repohl breaks open a drone pupa and the bees go to work removing the carcass, which he says they will eat. "Bees live so that the hive may survive," he says, "but bees also eat their brothers."

Repohl grew up in the San Fernando Valley, "halfway between L.A. and Disneyland." He came to the Bronx to do a Ph.D. in theology at Fordham University and befriended a former Trappist monk and master beekeeper who ran St. Augustine's Church at the time. Now, Repohl, through his workshops at Wave Hill in the North Bronx and in garden conversation, baptizes many a soul into beekeeping. During my visit, we worked while we talked, scraping propolis (a type of glue the bees create to seal the hive) from the hive frames before checking to see if the queen he'd ordered from Texas had been accepted by the hive. She hadn't. The bees were busily preparing the peanut-shaped cell for a queen of their own. In another hive, bee babies were being born, squirming in circles to push out of their eggs, arms up high, as if at the top of a roller coaster.

Norman Bantz, a Yonkers apitherapist, keeps his hives conspicuously between his door and driveway, the din of the Bronx River Parkway just yards away. The hives buzz with spring fever. At the other end of his unmanicured yard lay empty hive boxes lined with wax moth carcasses. Now in his 80s, Bantz believes that honeybee stings help treat multiple sclerosis and arthritis; he (and many other beekeepers) claim that eating raw, unpasteurized local honey banishes seasonal allergies. He began beekeeping decades ago to help one of his sons, whose allergies were so bad that he couldn't go outside to play baseball. He and his wife, married 62 years now, sting each other weekly, and he says, "I never have been in a hospital except to visit friends."

Bantz has perfected the art of mead making (honey wine) and swarm catching -- how to act at that moment when the bees decide en masse to leave the hive in search of a new home, to the horror of the uninitiated. He developed an award-winning gadget to catch them: a pool pole attached to a wide-woven basket. Bantz never wears the traditional beekeeper's protective suit when he enters a hive. He wears short sleeves and sandals. "I believe in divine providence," says Bantz. "I survived three World War II invasions."

Both Repohl's and Bantz's hives have been untouched by CCD. Bantz's theory about CCD lays some of the blame with bioengineering. "Queens usually fly out to mate with a drone in the air," Bantz explains. "The drone has to be very strong to hold them both together, but today the queens are artificially inseminated, the species weakens and loses its instincts." Repohl uses minimal pesticides and says his bees live a relatively happy, isolated life in the South Bronx, so he prefers to leave the diagnosis of CCD to the scientists. But he likes this theory from his piano tuner: "He thinks bees have gotten turned on to hip-hop and when they do their little dance to tell their sisters where the honey is the bees just take off and don't come back."

Sidney Glaser, the retired beekeeper at the Clinton Community Garden on West 48th Street in Manhattan, found his hive dead after winter; the bees had disappeared, probably casualties of CCD. On May Day, as children dance around the Maypole, only flies circle his hive. A Brooklynite by blood and accent, a veteran of the Peace Corps, Glaser began beekeeping on the Lower East Side 20 years ago, having joined the Green Guerillas after retiring from teaching. Wearing denim jacket, pants and shirt, he appears slightly confused and impatient for his apprentice, Michael Hegedus, to arrive with a new queen and a colony of bees to replenish the deserted hive. He has his smoker at the ready, burlap burning in the can.

Glaser likes to tell the story about his bee beard, for which he is infamous in these parts. He first made one while in Paraguay, and then did it again five years ago for PBS. "I hung the queen cage around me like a necklace and all the bees come and gather around her. Before I knew it I had guys on the set doing it as well."

Hegedus, an actor who renovates Brooklyn homes, arrives with a cardboard box from South Carolina marked "fragile" and bearing the cartoonish image of a bee. Inside, the bees hum actively. Hegedus says he's waiting to hear the scientific evidence on CCD but he likes to tell people: "It's the gasoline exhaust. Let's get rid of the guzzlers."

To date 35 states have experienced CCD. Maine is not one of them. Once commercial beekeepers have pollinated the state's vast blueberry fields, there are concerns that CCD could come here as well -- that the epidemic, having decimated agribusiness pollen factories and consumed city and suburban hives alike, will spread up the coast like urban blight.

