2006

Shiiba is so well known for its honey that two years ago, to capitalize on the fame, local residents here launched a special Shiiba brand. There’s just one problem.The honeybees have all but disappeared.Nobody knows why for sure. November, the peak month for harvesting honey, came and went with no sign of the bees. Local honey growers are getting desperate.”I’m perplexed,” says Hisaki Nasu, 72, a Matsugi district resident known as the best honey grower in Shiiba.”This is the first time I’ve experienced something like this in my 60-year career as a honey grower. I don’t know what to do.”Most of the roughly 100 beehives set up around his house and the nearby mountains are empty. Even last year, when Typhoon No. 14 did considerable damage to the hives, he was still able to collect honey from 48.Experts say environmental changes caused by planted forests could be contributing to the bees’ disappearance, or possibly they are being poisoned somehow.Nasu’s theory is that the amount of honey harvested each year is a good barometer of a mountain’s health. In mountains, bees pollinate trees more than ground flowers, so Nasu says he believes the lack of bees may be attributable to the increase in softwood trees that do not bear flowers, such as cedar or cypress.He also suggests that acid rain may be damaging the flowers that attract bees. Not only are man-made hives being abandoned, he says, but natural ones as well.In Shiiba, beehives are everywhere, both natural and artificial. Most of the bees are honeybees endemic to Japan. The man-made hives are generally hollow logs, with an open bottom to allow the bees entrance.The queen nests during the spring and by fall the bees are hard at work making honey. The hives are lined with honey to attract the bees, but suddenly that approach isn’t working. Nasu has been trying new things to bring them back, such as planting red Camellia sasanqua flowers nearby.But some people are skeptical that humans can do anything.”It’s inevitable because it’s part of nature,” says Makoto Shiiba, chairman of a committee of local honey growers. “If we can find the cause, we’d like to know. But I think all we can do now is count on next year.”The town government’s planning and tourism department is taking a wait-and-see attitude.”We don’t know what to do because this is the first time this has happened, and any kind of activity would cost money,” said one town official. “It might be just a temporary phenomenon for this year, so we would like to sit tight and see what happens.”Fujio Hisashi, 71, a honey grower from Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, heard about Shiiba’s mystery and did some research on beehives in late October.Hisashi discovered that honeybees have been disappearing elsewhere, too–and that the areas have some things in common.”Honeybees are disappearing from areas where cedars have been planted all over the mountains,” he says. “Shiiba also has few flowers and bees must have been barely surviving even before this bad harvest.”Honeybees need honey from various types of trees that blossom at different times of the year, Hisashi says. He guesses that the long rainy season also made it difficult for baby bees to survive.But the case is far from closed, and experts are far from agreement.”If the honeybees decreased rapidly, then it was probably caused by external factors like poisoning rather than environmental change,” argues Jun Nakamura, associate professor at Tamagawa University’s Honeybee Science Research Center.He points out that there have been cases overseas where tannin, a substance found in tea flowers, poisoned honeybees in large numbers. Honeybees don’t particularly like tea flowers, but if the number of other flowers decreases for some reason, they will use tea flowers as a last resort.”In order to determine the cause of this plight, we need to interview not only honey growers but also study changes in the types of pesticides used in nearby farms, as well as other external factors,” says Nakamura.(IHT/Asahi: December 19,2006)

Other Worldwide bee-vanishing news:

Honeybee Die Off Threatens Food Supply

The Honey Bee Crisis of 2007

The Honey Bee Crisis

Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Colonies Collapse Disorder

Disappearing Honey Bees – Billions Vanishing Without a Trace

What Happened to the Bees?