BLUE ORCHARD BEE: Osmia lignaria pollinating an apple blossom.
Image: Courtesy of Theresa Pitts-Singer of the USDA.
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Honeybees have been dying in record numbers in the U.S. for at least the past two years. Experts attribute the mass deaths to a catchall condition known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), although both a cure and the culprit remain elusive. Despite as much as a 35 percent loss of bees per year, we remain almost entirely dependent on what until recently was a self-renewing annual population of billions of honeybees to pollinate over 130 kinds of fruit and nut crops.
"We can't rely on the honeybee forever," says Blair Sampson, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That's a problem, given that entomologists have yet to come up with a viable alternative. But researchers report that another bee known as the blue orchard, or Osmia lignaria, holds out promise of filling in the void.
The blue orchard bee, also known as the orchard mason bee, is one of 3,000 bee species native to the U.S. and is currently the subject of intensive study by the USDA's Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan.
James Cane, an entomologist at the Logan bee lab, has been working for 10 years to increase the availability of these bees and he says there are now a million blue orchards pollinating crops in California.
The reason these bees are considered the best potential honeybee stand-ins, Cane says, is that unlike some specialist native species, blue orchard bees, like honeybees, can pollinate a variety of crops—including almonds, peaches, plums, cherries, apples and others.
In just about every other respect, however, these bees are totally unlike their European brethren. For one, they tend to live alone. In the wild, rather than hives, they inhabit boreholes drilled by beetles into the trunks and branches of dead trees. When cultivated, they will happily occupy holes drilled into lumber or even Styrofoam blocks.
The blue orchard bees also do not produce honey, rarely sting and, owing to their solitary nature, do not swarm. They are incredibly efficient pollinators of many tree fruit crops—on a typical acre, 2,000 blue orchard bees can do the work of more than 100,000 honeybees. Their biggest drawback is that beekeepers can only increase their populations by a factor of three to eight each year. (Honey bees can grow from a small colony consisting of a queen and a few dozen workers to a population of 20,000 foragers in a few months.)
"We're still in the development stage of applying all the research that has been done" by USDA's Agricultural Research Service, says David Moreland, CEO of AgPollen, the world’s leading producer of blue orchard bees for the California almond industry.
Of the nearly 700,000 acres (285,000 hectares) of almonds cultivated in California this growing season, as many as 300 acres (120 hectares) were pollinated by blue orchards, according to Moreland. Growers' inspiration for trying the new pollinator is simple economics—last season they were paying up to $300 an acre to rent honeybees, 10 times what they paid a decade ago.* This trend has made blue orchard bees cost-competitive with honeybees, but only barely.
"It's not clear we can [raise blue orchard bees on a commercial scale] in a cost-effective way," says Karen Strickler, an entomologist at the University of Idaho from 1993-2000 who has worked with solitary bees and who currently distributes them to beekeepers and hobbyists through the bee dealership PollinatorParadise.com, located in New Mexico.
Another solitary bee, known as the leaf-cutter, is the success story on which scientists and beekeepers hope to model the trajectory of the blue orchard bee.
"Ninety percent of all alfalfa seed in the U.S. is grown using the alfalfa leaf-cutter bee for pollination," Moreland says. "That's huge—that's an industry that over the past 25 years went from zero to the preferred bee. So there's a model there that says: 'This has happened before, it can happen again.'"
Cane, described by his peers as one of the world experts on orchard bees, cautions that these bees currently can only supplement—and not supplant—honeybees.
"The sheer number of bees you would need—at least 500 per acre (0.4 hectare)—it will never replace honeybees," says Cane. "That's an outrageous number if you think about it."
AgPollen's Moreland is more optimistic. "If we got to the point that we could not maintain populations [of honeybees]," he says, "this is one way to ensure that the largest dollar specialty crop in California for export—the almond—doesn't lose its pollinator."
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12 Comments
Add CommentIt's an intriguing an interesting article, about an interesting little bee. It's sad, though, that instead of working to restore the honeybee, we're already looking for an alternative.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans and honeybees have maintained a fruitful and mutually-beneficial relationship for some three thousand years, it would be a moral tragedy if we betrayed that relationship now thanks to our own environmental poisons. A metaphor, perhaps, for the way we are betraying our relationship with the entire ecosystem.
We should be ashamed.
Charles - it's entirely possible that CCD has as much to do with honeybees being loved to death as anything else. Remember: honeybees are a highly cultivated species that humans have been manipulating since the middle ages, at least.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHoneybees in the U.S. are a genetically homogenous population that is regularly mixed during the annual pilgrimages of beekeepers to California (and elsewhere) for pollination.
Seems like an epidemiological disaster waiting to happen, no? But such is the way of all monocultures.
