SMITH ISLAND
-- The bell peppers in Hoss Parks' backyard garden grew bigger and tastier this summer than anyone could recall. That signals good news for agriculture across North America. And for struggling watermen, it could mean
the first new industry since crab pots were invented 50 years ago. Mr. Parks, a crabber on this soggy archipelago nine miles west of Crisfield, has been tending a species of wildlife unknown on Smith since the
Chesapeake Bay rose to isolate it from the mainland 10,000 years ago.
They are honeybees, whose pollinating habits are critical to the nation's fruit, nut and vegetable industry, worth $10 billion to $20 billion.
But honeybees never settled on Smith. Bees become disoriented when flying across so much water, and crash.
Even so-called ``killer'' or Africanized bees, notorious for hitchhiking on freighters, can't touch this
place. The shallow waters, so productive of soft crabs, keep the closest shipping lanes nearly nine miles to the west.
Smith's splendid isolation persuaded the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1992 to approve the
proposal of John Klapac, a Frederick County apiculturist, to use the island to produce a new, Yugoslavian strain of honeybee.
The ``Yugo bee,'' or ARS Y-C-1, as the strain is officially known, shows unique resistance
to mites that have the potential to wipe out current species of honeybees in the United States and Canada.
Since the early 1980s, the mites have spread from Texas and Florida across the country. They destroyed an
estimated 50 percent of beekeepers' hives in Pennsylvania last year, and perhaps 40 percent in Maryland.
Pesticides are being used to control the mites, but there are concerns that the mites are becoming resistant
and that the miticides pose a threat to the bees.
Raising queen bees
Mr. Klapac, who keeps colonies, or hives, of traditional U.S. honeybees and rents them to farmers for pollination, says the Yugo project
was his ticket to becoming a breeder of queen bees, something he's wanted to do for years.
Queens are at the heart of bee culture. A colony, which may have 60,000 workers and drones, has but one queen. Without her,
the other bees cannot long exist.
A few days after she hatches, the queen leads the hive in a mass swarming, mating with several drones. And from this conjoining, she will lay a thousand or more fertile eggs a day
during warm weather for her three- to five-year life.
Producing queens for sale to beekeepers is a specialty in itself, as much art as science. Breeders select for and advertise a wide range of characteristics with
which their various hybrids of queens will imbue a hive, such as docility, fast start-up (making honey) in the spring, and propensity to swarm and mate.
In 1992, Mr. Klapac joined hundreds of applicants nationwide in
responding to a USDA offer. The department proposed leasing to three breeders with the best proposals the exclusive right to propagate and sell mite-resistant Yugo queens for dissemination to the apiculture industry
around the country.
Mr. Klapac says, ``It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that [leases] would go to a couple big outfits with lots of resources and state-of-the-art breeding techniques like artificial
insemination.''
Indeed, two such groups, Hybri-Bee of La Belle, Fla., and Honeybee Genetics of Vacaville, Calif., were selected. Mr. Klapac figured the right island could do the job, too, maybe even better in his
opinion.
``With artificial insemination you don't need the physical isolation of an island to ensure genetic purity,'' he says. ``But it's a touchy process, and natural breeding will produce a queen with superior
longevity.''
With a road map and charts of the bay, he narrowed his site to a few islands, and eventually to Smith. He says the climate there, ++ because of the surrounding waters, ``is closer to South Carolina than
anywhere else'' -- a help in minimizing winter losses of bees.
The marshy island also had enough forage such as clover, thistle, blackberries, willow, hackberries, maples and pomegranate, though he must supplement
the bees' diet with sugary syrup brought over in barrels.
And the island, along with the Somerset County mainland, has what he thinks will be a ready labor supply. Mr. Klapac plans to train and hire 10 full-time bee
breeders in 1994, and eventually more than 20.
Given the loss of oystering and fishing opportunities in recent years for the island's 450 or so inhabitants and the chronic, high unemployment rate in the county as a
whole, he thinks Yugo bees could be a significant boost to the economy.
Mr. Parks, who crabs part time and supplements his income with odd jobs, ,says he hopes to be the first to sign up.
Less aggressive bees
Mr. Klapac initially heard some islanders express fears that bee stings would be a problem -- which struck him as ironic. He wears ``plenty of netting and protective clothing'' when he tends his colonies there.
