05/08/09 More on the Bee Issue

More on the Bee Issue. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Eric Olson who runs the state's largest commercial pollination business is worried about his bees. More and more bees are winding up dead and there are a lot more questions than answers. Olson took it on the chin recently. OLSON: We lost 4000 hives this winter and that's a mighty big loss for anybody. That's about 35% of our outfit and if you just do the simple math of what we would have gotten paid for pollination plus the cost of rebuilding them that comes to over a million dollars. That's a pretty big loss for anybody. While scientists are not sure to what is exactly causing the bees to die, there is a new discovery. OLSON: It's called nosema ceranae. Nosema is a disease that has been in bees for a very long time and nosema ceranae is the new kid on the block. Nosema apis is what's always been here and we have always dealt with that and it has never been a particularly major problem for us. He says that for some reason the nosema disease is starting to run rampant. OLSON: I put 24 colonies into our research project into the end of January and I was absolutely stunned at the results. We had very high spore counts for nosema. And then the first of March we took our second samples out of those same bees, we had 30 days of beautiful weather in California. The nosema should have disappeared and instead it doubled and tripled. Tomorrow we conclude with beekeeper, Eric Olson. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.