The hive detectives Chronicle of a honey bee catastrophe

Loree Griffin Burns

Book - 2010

Bees don't just produce honey. Your food supply depends on them. Apiarist Dave Hackenberg's bees have a busy travel schedule, pollinating around the United States from February to July. So when Dave inspected four hundred of his hives and found that the bees had simply vanished, a dream team of bee scientists got to work.

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Subjects
Published
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Books for Children/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Loree Griffin Burns (-)
Physical Description
66 p. : col. ill. ; 24 x 29 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780547152318
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

While tens of millions of viewers around the world are following the World Cup on television, the young boys in "Goal!" play a pickup game in a South African township that even more powerfully conveys a passion for "football." The boys play joyously in an alley (Ford's illustrations are brightly expressive, amid the dusty scene), while one keeps watch: "The streets are not safe," and the soccer ball is their prized possession. Sure enough, a meanlooking gang shows up to steal it, but this time the young players come out winners. THE VERY FAIRY PRINCESS By Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Illustrated by Christine Davenier. Little, Brown. $16.99. (Ages 3 to 6) Among all the princess picture books, this new one from Andrews and Hamilton - a mother-daughter team - offers a refreshingly different definition of "sparkle": Geraldine tells us she does "everything that fairy princesses do," including sliding down banisters and running for the bus ("scabs are the price you pay"). The message is that working hard in class, and sometimes getting a little carried away, can be part of being a princess too. THE HIVE DETECTIVES Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe. By Loree Griffin Burns. Photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz. Houghton Mifflin. $18. (Ages 10 and up) In this new volume from the excellent "Scientists in the Field" series, Burns takes up the case of a die-off of millions of honey bees in 2006. As a commercial beekeeper explains, the concern about bees is not abstract - "Your food supply depends on them"; beekeepers transport hives to Florida and California to help pollinate fruit trees. The mystery is not completely solved here (the culprit could have been a virus, pesticides or large-scale beekeeping itself), but the potential risk is clear. A FABULOUS FAIR ALPHABET Written and illustrated by Debra Frasier. Beach Lane Books. $16.99. (All ages) This brightly painted and collaged ABC is also a homage to state fairs everywhere: "C" is for candy (in neon lights, red-and-white-striped and pink-puffed), and "W" is for an arcade win, milk bottles flying. Some letters are a little too hard to make out ("outstanding," for prize-winning cakes and pies, takes close study), and that may limit the book's usefulness to alphabet newcomers. But the way Frasier brings to life a jaunty Ferris wheel, a sunburst-yellow pitcher of lemonade and a swirling roller coaster will nevertheless whet appetites for summer. THE QUIET BOOK By Deborah Underwood. Illustrated by Renata Liwska, Houghton Mifflin. $12.95. (Ages 3 to 5) "There are many kinds of quiet: First one awake quiet; jelly side down quiet; don't scare the robin quiet." Underwood's gently humorous text follows the same simple pattern throughout, accompanied by Liwska's penciled illustrations of some fuzzy animal characters (in an appropriately hushed palette). Not all is completely muted. A comical image shows the animals driving along, windblown, through a snowstorm in a convertible - "car ride at night quiet." Sort of. PICTURE THE DEAD By Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown. Fire/Sourcebooks. $17.99. (Ages 12 and up) Brown's striking portraits, drawings displayed throughout as though in a photo album, animate this artful Civil War-era novel. Jennie, 16 years old and an orphan, is left without prospects when Will, her fiancé, dies on the battlefield : his mother is her reluctant guardian, and makes it clear she is no longer welcome in the house. With the aid of a spirit photographer, Jennie attempts to get to the bottom of a mystery: How exactly did Will die, and why does she keep having such horrible dreams? The story is engrossing and the period details an added pleasure. JULIE JUST

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 20, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The author of Tracking Trash (2007), Burns now spotlights a dream team of scientists as they work to determine what is threatening bee colonies and (by extension) agriculture, which depends on bees for pollination. After following hobbyist beekeeper Mary Duane as she inspects her hives, the discussion turns to a commercial beekeeper who reported in 2006 that 20 million bees had vanished in a mysterious and deadly phenomenon now known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). Fully illustrated with excellent color photos, the clearly written text introduces four scientists and follows them from the field to their labs as they investigate possible causes of CCD: pesticides, viruses, bacteria, and pests such as mites. The book demonstrates the urgent need for answers, the challenges of the scientists' ongoing research projects, and the importance of investigating a variety of possibilities. In the final pages, beekeeper Duane harvests honey from her healthy bees' hives. Throughout the presentation, readers learn about the anatomy, development, and social behavior of honey bees and observe the process of scientific investigation and its vital, real-world application. Appended are lists of recommended books, magazines, films, and Web sites as well as a glossary and a source bibliography. A fascinating book from the Scientists in the Field series.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-9-A team of scientists investigates possible causes of the mysterious phenomenon, Colony Collapse Disorder, that has devastated honey bee hives in recent years. Readers learn about the importance of insect pollinators and the work of beekeepers, factors that might contribute to the decline of honey bees, and the need to protect them. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review

