Bees for hire become hot commodity

NANTUCKET — Wes and Glenn Card gingerly eased two flatbed trucks wrapped in fine mesh screens off the 6 a.m. cargo ferry from Hyannis Sunday and slowly rumbled over a downtown cobblestone street, taking care to not shake loose their valuable payload.

In the cabs, the Cards ignored a handful of bees dancing on the dashboards — escapees from the more than 4 million honeybees humming in hives stacked on the back of the trucks.

Eight miles later, the brothers began unloading the trucks in a cranberry field, unperturbed as the freed bees dive-bombed their ungloved hands before dispersing through the bog to feed on the blossoms.

The bees' arrival is an annual event crucial to keeping the island's cranberry crop robust. Without trucked-in bees, New England's $121 million crop of cranberries, blueberries, and apples would likely crash because there aren't enough wild bees to pollinate all the fields. But the honeybee is locked in a two-decade battle with a parasite that has sliced the nation's commercial hives by one-third and appears to have wiped out much of the wild honeybee population. Now, frustrated with the parasites' ability to develop widespread resistance to the chemicals designed to kill them, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, scientists, and beekeepers are racing to develop new weapons.

"We are at a very critical period, it's very depressing," said Tony Jadczak, Maine's state beekeeper. "We just keep losing bees."

Honeybee hives are trucked around the country to keep up with the blooming seasons for various crops — the Nantucket bees began their trip in Louisiana, with stops along the way in California, New Jersey and Maine. The itinerant bees pollinate $6 billion to $8 billion worth of crops each year across the country, from Florida oranges to California almonds.

Since a tiny Asian mite was found in the United States in 1987 — nobody knows how it got here — the number of beehives for hire has dropped from 3.6 million to 2.4 million, the Department of Agriculture says. The decline has pushed up the price farmers pay to rent hives, and many fear there may eventually be too few bees to pollinate all the crops.

Maine has lost about half of its resident beekeepers, both hobbyists and those for hire, in the past 20 years in part because the honeybees are so difficult to keep alive, Jadczak said. And this year, higher fuel costs have added almost $1,000 to the price for bringing a truckload of hives from southern states to New England.