MASTER OF THE BEES: Frank at his farmhouse in Colombo

Dave Hackenberg, an apiarist from West Milton, Pennsylvania, began lifting the lids off hives at his winter yard in Tampa Bay, Florida, last November and was stunned by what he found: most adult bees had vanished, reports Peter Huck.

“They were good-looking bees on October 1,” says a still bemused Hackenberg. “But by November 12 they were totally gone. And no one's figured out where they went.”
As he inspected the yard, he found that the missing bees, foragers who roam for pollen, had left their queen and brood. Just as mysteriously, the dead colonies contained honey, usually plundered quickly from abandoned hives by other bees, wax moths or hive beetles.
Out of 400 hives in the Florida yard, only about 40 housed live bees. Most were empty of adults. Hackenberg, who has spent 45 of his 58 years as a beekeeper, hauling insects from state to state to pollinate crops, had never seen the like. Gathering dead bees, he ferried the samples to researchers in Pennsylvania.
In the past, hives succumbed to varroa or tracheal mites and amoebic infection. But when researchers examined Hackenberg’s bees they found blackened and swollen organs.
“We found many abnormalities,” says Dennis van Engelsdorp, Pennsylvania’s state apiarist. “Scarring on the digestive tract, kidneys swollen and scarred. Even the sting gland had evidence of a fungal or yeast infection.”
The dramatic scene in Florida was the first reported instance of an alarming phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder. According to Montana's Bee Alert Technologies, CCD has hit 35 states, and Van Engelsdorp estimates that 25 per cent of apiarists suffered losses, with up to 875,000 out of 2.4m hives infected. Collapse within each hive ranges from 35 per cent to 90 per cent of the bee population.
Bees have vanished in Canada, Brazil, India and Europe, although CCD remains unconfirmed. Barry Gardiner, parliamentary under- secretary at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Westminster parliament last month that the National Bee Unit had received reports of isolated UK cases.
Faced with a dramatic die-off among Apis mellifera, the non-native honeybees that pollinate a third of US crops, scientists are working flat out to isolate the cause and find a remedy. Without bees, pollination is dramatically reduced and crops are put at risk.
So why would socially sophisticated insects abandon their young and their queen? Theories abound, ranging from an Al Qaeda plot to wreck US agriculture to wireless waves from cellphones.
In April, Californian investigators said a single-celled parasite, Nosema ceranae, might be to blame. Other researchers say the fungus indicated a suppressed immune system. Some have blamed GM crops.
Researchers talk about breeding new bees. But as bees disappear around the globe, there are fears that CCD is evidence of the deadly fallout visited on societies out of kilter with nature.
l Researchers at Landau University in Germany have found that cellphone radiation could interfere with the bees’ internal navigation capabilities. A limited study showed that up to 70 per cent of bees exposed to radiation from a cordless phone docking unit placed in their hive later failed to find their way back to the hive.