In 2006-2007, a sudden and unexplained drop in the number of honey-bee colonies -- a reduction of nearly forty percent of the total honeybee population in the United States -- alarmed beekeepers and scientists alike. In yet another excellent entry in the series, Burns tells their story as a dramatic scientific mystery, carefully leading readers through the unfolding of the crisis and the attempts to solve it: from the initial collapses in the beekeeping industry, through the identification of possible causes and the careful scientific research that eliminated each individual cause (pests, virus, pesticide), to the current research collaborations as scientists still try to figure out what happened. Profiles of the beekeepers and scientists, details about bee types, anatomy, and honey making, and information about the important roles bees play in global food production are interspersed throughout the main text, along with gloriously crisp photographs of bees and people at work out in the field and inside scientific laboratories. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Not long after beekeepers encountered a devastating new problem in their hives in 2006, a team of bee scientists began working to discover the causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD), now attributed to a combination of factors possibly including pesticides, nutrition, mites and viruses. Unusually for a Scientists in the Field book, the focus here is as much on the scientific question as the individual scientists. The central section describing the investigations of four members of the CCD working group is framed by chapters introducing a hobbyist beekeeper's mechanics and methods and explaining the work of the commercial beekeeper who first discovered the problem. Mock notebook pages break up the narrative with biographies of the individual scientists, information about who and what can be found inside the hive and the features of bee bodies. An appendix adds varied fascinating facts about beesagain using the format of an illustrated research journal. Harasimowicz's clear, beautifully reproduced photographs support and extend the text. Readers may be left wanting more but will be well served by this example of a scientific mystery still unsolved. (glossary, materials to study, acknowledgments, selected references, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe by Loree Griffin Burns, illustrated by Ellen Harasimowicz Text copyright © 2010 by Loree Griffin Burns. All rights reserved. Put on your veil, grab your hive tool, and light up your smoker . . . . . . we're going into a beehive. Before we begin, remember this: Honey bees are gentle insects. Gentle? you ask. But don't they have giant stingers on their rear ends? Well, yes, most bees do have a stinger at the tip of the abdomen. But they only use it in emergencies. If you move slowly and deliberately (no jerks in the bee yard!) and remember not to block the hive entrance (bees hate to find a strange body between them and the entrance to their hive), you can spend an enjoyable afternoon with thousands of honey bees and walk away without a single sting. Mary Duane does it all the time. Mary is a hobbyist beekeeper. She keeps a small number of honey bee hives in her backyard for the pleasure of working with the bees and, of course, for the honey. Every week or two, from early spring until fall, Mary opens and inspects each of her hives to be sure the family of bees inside is healthy and safe. If anything is wrong with the colony--and, unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong--Mary will see signs during the inspection. Her goal as beekeeper is to recognize these signs and take the steps needed to correct them. It's not an easy hobby, but the rewards, according to Mary, are many. "When you work with bees you have to pay close attention to what you are doing," says Mary. "Everything else in your life drops away. The bees are fascinating, they help the environment, and the honey is great, but mostly I love that keeping bees forces me to be mindful." In nearly ten years of beekeeping, Mary has been stung about twenty times--not bad when you consider she's handled millions of bees. Most of those stings happened early on, when Mary was new to working with honey bees. Now that she is used to the sights and sounds of an apiary, or bee yard, Mary is more relaxed and stings are rare. She wears a veil, of course, to protect her face, and she keeps sting remedies in her bee box, but she works her bees barehanded. "I started off wearing gloves, but I find that I'm more gentle without them," Mary says. She pats the top of her bee box and adds, "If I come across an ornery hive, then I put my gloves on like anybody else." Mary also keeps a smoker handy. Any worries the bees have about Mary poking through their home--worries they communicate with each other by releasing a smelly chemical called alarm pheromone--will be masked by the smell of smoke. Unable to smell alarm pheromone, the majority of bees in the hive don't realize anything is amiss and, as a result, remain calm during the inspection. To prepare the smoker, Mary fills it with dry pine needles, drops in a lit match, and fans the flames with air from an attached bellows. Once the needles are burning well she closes the top and a thin line of smoke issues from the metal spout. Like most modern beehives, Mary's consist of several boxes, called supers, stacked one atop the other in a towerlike structure. The supers come in different depths--and depending on the beekeeper, in different colors, too--but inside, all supers are the same: ten rectangular frames hang side by side. Each frame provides a foundation on which the bees can build their wax honeycomb. They fashion rows and rows of hexagonal cells that will eventually be used to store food and raise young bees. Supers and frames are designed so that the honeycomb is arranged just as it would be in a wild hive. Of course, the removable frames and stackable supers make handling a man-made hive much easier than handling a wild hive in a hollow tree. Mary begins her inspection at the top of a hive and works her way down. Because her hive tower is fitted with a