Mite that makes bees buzz off threatens $15bn US fruit crop

[emad]

The Independent
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
30 March 2005


It is a sound you take for granted, the gentle buzz of bees out and about on their daily business, pollinating flowers and trees. But in the US it is a sound that is becoming steadily rarer - and that rarity threatens fruit crops worth $15bn from Florida to California.

In the last year, up to a half of all bees in the country may have died. The culprit is the varroa mite, first identified here in 1986. The eight-legged parasite is no larger than a grain of salt, but to bees it is lethal.

The scourge is by no means confined to the US, but nowhere has it been as devastating. For a while after its arrival in the US - probably from Africa or Asia - the problem was manageable. However, the bug has now grown resistant to almost every chemical used against it.

Unless a new treatment is found, or a new mite-resistant breed of bee is developed, fruit crops including strawberries, cherries, apples, squash, avocados melons and cranberries, which to varying degrees depend on bee pollination, could be affected. Honey production has also fallen steeply.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=624668

[Mari333]

1. where I live in MI its fruit country

This will dampen an already ruined economy here. Our joblessness rate in my neck of the woods is 11 percent.

[Dover]

2. You have to wonder if it wasn't the use of chemicals that gave rise

to this inbalance in the first place. And creating resistant species can actually continue to throw off nature in as yet unpredictable ways.....a viscious cycle.