ARUN RATH, HOST:
If you think you're noticing fewer bees in your garden this spring, you're not imagining it. The U.S. is experiencing a dramatic disappearance of honeybees. The causes include disease, poor nutrition and pesticides. That's according to the USDA.
Beekeepers in Plympton, Massachusetts, though, are taking the mission to save the bees into their own hands. Katherine Perry reports.
KATHERINE PERRY, BYLINE: The arrival of the bees in Plympton, Massachusetts, is a rite of spring for the Plymouth County Beekeepers Association. This year, the club's some 300 members came out to pick up 525 crates of honeybees.
ANN REIN: We figure we've got 5,250,000 bees came up.
PERRY: Ann Rein is president of the Beekeepers Association. She says most people in the club, like Steve Brown, have gotten into backyard bees not to save the earth but for more hedonistic reasons: honey and entertainment.
STEVE BROWN: So you go out first thing in the morning and have coffee and watch the bees going to work. Maybe the end of the day have a cocktail at the end of the day and watch the bees coming back from work.
PERRY: But the bees Steve is picking up today likely won't survive the winter. These bees are bred in Georgia. The majority of the U.S. bee-rearing industry is in the South. They're unsuited to the New England climate and are vulnerable to the same factors being blamed for the widespread decline of the honeybees.
BOB HICKEY: There'll probably be anywhere from 30 to 60 percent failure with a lot of these queens that won't over-winter.
PERRY: That's Bob Hickey, chairman of the association's Queen Rearing Initiative. He says most backyard beekeepers just buy new bees every year, maintaining but not substantially increasing or strengthening the bee stock. When they read about heartier, Northern-bred queens being bred at Minnesota State University, the group decided to work on breeding its own better bee.
HICKEY: We purchased instrumentally inseminated queens with hygienic traits that will fight off varroa mites, viruses and diseases.
PERRY: The queens have also been bred with Russian bees for a better over-wintering ability, and Hickey says in the past four years, they've seen success.
HICKEY: We have some that have over-wintered for three years in a row now. And we reproduce every year from the ones that have the best qualities of those genetics. So we're really fast-forwarding Darwinism, basically.
PERRY: They're hoping these queens will produce offspring that can also survive a Massachusetts winter. While this type of selective breeding is happening at many universities and research centers, very few amateur beekeeping societies have taken up the task, according to Dr. Tom Rinderer, a honeybee researcher at the USDA.
His lab produces the type of bee breeds that the Massachusetts beekeepers are using. Some of those bees go to commercial producers and some go to boutique backyard breeders.
DR. TOM RINDERER: It's difficult for somebody to commercialize that, so there's still a need for folks to take what is available, bring it into their area and then kind of reselect and fine-tune the genetics of those bees for their own area. And so it's a great thing to hear. I congratulate them.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I'm going to put my veil on. I normally don't wear gloves.
PERRY: Back in Plympton, Massachusetts, the new beekeepers are learning how to manage their bees. This year, they'll still be working with those Southern ones, but Hickey says they hope to slowly replace them with the Northern-bred bees.
HICKEY: This is going to be a 10, 15, maybe even 20-year plan. It's a shot in the dark.
PERRY: Until then, says Hickey, he'll keep handing out Southern bees and training residents to care for them. So when they get their first hearty Northern queen, they'll be ready. For NPR News, I'm Katherine Perry.
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