Bee Colony Loss - Part One
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Many of our food crops rely on bees for pollination. There’s a whole industry of beekeepers who deliver pollinators to crops while they are in bloom. But this year, our nation’s beekeepers prepared to bring their bees out to California for almond bloom, they were alarmed at what they found. Danielle Downey is the executive director of Project Apis m.
Downey… “ Almonds are the first big bloom, and they require. most of the nations managed bees to be put on trucks and moved out there to that bloom, which is over a million acres of trees. So as the beekeepers are starting to look, they open up the colonies. And this year they found a lot lower survival than they expected. And in addition to that, the colonies that were surviving were small and dwindling, and it was not at all what they predicted. And so. they were wondering what went wrong. And they called scientists, and right now they're looking for viruses. They've sent the wax and pollen off for pesticide analysis. So all of that's underway. And PAm's role was to gather information from the industry from beekeepers.”
PAm is short for Project Apis m. which funds research and efforts to improve honey bee health and vitality.
