that is all the time we have. tony harris in new york city. "inside story" is next. for more on any of our stories head over to our website at www.aljazeera.com. >> the crisis of the bees, mass death, threats to agriculture has gone so far that the slowing down of the decline is framed as good news. what is happening to the bees? that's the inside story. >> hello, i'm ray suarez.

honeybees have lived closely with human beings for thousands of years. it's hard work, corporation, and selflessness. the bee is more honored than other animals not because she labors but because she labor more than others. you probably don't think about bees working for you, but they do. the today the shelves of supermarkets piled high with produce depend heavily on the work of bees. fruits and vegetables grown from seed fertilized by bees. and the bees are dying by the hundreds of millions. there are theories. there are suspected culprits, but the tragedy for the insects

themselves may also be a disaster for us. >> well, this area is really a paradise for bees, the huge amount of plant diversity. >> for several years now, tibor has watched large stocks of his beloved honeybees die off. >> bees just sitting on plant leaves, hundreds of bees running around in the grass not coming home, twitching and spas spasmin fronts of the hive, a good population of the colony has disappeared. >> reporter: the flight is part of a crisis among the colonies. according to a report by the federallfederal government saide healthy loss hovers around 15%.

but in the winter between 2010 and 2011 the loss of managed honeybee colonies on average was 30%, well over the acceptable range. the following year, 22%, then the death rate rocketed back up to 31% in the winter of 2012-2013. and this past season at 23%. the u.s. department of agriculture has been closely watching high losses. over researchers see a range of other lethal factors such as viruses, parasites, environmental changes and pesticides. >> we'll reach a threshold where it's not going to be worth it for a bee keep for maintain a colony only to see 40% of his colonies die every year. >> reporter: bees are highly evolved socially and they

protect each other from diseases so they have less individual immunity than other insects. ten years ago they seemed to be bulletproof, invulnerable to any of the diseases. now we are all seeing that they are getting sick or dying. >> dees and the plants they pollen nate form a symbiotic relationship that comes together to the american dinner table to the tune of one of three mouthfuls. an estimated $15 billion in value is added to u.s. crops by bees. >> if we lose bees we'll lose a significant part of our food supply. that's it. without bees we don't get fruits. we don't get a lot of animal feeds that are dependent on bee pollination. there are many things we'll lose. >> and this week's report may have the u.s. listening closely to our buzzing buddies.

>> virus in colonies, an immune system up presse suppressed, pes applied to crops. there are a lot of ideas about what is killing bees. joining us on inside story here in washington our guests. tiffany, this is being presented as a good year. is 23% a sustainable amount of winter death for bees? >> no,, it's not.

bees pollinate $15 billion of the food crop we eat every year. if we continue to see numbers at this rate its extremely unsustainable for our u.s. farmers, for consumers and for the economy. what we saw from this study is that it glossed over the--one of the leading causes contributing to this client which is pesticide. pesticide, a specific class of pesticide has been implicated as one of the key factors in the global bee die off. last year the european union placed a two-year moratorium on these pesticides and harvard university came out with a new study saying that this is most likely the main culprit of colony collapse disorder. not only are we seeing it being applied in agriculture, we're also seeing them being applied in our backyard.

so many homeowners are going to garden retailers ready to plant pollinator friendly gardens because they heard about the loss of bees across this country and global by. without knowing it they're purchasing plants that have been labeled bee friendly, but it's been treated. >> what does it do to an insect to make their life miserable? >> there is a fairly new class of chemistry brought forward from our member companies, discovered as an alternative and older insecticide products. and they work in a refined and targeted way.

we're looking at the multiple factors with the stress on bees that are at the root of this problem. we want to know more about the modes of action of the insect sides and other products from our industry, but we also wants to help with the answers to the problems things like th the the miteicides that are used to control mites. >> do you accept the report that was just cited. they are not made to target just one insect.

so if any insect ingests it, it's going to kill them. >> modern science tells us we need to assess safety of products used like insec insects user based on its risk, it's toxicity to the compound itself, multiple times the exposure. when they measure the insecticide product, determine ways that our industry can develop products so the unintended exposure to non-target species can be limited to the point where they are an acceptable risk or no risk at all. >> are they such an advance to the science that it is worth risking as you call healthful risks to kill the ones your why'

trying to kill. >> it's a constant state of responsibility, to understand the effects of the environment and to human beings as well. >> i'll give a chance to respond to what you just heard, but i'll turn to randy to begin with what kind of winter it is to you. what do you estimate your loss being over this past winter. >> i'm a poster child for this year. this year i lost probably pretty close to 50% of my bees just this winter. to put that into perspective, in 2013 i shift 10,000 hives to

pollinate almonds and i was only able to send 3,000 and the remaining hives are too weak to send. >> is this a case where you can see the dead bees or do they go out to do whatever it is that bees do and simply not come back? you end up with empty hives or hives full of corpses? >> basically, basically empty hives. if you have a situation where a beehive is starved because they ran out of food, then the bees are dead right in the hive. but in some other case where it's a disease it's just a natural function of the beehive for the infected or sick bees to fly away from the hive. >> does that make it tougher to figure out what is going wrong with the insects since you can

can't, in fact, them, since you can't see what it was that killed them. >> yes, most definitely. the best way to take the approach is to have consistent monitoring. >> and so can you anticipate whether it's going to be a rough year? do your hives enter winter already showing signs of dress, signs of weakness, signs of die-off so you can guess whether it's going to be a rough winter? >> yes, to a degree you can because we're in our bees all the time, and we're constantly monitoring for things. but i could not--i just did not see this winter happening to me because do a really good job taking care of our bees. we havwe are involved in some t.

so it really did take me by surprise this year. >> well, and in its story about the study, "the new york times" said that honeybees could be on their way back and cited this 23% loss. we'll talk about whether that was a little too optimistic after this short break.

