Latest Buzz - Vanishing Bees!

Next time you sit down to a cup of tea sweetened with honey, savor it. That honey may soon be in short supply. Seems bees are vanishing. Beekeepers who raise and maintain hives for crop pollination are opening their hives to find sometimes more than half of the colony AWOL. The bees have disappeared.

Where did they go? Scientists suspect they have traveled far for food and failed to return. The exact reason is still unknown, however a likely culprit may be the bee business itself. To stay profitable, beekeepers truck their hives from farm to farm to pollinate the crops. The fees paid by farmers keep them in business. The bee business has been consolidating recently and keepers are trucking their bees further and further and this might be putting too much stress on the hive.

The problem is prevalent in several states prompting a serious investigation. Without bees, many food crops would have to find alternative means to pollinate, and that may be tricky.

Meanwhile the Africanized bees creep further and further north. African HoneyBees were introduced in Brazil by accident when they escaped from a research project. The highly aggressive bees have thrived in the Western Hemisphere and are steadily moving north. Texas already has them and they are becoming a problem in other southern states. Not such a sweet deal.