Sitting in a House and Garden-ready country kitchen on the 65-acre Maine farm of the D'Entremont family, Phil Jackson ponders what CCD might mean for them. "If a commercial keeper has lost 80 percent of his hives, you can't say, 'I won't use a cellphone,' and hope that will bring the bees back," he says. The cellphone theory, which proposes that the radiation from cellphone towers interferes with bees' navigational powers, has been discredited by some scientists but is still under investigation. Yet Jackson's point is clear: They have not been able to rule out any possible explanations.

Jackson started beekeeping during World War II to have some extra sweetener when sugar was being rationed. Since then he's seen the "complete disappearance of wild honeybees" and watched the simple art of beekeeping become complicated. Not so long ago, he says, "basically they took care of themselves and you'd get 50 to 75 pounds of honey." But problems have come with mites, and now CCD.

"If CCD continues then we're at the threshold of catastrophe, especially the farming business. It's one thing for us backyard keepers to not have a jar of honey, but for the big apple farmer, that [beehive is] a livelihood." Without bees to pollinate, the apple fields' survival is at risk.

The D'Entremonts, Chuck and Peg, have been raising their own beef, chicken and turkeys, and making maple syrup for 30 years. Their 18th century house has window sills blooming with orchids, and hummingbirds feeding outside the window at eye level. Chuck D'Entremont thinks that Maine has so far been spared CCD "because of what we do with diversity" -- keeping a variety of flowering plants and wild grasses. "And the state of Maine has very strict pesticide license requirements," which means that beekeepers are alerted when large sprays for gypsy moths or other pests will happen, and take precautions.

The theory that the bees have been taken out by pesticides seems obvious enough, and one group of pesticides -- neonicotinoids -- has been cited in particular. They impact the central nervous system of insects and can lead to memory and navigational impairment. To be careful, the D'Entremonts don't order their queens by mail or use pesticides. "Somebody said to me that CCD was like human Alzheimer's," says Chuck D'Entremont. "If the bees are getting Alzheimer's, then the things that are happening to them may be happening to us."

Nutritional deficiency (the replacement of agricultural diversity with vast fields of a single crop), environmental stress (global warming screwing up the bee's sensitive attention to seasons), and turning bees into migrant workers for large-scale agribusiness (a movable pollination force that travels by truck from state to state during blooming season) may also play a role in the ultimate diagnosis. The autopsies that vanEnglesdorp and his group are currently performing on those bees that have been recovered are leading toward an "all of the above" answer, but it's a mystery in need of a particular detective, a cross between Agatha Christie and Rachel Carson.

Massachusetts farmer David Graves runs an underground collective of 17 rooftop keepers in New York City, finding homes for orphaned hives, then selling their honey at his stand in Manhattan's Union Square Greenmarket. One of his hives sits precariously on a platform, 13 stories up on top of a hotel. Just Food, an organization that addresses food and farm issues, is lobbying the New York City Council to legalize bees so they don't have to be hidden high in the sky and so that the city can contribute to pollinator health.

"Usually zoning changes to restrict beekeeping are the result of one bad beekeeper who pissed everybody off," says Bee Culture magazine's Flottum. "Or one bad neighbor who's pissed off. And anyway you can't legislate bees. If a bee wants to get in a hollow and make a hive it will. It's like telling chipmunks where to dig holes. Having zoning restrictions on bees is just plain silly."

As for change, as vanEngelsdorp puts it: "Things happen a backyard at a time." Or one rooftop.

Newsday.com: Local Growers Watch Vanishing Act of Honeybees by Cynthia Hernandez...

If the puzzling, nationwide disappearance of honeybees continues, it could affect $100-million worth of crops on Long Island, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Long Island Farm Bureau.

Their announcement Thursday came a week after U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns said that the honeybee decline could cost the country up to $90 billion in agricultural losses.

Millions of honeybees have disappeared from 35 states, and the cause of this colony collapse disorder, as it is called, remains a mystery.

Theories as to why their numbers have declined include weather and the appearance of mites. Research efforts are under way nationally to pinpoint the cause.

As part of his Farm, Nutrition, and Community Investment Act, a bill introduced in May, Schumer seeks $250 million to be allocated over 10 years to the Agricultural Research Service, an arm of the Department of Agriculture, to study the phenomenon and find ways to restore bee colonies to healthy levels.

