Feeling the sting

LYNNWOOD

For the 45th year in a row, Wesley Crossman’s lone cherry tree is in full bloom.

Yet something’s different these days.

The lush, Bing cherries that showed up like clockwork every year aren’t there.

What’s more, Crossman isn’t seeing any bees.

“This’ll be the second year in a row here without bees,” said Crossman, a design consultant who shares a rambler with his wife, Barbara Eyrish.

Their house, along 40th Avenue West, lies on three-fourths of an acre, with a large backyard that slopes down to a shed.

“I didn’t have a solitary cherry in it last year,” said Crossman, a 58-year-old longtime Lynnwood resident. “I should have bees all over it.”

Is Crossman’s experience just a fluke? Perhaps, but there’s definitely been a big drop since 2004 in the number of honey bees owned by beekeepers nationwide, said Jeff Pettis, an entymologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He’s led government studies on a phenomenon that’s been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder.

Honey bees and other pollinators are responsible for about one-third of our diet. Last year, for the first time, commercial beekeepers began reporting that many of their bees had vanished and they had no idea why.

Scientists who looked closely at the problem discovered many of the deceased bees had died from diseases, some of which had never been seen in bees. They noticed that mites, a common cause of bee disease, had in some cases become resistant to treatment. They also discovered a virus called Israeli acute paralysis (ICP), which seemed to be connected to a large number of bee die-offs.

Still, there’s no smoking gun, Pettis said.

“What it points to now in my observation is that you have something that is weakening bees,” he said.

Whatever is causing the problem, and it could be a variety of sources, “allows a virus to replicate in bees because now they’re in a weakened state,” he said.

Dean Barnett, a commercial beekeeper in east King County, got into beekeeping while he was a teacher living in Edmonds more than 30 years ago.

These days, bees are his life. He kept as many as 600 hives until last year, when “I kind of got wiped out; I lost 80 percent of my bees.”

Years ago, Barnett would expect to lose 3 to 4 percent of his bees during the winter. In the last few years, he’s noticed a big drop in the number of bees returning to his hives and 2007 was when the biggest drops started, he said.

Commercial beekeepers aren’t the only ones noticing the drop. Brad Boardman, a beekeeping hobbyist in Everett, said he had eight hives at the beginning of the winter. By February, “I had three and two of those were marginal as far as their strength.”

His bees didn’t vanish.

“I’m not sure what happened but they’re all dead in the bottom board,” he said.

Crossman said he wonders if all the new construction that’s going on is making it harder for bees to live in the area.

Bees, particularly honey bees, rarely live in the wild anymore, Pettis said. And hobbyists are declining in number because it’s getting harder to keep hives together. That means there aren’t as many bees kept by beekeepers as there once was.

“I used to think nothin’ of runnin’ ‘em over with a lawn mower,” Crossman said. “Now, if I see one, I almost get down on my hands and knees and say ‘thank you.’”