{"id":24252,"date":"2015-06-25T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T16:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/?p=24252"},"modified":"2015-06-25T11:00:12","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T16:00:12","slug":"why-oklahoma-had-the-nations-highest-percentage-of-bee-deaths-last-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/2015\/06\/25\/why-oklahoma-had-the-nations-highest-percentage-of-bee-deaths-last-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Oklahoma Had the Nation&#8217;s Highest Percentage Of Bee Deaths Last Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_24258\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 620px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-24258\" alt=\"Beekeeper Tim McCoy pries a hive of European honeybees out of an electrical box on Ed Crall's property near Weatherford, Okla. \" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2015\/06\/20150625-Bees002-620x412.jpg\" width=\"620\" height=\"412\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Logan Layden \/ StateImpact Oklahoma<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Beekeeper Tim McCoy pries a hive of European honeybees out of an electrical box on Ed Crall&#39;s property near Weatherford, Okla.<\/p>\n<\/div><p><a title=\"NYTIMESlink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/05\/14\/us\/honeybees-mysterious-die-off-appears-to-worsen.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">Honeybees are dying at an alarming rate<\/a> across the country, but no state lost a greater percentage of its bees than <a title=\"BeeInformedLink\" href=\"http:\/\/beeinformed.org\/results\/colony-loss-2014-2015-preliminary-results\/\" target=\"_blank\">Oklahoma over the last year<\/a>. When it comes to the general public, there\u2019s a lot of mystery around this issue, but the reasons are becoming more clear.<\/p><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/211942676&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=false\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p><p><!--more-->Nathalie Steinhauer from the <a title=\"BeeInformedLink\" href=\"http:\/\/beeinformed.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bee Informed Partnership<\/a> at the University of Maryland says the biggest threat to bees comes from varroa mites that came to the U.S. from Asia in the 1990s.<\/p><p>\u201cThis is definitely enemy number one for bees around the world,\u201d Steinhauer says. \u201cThe second major cause of death would be poor nutrition and habitat loss. Certainly, in areas of the world where we have intense agricultural practices, we have a lot of monocultures and reduction of natural habitat. And then finally pesticide is also one of the top three causes of honeybee colony loss.\u201d<\/p><p>Those are factors that are impacting bees across the U.S., but University of Oklahoma biology professor Ken Hobson says there\u2019s another factor that made the situation worse in the Sooner State.<\/p><p>\u201cBees are pretty heavily impacted by drought, and we\u2019ve had a five-year drought here in Oklahoma,\u201d Hobson says.<\/p><p>This all seems pretty egregious, right? Man depleting honeybee habitats and exposing them to pesticides, stressing bees to the brink. But there\u2019s something you need to know about these bees. They aren\u2019t native to North America. We brought them here, and they work for us.<\/p><p>\u201cIt takes \u2026 around 1.5 million hives of bees to pollinate the almond orchards in California. And so, those are not there,\u201d Hobson says. \u201cYou have to load them onto trucks, and trucks just arrive from all over the western United States and elsewhere, carrying 1.5 million hives of bees.\u201d<\/p><p>Without beekeepers feeding them and selectively breeding them, honeybee colonies die quickly. So if you see a honeybee, it\u2019s probably part of a managed hive somewhere.<\/p>\n<div class=\"module image alignright mceTemp\" id=\"attachment_24259\" style=\"width: 620px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-24259\" alt=\"20150625-Bees002\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2015\/06\/20150625-Bees001_WEB-620x412.jpg\" width=\"620\" height=\"412\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Logan Layden \/ StateImpact Oklahoma<\/p>\n<\/div><p>Weatherford, Okla. Beekeeper Tim McCoy tells StateImpact the commercial beekeeping industry is massive.<\/p><p>\u201cThere are people who that\u2019s how they make their living,\u201d McCoy says. \u201cThey take their bees from California to Texas, then Georgia, and then to the east coast for apples, over to the Dakotas for clover. They just run them suckers around the country.\u201d<\/p><p>Beekeeping is a lot of work, and expensive, especially when colonies are dying in large numbers and have to be replaced each year. It\u2019s more of an economic problem than an ecological one. If commercial beekeeping gets too expensive, it\u2019s bad news for the country\u2019s food supply. The crops need the bees.<\/p><p>\u201cIt\u2019s left us with this Achilles\u2019 heel of a real increasing reliance on the European honeybee,\u201d Hobson says.<\/p><p>But Hobson isn\u2019t too worried about the European honeybee. Mite-resistant bees are being bred, and farmers are starting to think more about bee health. He worries about what the bee deaths tell us about Oklahoma\u2019s ecosystem as a whole.<\/p><p>\u201cYou know, bees are kind of a gauge or a monitor \u2014 they\u2019re a monitor for the health of the ecosystems,\u201d Hobson says.<\/p><p>Hobson says all the recent rain has been great for the ecosystem, so he expects Oklahoma\u2019s bees to rebound very soon<b>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Honeybees are dying at an alarming rate across the country, but no state lost a greater percentage of its bees than Oklahoma over the last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":24259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[491],"tags":[313,641,423],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24252"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24280,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252\/revisions\/24280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}