Without bees to pollinate Long Island's crops, millions of dollars in local revenue could be lost, said Joe Gergela, executive director of the Calverton-based Long Island Farm Bureau.

Virtually every type of fruit and vegetable could be affected, he said.

To date, however, experts say Long Island's farming industry has not been affected by the disappearance of honey bees. These experts say, however, that if the problem continues, the region could see dramatic losses in some crops.

Crops that could see the most impact are fruits, like apples, peaches and pears. But, Gergela said, pumpkins, tomatoes and flowers could be affected as well.

The entire Long Island farm industry, he said, produces $250 million in revenue yearly.

Long Island remains New York State's most productive farming region, with crops like flowers, corn, tomatoes, melons and grapes for the wine industry.

Dale Moyer, agricultural program director for the Cornell Cooperative Extension Service in Riverhead, said he is worried about the decline, which he said started more than a decade ago.

But he has not seen a major impact on Long Island yet.

"I'm not aware of folks this year who have had a poor crop because of lack of pollination," he said.

There are many possible explanations for the national decline, said Julie Suarez, director of public policy for the New York State Farm Bureau.

Parasitic mites are partly to blame, she said, as well as poor weather conditions. Temperatures above 50 degrees are imperative for bees who need to get exercise and tend to hives, Suarez said. But last winter was cold, snowy and long, and could have played a role in the dwindling of local populations.

Despite these clues, Suarez agreed more research into the decline was needed.

"I think it's the only answer," she said. "Until we determine what the cause is we're just flying blind."

Aside from Schumer's effort, another bee-related bill is buzzing around Congress. Last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced the Pollinator Protection Act, which would also provide funding to study the disappearances.

Schumer said his farm bill would focus on issues of the Northeast, including the honeybee decline.

"The bottom line is that we wanted the farm bill to pay attention to our crops," he said.

New York Times Blog: Following Urban Bees on Their Daily Rounds by Sewell Chan...

Honeybees (Photo: Richard Perry/The New York Times)

The mysterious and alarming collapse of honeybee populations throughout the United States has prompted a new local study of the phenomenon.

The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and the Greenbelt Native Plant Center at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation are joining forces to study bees native to the city, and the indigenous plants they pollinate. The pilot program will recruit volunteers to collect data and spread the word about the key role bees play in pollinating plants.

In case you forgot to mark it in your calendar, National Pollinator Week began on Sunday. The week is designed to promote the health of resident and migratory pollinating animals.

“Bees are a crucial part of our urban ecosystem,” said Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. “We are very pleased to be collaborating with Parks to examine the relationship between the city’s native bees and plants.”

The project is modeled on a similar recent study carried out in San Francisco and has been modified to focus on East Coast bees and plants. About 800 species of bees are found east of the Mississippi River and a surprising number — more than 200 — have been documented in New York City.

Throughout the week, Liz Johnson, manager of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s metropolitan biodiversity program, and Ed Toth, director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, are giving volunteers a one-hour orientation and training session. The natural history museum said in a news release:

The G.N.P.C. will distribute six native, bee-pollinated flowering plants to volunteers, which they will be directed to plant in a sunny location in their own backyards. Twice per month over the summer and fall, the volunteers will observe how long it takes for bees to discover the plants and which bee species visit their flowers. Data from the pilot period will be analyzed by Johnson, Toth, and other project advisors, and the results will be released sometime during the winter.

CNN: Study: Abstinence Programs No Guarantee...and Stephen Colbert's Perspective on Abstinence and the Bumblebee Colony Collapse study...

As a follow-up to two of my recent posts:

Stephen Colbert gives a wag of his finger to the recent abstinence only study and he also weighs in on the widespread colony collapses of bumblebees due to cell-phones radio waves...and an article from cnn.com on the abstinence study...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes that were reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes. And they first had sex at about the same age as other students -- 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

The federal government now spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education. Critics have repeatedly said they don't believe the programs are working, and the study will give them reinforcement.

However, Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study. They said the four programs reviewed -- among several hundred across the nation -- were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation's welfare laws in 1996.

Officials said one lesson they learned from the study is that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior.

"This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can't expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth's high school career," said Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families.

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The Flight of the Bumblebees...Are Cellphones to Blame..?

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious "colony collapse" of bees

By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross

Published: 15 April 2007 - Independent UK Online Edition

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

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