The Boston Channel News
PEMBROKE,
Mass. - Beekeeper Howard Scott looks forward to the bustle of his honeybees each
spring. This year, the buzz was gone.
When he recently opened up his hives,
he found that all the bees in his four hives were dead -- casualties, it appears,
of a minuscule mite imported from Africa that is wreaking havoc on American bee
colonies.
Scott said that about 50 of 80 South Shore beekeepers faced the
same bleak scenario this spring. No one knows for sure why hives are dying, but
a possible culprit may be the varroa mite, a tiny insect that can kill whole hives.
"This
year is very heavy with losses of hives all around southeastern Massachusetts,"
Scott told The Patriot Ledger.
Scott, 56, who has replaced the dead bees
with 2,000 new live ones, sees the deaths in a somewhat more poetic light than
other people might. A free-lance writer and tax consultant by trade, he often
writes about his bees, including their untimely demise.
"A dead hive is
a terrible sight to behold," Scott wrote in his book, "Bee Lessons." "Often there's
a charnel odor or foul smell of death. ... The silence is unnerving. You think:
Where once there was teeming life is now nothing."
Alfred Carl, chief beehive
inspector in the state Department of Food and Agriculture, said the varroa mite
is the likely culprit for this spring's bee deaths.
"From what I've seen,
the main killer is the varroa," he said.
The fluctuating temperatures of
this past winter may also be a factor, Scott said. Hibernating bees cluster for
warmth in the wintertime; an early thaw can be deadly if the cluster loosens and
cold weather returns.
Scott, whose bees produce about 250 pounds of honey
a year and sells about $1,000 worth to neighbors, takes solace from the bees'
freeze by concentrating on selling his book.
His book has sold 7,000 copies
and made him a $3,000 profit. He wrote it three years ago to sell at the beekeeper's
booth at the Marshfield Fair, and sales have soared, he said.
There's much
to learn from bees, he said. The 46-page book has tidbits about bees, and 42 aphorisms
about what humans can learn from bees, such as toiling for the greater good rather
than individual gain.
"I just felt that we had nothing written that expresses
my magic and wonderment at bees," he said. "In the book, I aimed to show what
we could learn." |
