More Bad Buzz For Bees: Record Numbers Of Honey Bee Colonies Died Last Winter
It's a sweltering morning in Beltsville, Md., and I'm face-to-face with bee doom. Mark Dykes, a "Bee Squad coordinator" at the University of Maryland, shakes a Mason jar filled with buzzing honey bees that are coated with powdered sugar. The sugar loosens the grip of tiny Varroa mites, a parasite that plagues bees; as he sifts the powder into a bowl, they poke out like hairy pebbles in snow.
"Right now there [are] three mites per hundred [bees]," says , associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, which studies bee survival rates. That's a high rate of mites, vanEngelsdorp says: "If this were September and you were seeing that number, you'd expect the hive to die" during the lean months of winter.
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