CORVALLIS --
communicate in such complex fashion that they make the jaw drop. With a dance of vigorous waggles and figure-8 patterns, they tell hive mates the direction and distance to food in geometric relationship to the sun. With an array of released pheromones, they signal which intruder to sting, which eggs to tend and who is doomed to be thrown from the hive.
But they cannot tell us what is killing them.
That is for Ramesh Sagili to interpret, and West Coast farmers and commercial beekeepers, links in an industry valued at $2 billion in Oregon and Washington alone, wait to hear what he learns.
In Sagili, a son of India whose waggle dance has taken him far from home, the bees have a benefactor who understands them.
"We can talk for days and days," he exclaims to anyone who will listen. "A very fascinating organism."
He wishes them good health. Even if he must cut off their heads and check their tiny trachea for even tinier
. Or grind their minuscule guts to look for parasites. Or manipulate their behavior with false clues that lead to the truth.
American agriculture long ago outpaced the wild pollinators whose flower to flower visits turn blossoms into berries. Expansive cultivation and development eliminated habitat and pesticides thinned their ranks, while vast acreages of mono-crops created the need for pollination in compressed time.
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Filling the void, hobbyists or farmers who kept hives for honey or home fields became
. Every January, keepers from Oregon and elsewhere truck thousands of hives to central California, where 600,000 acres of almond orchards require 1.3 million hives to pollinate all at once, and farmers pay rent of $125 to $180 per hive. The beekeepers move north as crops blossom in seasonal sequence. Oregon's blueberry growers alone require 25,000 hives each spring. Cherries, cranberries and pears wait their turn.
, a burgeoning crop with oil-producing seeds, needs bees to pollinate its sea of white flowers. Hermiston's watermelon growers need help, as do Central Oregon specialists who grow carrots for seed.
"We live out of town about three months a year," says Jan Lohman of Hermiston, who transports about 2,000 hives and is president of the
.
"There's not very many of us, but it's the dependence of agriculture that makes this important," says George Hansen, who has 5,000 hives and owns F
in Colton.
The
estimates that bee pollination -- a byproduct of bees' natural foraging -- increases crop values by $15 billion annually. Farmers estimate yields would drop 70 percent in some cases without commercial bees.
But in October 2006, beekeepers nationwide began to report hive losses of 30 to 90 percent. It's not unusual to lose 10 percent of hives in winter, but this was a baffling shutdown. Keepers found live queens but no or very few worker bees. They weren't dead in the hives, which often still contained honey and immature brood. They simply disappeared. Researchers labeled it "Colony Collapse Disorder."
Northwest beekeepers were not immune. "If we don't react and get a handle on this -- I'm not kidding -- there may not be any bees this time next year," said a Yakima, Wash., beekeeper who lost 4,000 of his 13,000 hives in January 2008.
At the time, Ramesh Sagili was deep into his post-doctorate research at
. He'd arrived with bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculture, but India churns out jack-of-all-trades and Sagili felt the call to specialize in entomology.
He grew up in the south India state of
, a hot and humid agricultural region sometimes called the rice bowl of India. His father was an officer in the Indian air force and his mother a homemaker, and they raised their children to succeed. Sagili has a doctorate in entomology; his brother is an eye doctor in England, and his sister is a federal employee in India.
One set of grandparents were sunflower farmers. Indiscriminate pesticide use had wiped out many bees, so laborers pollinated by hand, flower to flower, rubbing them with cloth. That image stuck with Sagili, who occasionally helped when he was young. "It is high time," he decided. "We should do something for the bees."
Sagili arrived at Oregon State University in March 2009 after beekeepers and farmers pressed the Legislature to fund honeybee research. Sagili's qualifications, focus and the detailed research he proposed sold the selection committee, which included beekeepers Lohman and Hansen .
"He was ambitious in that way," Hansen says. "He wanted to develop his own program."
Sagili impressed Lohman by traveling to California in January to gather pollen from the almond orchards for a nutrition experiment.
"Keeping honeybees alive is more complicated than it's ever been," Lohman says. "Any research we can have that points us in the right direction is critical to our livelihood and also to the orchardists we work with."
"We're having a lot of problems," Hansen agrees. "This CCD (colony collapse disorder) thing, nobody has a handle on it. We need somebody who can help us."
Sagili leads an effort to unlock the mysteries of bee health and stabilize a threatened industry.
In a lab at OSU, faculty research assistant Carolyn Breece and student researcher Alexis DeLong dissect and examine bees for mites. Under a microscope, white tracheal mites clutter a bee's breathing tube. Tracheal mites, along with the more common, fluid-sucking
and a gut parasite called
all weaken bees. Their presence combined with other factors may be linked to colony collapse disorder.
Off campus, Sagili is conducting an experiment to compare the nutritional health of bees that feed on a single pollen source -- the almond pollen he gathered in California -- to hives with access to multiple food sources.
Bee behavior can be manipulated. By introducing a pheromone into the hive, Sagili can fool them into thinking there are more babies to feed than there really are. Bees increase their foraging as a result -- and do more pollinating in the process.
Sagili's first task at OSU was to establish a baseline of bee health through surveys and samplings. The results are sobering. Oregon and Washington beekeepers sustained colony losses of 24 percent in 2009; the national average was 34 percent.
Bee samples from 300 hives statewide show 40 percent had tracheal mites, 48 percent had a nosema parasite and 85 percent had varroa mites. The high varroa presence is not a surprise because it is so difficult to eliminate, Sagili says. "The only concern is if you have all three in the hive, then you're having trouble."
Research on the samples continues. Sagili and his researchers are checking protein levels in food-producing glands removed from the bees' heads. Sagili believes proper nutrition is key to bee health, just as a person who doesn't eat well may fall ill more easily.
The OSU team is following up on what happened to the hives from which the sample bees were taken. Did they later collapse? Correlating the mite and parasite presence, protein levels and fate of hives should provide a clearer picture of Oregon beehive health.
Sagili suspects that colony collapse of commercial hives results from the combined impact of parasites and diseases, pesticides, chemicals in the hive, habitat changes, lack of genetic diversity, malnutrition and the hardship of being trucked up and down the West Coast.
"I think if there was one single reason, we would have found it by now," he says.
Above Sagili's desk on the fourth floor of OSU's Agricultural & Life Sciences building is a drawing by his 5-year-old son, Srikar, of honeybees returning to a hive. Sagili and his wife, Suma, have an older son, Sai, 9,who is past the bug infatuation stage most kids go through, but Srikar is deeply immersed. "Get me some drones I can play with," he says when his father goes to work, because he knows drone bees, the males, have no stingers.
Sagili is 39, slender and reserved, but his affection for and fascination with bees streams forth in rapid paragraphs. A hive consists of a single queen, several hundred drones and 30,000 to 40,000 female workers. The drones' sole job is to mate with the queen, which they do in-flight, away from the hive, in a cloud of
from multiple colonies. The queen mates with 10 to 20 drones in a one-time fling and stores their sperm for three to four years, laying up to 1,500 eggs a day at times. If there is no need to fertilize a queen, workers push out the freeloading drones.
Without honeybees there are no almonds, Sagili says, no blueberries, and on and on. They are tireless workers, able to fly more than two miles for nectar and pollen.
Their waggle dance to signal food location is a marvelous thing. Multiple scouts may be dancing in the hive at any given time, each insisting they have found bounty and regurgitating a taste as proof. Somehow the hive arrives at a consensus, and off they go.
Industrious and seeking opportunity, far from home.
Sagili smiles, acknowledging that he can talk for days and days.
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