queen excluder--a metal screen with openings large enough for worker bees but too small for a queen bee to squeeze through--the contents of each super is predictable. Above the queen excluder, in the part of the hive the queen can't reach, are the so-called honey supers. These will be full of worker bees storing nectar and turning it into honey. Below the queen excluder, toward the bottom of the hive, are the brood boxes. These are the only supers the queen has access to, and so they contain the result of her hard work: the colony's young and developing bees. Since developing bees are called brood, this part of the hive is often called the brood nest. To get started, Mary grabs what looks like a small metal crowbar--beekeepers call it a hive tool--and pries open the first honey super. "We beekeepers like to say that whoever invented the hive tool should get a Nobel Prize," Mary jokes as she works the hive tool into position. "It's that useful." Hive tools are necessary because bees seal every crack and crevice in the hive with propolis, a gummy substance they make from the sap of plants and trees. Propolis protects the bees by keeping wind, water, and pests (such as ants and spiders) out of the hive, but it is a hassle for beekeepers. "It's sticky!" says Mary. "There has never been a hive I couldn't open, but sometimes it takes a bit of muscle." When she finally opens the top honey super and pulls out a frame, the news is good. "Look at all that honey," she exclaims, pointing at the rippled wax surface the bees are crawling over. The bees made the wax and used it to cover, or cap, honey-filled comb cells. Though most cells on this first frame are capped, others are open, and sunlight bounces off the liquid nectar inside them. The bees collected this nectar from flowers in and around Mary's yard. When it is fully ripened into honey--a process that involves a little bee spit and a lot of evaporation--the bees will cap it, too. Eventually they will fill every cell on every frame of this super with honey. Only then will Mary collect and bottle it. When she is satisfied with her inspection of the first honey super, Mary removes the entire box from the top of the hive tower and sets it gently on the ground. Then she begins to inspect the honey super below it. When this box also passes inspection, Mary is ready to move deeper into the hive. She pries off the queen excluder and takes her first look inside the brood nest. "This one is just boiling with bees!" she exclaims. She blows smoke gently across the top of the box and then, just as she did in the honey supers, removes a single frame. Thousands of honey bees come with it, but Mary hardly notices them. Believe it or not, the bees hardly notice her either. "This is beautiful," she says, gazing at the frame through her veil. "Perfect. I couldn't be happier. There's a great brood pattern." She points beneath the crawling bees to an area of honeycomb covered with what looks like a graham cracker crust. The crust is actually more wax. Unlike the fresh wax that covers cells in the honey supers, the wax in the brood nest is recycled. It is darker in color and drier in appearance. In the brood nest, the wax-capped cells contain young bees in the final stages of their development. When the bee in each cell is fully developed, it will chew through the wax and join the hive. "And here are some larvae," Mary adds, pointing out a few open cells, each housing a curled white grub. Eventually, when these larvae grow big enough, their cells will be capped and they, too, will begin the process of transforming into adult bees. Mary lifts another frame from the brood nest, holds it up to the sunlight, and squints at it. She is hoping to see signs of the first stage of bee development: eggs. Honey bee eggs look remarkably like grains of white rice, although they are smaller and hard to see with the naked eye. Eggs, larvae, and capped brood are all signs that this colony's queen is healthy. Although Mary doesn't see the queen herself--she is lost among the thousands and thousands of bees in the brood nest--the presence of young larvae prove she is here, somewhere. "She's doing a nice job," Mary says thoughtfully as she continues to study the brood nest. In addition to developing bees, Mary finds capped honey, nectar, and pollen in the brood nest. Worker bees use these stores to feed themselves and the growing larvae. Mary examines each frame for signs of disease (thankfully, there are none) and for signs that the colony might soon swarm, or split into two separate colonies. Although swarming is a normal and healthy activity in the beehive, it limits honey production. Most beekeepers work hard to prevent it, and Mary is pleased to find no signs of swarming today. When the inspection is finished, Mary rebuilds the hive frame by frame and super by super, carefully putting each component exactly where it was when she began. She records everything she has observed in her notebook and then takes a few minutes to contemplate the hive she has just visited. At the base of the hive tower is the entrance, and bees are coming and going at an incredible rate. Field bees, the ones responsible for collecting food for the hive, arrive with clumps of bright orange-yellow pollen. Mary knows these bees are also carrying nectar, and she can't help but smile as they lumber onto the landing board in front of the hive entrance. "They can barely negotiate the landing!" she says. Guard bees examine the arriving bees to be sure they belong here, and receiver bees stand ready to unload the incoming nectar. When the guards are satisfied, the field bees regurgitate nectar directly into the mouths of receiver bees, who quickly store it inside the hive. New field bees constantly emerge from the hive and fly off in search of more food. "It's like a busy airport strip," says Mary. She touches the side of the hive before moving toward the next tower in her apiary. There is little time for rest in a healthy and productive bee yard . . . not for the bees, and not for their keeper. Excerpted from The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe by Loree Griffin Burns All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.