If the problem is homogeny, then perhaps we simply need to find queen bees from all over the world and mix things up a bit. I do think alternatives and backups are a great idea, but honey bees are obviously the first and best choice for pollination.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMixing things up a bit is why we have deaths each year from a strain of bee called killer bees here in the southwest and other countries. How many years has that experiment been going on and the mixing hasn't yet completed. They just had a man stung 3000 times near Las Vegas a couple days ago from a killer bee swarm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are at least 4,000 native bees other than honey bees in the US, which are not native.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGrain crops are wind pollinated not pollinator dependent.
3/4 of all native bees nest in the ground.
Any place that the soil is not tilled or not treated with massive pesticides has naturally occurring native bee populations that do indeed pollinate quite well.
Because honey bees winter over and the hive is maintained at 82 degrees, this allows for many pathogens and parasites to thrive. Thus, it has been common to loose 1/4-1/3 of all hives for decades, over the winter. The bees immune systems must adapt to naturally occurring stressors.
"Killer" bees are actually hybridized Africanized honey bees. they are a serious concern in Central America.
The honey bees are not at risk of dying out.
What is at great risk at this point in time, are the amphibians on the west coast and bats on the east coast. These creatures are in peril of extinction from fungal diseases killing them off with upward of 95% mortality.
It is interesting that both of these families eat insects. We have gone crazy with pesticides killing insects that are the food source for these creatures.
Something has triggered these killing fungi, but how can we stop their spread and devastation?
Actually, the worst thing we could do is allow bees in from other countries, that's how diseases get here in the first place!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing could be more environmentally irresponsible.
Bee specialists have the ability to breed for immune strength which is exactly what needs to be done.
There are commercial bee keepers that kill off their hives every fall, by the thousands, this has been common place for decades.
They preserve the best stock and use them to re-breed over the winter. As far as I am concerned the act of killing off the majority of hives breaks the pattern of the even temperature in the hives and allows for some of the parasites and pathogens to die off.
Keep in mind "Colony collapse" came about in the first place because they allowed bees IN From Australia or Israel; the number one thing we must not do is bring in any bees from other countries. There are 4,000 bees here besides honey bees. There a multitude of other pollinators: wasps, butterflies, moths, flies beetles, bats.
Bringing bees from other countries could trigger an environmental disaster, I sincerely hope we learned something from the colony collapse scare.
Honey bees are an invasive species, brought by the English to Jamestown in 1607. It is possible the environment is simply rejecting them. The same is true for earth worms.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't most people realize just how many "American" species were actually introduced by Europeans and Asians.
there are numerous glaring errors in this article
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisas a proffessional beekeeper I can tell you that CCD is pretty much past history and no significant losses have occurred in the last 12 months. additionally these losses are made up quickly. the article implies they are gone for good. no honeybee researcher is predicted the demise of the honeybee
furthermore the number of $300 per hive for almond pollination is sheer fantasy. the last two years the prices is averaging $120-$160.
there are other additional glaring errors I do not have the time to get into.
this article is so bad I think the publication should pull it.
I was a beekeeper. The biggest problem was trying to continuously harvest rape-seed honey that in our cool Normandy temperatures crystallises in the wax cells before you can extract it. Rape-seed flowers from april onwards, so gives endless work to keep up for scant reward. Secondly, bees leave the hives but don't return...so there is no way of knowing what they are suffering from. It is possible that they are disorientated, but by what is the big question. Bees are fascinating creatures to work with, but the old traditional bee-keeper is a thing of the past. The trade has become highly technical, meaning only devoted professionals can earn a living from once was the pastime of priests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMason bees at 500/acre would hardly seem crowded: about 10 linear feet of 4x4 would suffice to give each bee its own hole.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReasonably competent middle-schoolers can make mason bee boxes and hang 'em in an orchard. Get lots of holes ready for them and expect them to multiply, nee, exponentiate.
CCD is not only in the America’s it is unfortunately a world wide problem. As for America importing bees from here it is my understanding that America would not allow them to be imported from anywhere until the CCD had decimated the population there, and then the only ones they allowed had to undergo a very stringent quarantine regime.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo any bees imported from Australia were definitely not the cause of CCD in America. You already had it, in fact from memory the America’s were the first to get it, before it spread worldwide. How it spread throughout the world is unknown.
I still am concerned that the affliction that is decimating our bee population may well be linked to the effects of cell-phone towers and signals in the air (microwaves) and if these could be affecting the honeybees' ability to 'home-in' on the hive. Even if this were to be found the cause, nothing could(or would) be done about it. I just can't believe that these 'sensitive' insects AREN'T being affected by the many cell-phone towers...not to mention all the other signals in the air due to our technology. Just my perspective on things.
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