``But not because of the Yugo bees, [which are] substantially less aggressive than U.S. varieties. I need it to keep off all the mosquitoes and biting flies on this island,'' he says.
To date, working with the
federal Private Industry Council and with Maryland officials, Mr. Klapac has raised about half the $80,000 he estimates he needs for a six-week, 35-hours-a-week training to begin this winter for 10 apiculture positions.
A sticking point, he says, is convincing state officials he needs another $40,000 to buy several hundred hives of bees from Florida for the trainees to use for practice.
The cold weather training will result in
the loss of most of those bees, he says, so it would be folly to risk the precious stock of Yugo bees for practice.
Mr. Klapac says the USDA's Honeybee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Laboratory in Baton Rouge,
La., liked his proposal, but before approving it, the laboratory asked the department's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville to check it out.
``The people in Beltsville told me they had been looking for a
place like Smith Island for 40 years, and here it was right on their doorstep,'' Mr. Klapac says.
The acid test came on the island last spring, when he placed virgin queens in hives that contained no males. After
several weeks, the queens were still virgin, proof that no other honeybees existed on Smith to contaminate his Yugo breeding.
First for USDA
The Yugo project marks the first time the USDA has deliberately
introduced breeding populations of a new insect, according to Thomas Rinderer, director of the Baton Rouge honeybee lab.
It is not a step taken lightly, agricultural officials say, noting a recent report by Congress'
Office of Technology Assessment on the devastating economic and ecological consequences of some 4,500 foreign species of plants and animals that have taken hold in the United States.
The report concludes that
``exotics,'' from kudzu vines to gypsy moths and zebra mussels, are costing billions annually and outstripping all efforts at control.
But the stakes with the decline of U.S. honeybees are huge, Mr. Rinderer says --
not so much with honey production, which brings beekeepers about $125 million annually, but rather with the multibillion-dollar increases in productivity that pollination by honeybees brings to agriculture.
Mr.
Rinderer disputes the claims of some scientists that the world could not feed itself in the absence of honeybees, but he says our diet would be ``dismally boring.''
Growers of virtually all fruits (except citrus),
all nuts, melons, radishes, onions, lettuce and other vegetable species depend heavily on nectar-seeking honeybees.
Only a 'first step'
The Yugos on Smith Island represent only a ``first step'' in a
laborious and even passionate process that has already taken nearly a decade, Mr. Rinderer explains.
The USDA long ago anticipated the spread of mites to the United States from Europe, from where all U.S. honeybees
originally evolved. The Americas never had native honeybees, he says.
Early colonists brought them here -- if not on the Mayflower, then ``it was the next ship over,'' Mr. Klapac says.
Mr. Rinderer and an old
friend, Yugoslavian researcher Jovan Kulencevic, worked for years to improve a strain of bees found in Yugoslavia that seemed to have unique resistance to Varroa mites, parasites that infest bees and weaken or kill
them.
By 1989, after months of quarantine on USDA's Grand Terre Island facility off the coast of Louisiana, more years of trials with the Yugos began in Florida.
A graduate student from Louisiana State University,
Lillia Ibay de Guzman, did field evaluations, working outdoors during rainstorms and drought, often 80 to 120 hours a week, for three years.
``It really was an act of scientific creation. . . . There was no way we
could pay for the kind of energy and care it took,'' Mr. Rinderer says.
Their original intent was to test the Yugo's resistance to Varroa mites, but Ms. de Guzman on her own also looked at tracheal mites, the other
major species killing U.S. honeybees.
And as it turned out, excellent resistance to tracheal mites is the main benefit of the Yugos. They do have what Rinderer calls ``scientifically measurable'' resistance to Varroa
mites, ``but chemicals still will probably be needed to prevent infestations of Varroa.''
'Flower fidelity'
There are hundreds of varieties of pollinating creatures besides honeybees -- wasps, hornets,
hummingbirds and bumblebees, to name a few.
But only honeybees, which co-evolved on Earth with flowering plants, have a critical trait that scientists call ``flower fidelity'': Once the bees begin on a certain kind
of flower, they stay with it, rather than flitting from one variety to another. This is essential for pollinating the large monocultures that typify much of U.S. agriculture today.
That same agriculture, with its
heavy use of chemicals, has killed off many wild pollinators, including colonies of wild honeybees.