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>> welcome back to inside story. i'm ray suarez. we're talking about bees, and how important are they to the food you eat? we'll start with almonds. there are orchards in california producing 80% of the world's supplies. farmers import 1.6 million beehives. almonds bring $.2 a pound. and that's money, not honey. brandon, you mentioned that you lost half your bees over the winter. how do you build back from that? how do you build back to the season of pollinating bees for

hire? >> it costs a lot of money to get our hives back into shape. we either have to buy bees from other producers or what have you. in my case i'm down here on the gulf coast sows west of houston texas, and the bees that i have left, it's just amazing how they can begin to rebound when the weather warms up and they have fresh nectar and pollen coming in. as those bees build up we're able to split them out and regain our numbers, buts always at a cost. a cost of honey production, pollination event or what have you. >> how do you balance the interests at hand to get enough of what everybody needs to walk away from the table and say okay, we got a workable system here. >> there is a variety of factors

impacting bees. there are pests, diseases, climate change. but one thing we can do right now is address pesticides. pesticides when they are applied limit the bees ability to forage, navigate, making it harder for them to come back to the hive and make them more susceptible to diseases and other bests. so if we take pesticides out that have equation, bees are able--we're going to see numbers rise as opposed to now where they're dying out at rapid rates, and also because the systemic pesticide gets into the leaves, the flower, the stem of the plant and go down into the soil and the water. they're impacting our whole entire environment. bees are a canary in the coal mine.

they are an indicator species. what we're seeing with bees, we're seeing in other inspects, birds and plants and animals. >> are you suggesting that we phase out this entire class of pesticides or use them differently, use them more sparingly, targeted, what do you want to come out of this? >> what we would would like to see is take them off the market. at the moment the pesticide is allowed on the market is without the review if they are safe. we would like the epa to take them off the market and we would like to see farmers use integrated pest management and transition to the sustainable agriculture. >> so there are alternatives. jay, i think a lot of public might be surprised that you can use something out there in the environment before it's been

tested. but how long does this take before the review that tiffany is talking about is done? >> tiffany is referring to a technical term regarding the stages of the product approval. the registration can be essentially permanent. it is a technical term. let's go back to a real world example. there is no known existence of colony collapse disorder on the entire continent of australia. big agricultural market. lots of pollination demanding crops, lots of honey produced. neonicitinoids had been used by australian farmers for over two decades, and no colony collapse disorder. they have put out much greater control on the importation of bees, and they limited the

production, and hence the disease investigator for transmitting all of the diseases which are at the root of a lot of bee problems have been taken off the table in australia. we agree we need to continue studying and evaluating the risks of neo-nicitinoder but we believe there is other evidence that these products are not a significant contributor to the bee problems here in the united states nor in the european union. unfortunately the european union has a whole different set of politics and the government structure that does not allow for a free and open debate as rule of law that we have here in the united states. i would argue that the european union is not the model that we here in the united states want to follow. we need to follow our own path, look at our own science and trust in the rule of law that we have here in the united states.

>> randy, when did this start to become a problem, and was there anything else happening in agriculture, in industry that you can identify. is there a point you can put your finger on and say this is where we really started to have problems? >> well, yes, absolutely. i've been doing this and i know how to keep bees. i know how to keep it under control. yet in the early 2000s we began to see issues and different bee keepers began to be hit in, and i've been pretty hit myself. in 2007 i know another guy who

a new report from the u.s. department of agriculture found that after years of massive bee deaths the losses dropped nationwide. for now no one knows why the death rate dropped or why it

remained so high. is there a different way of looking at acceptable levels of loss that might have us looking at the use of pesticides in a different way that we don't kill everything in a field, neither would we won't to. >> first of all the vast majority of neo-nicitood insect sides are not used where pollinators would be apracticed. corn, canola, some wheat crops. right off the bat in terms of where our markets are for these insect controls are not the intersection with the attractive crops. but that said there are road sides and other nearby fields, so we need to continuously remind farmers and redouble

their efforts at being cater how they use these and products that our industry provides. womb of the reasons we have abundant cheap food we have the integrated pest management that we have. how do you talk to americans in a different way of how we fit into the food equation, use less of these products. >> can you reimagine agriculture in this country to a sustainable food system. one being the majority of the crops in this country are pre-treated. so 94% of 99% of corn secedes are pre-treated with neo-nic

neo-nicitinoids. we need to shift away from mono cultures that are heavily dependent on the chemical industry so we shift our system to a more sustainable and organic way of practicing farming. >> and randy, before we go, can we do without your bees? we're getting to a point where this has reached crisis levels. when do we start to notice it in the check outline? when do we start to notice it in the produce section? well, we're probably noticing it pretty quick here. sustainability is key. basically the whole midwest is turning into a green dessert which is basically corn and soybeans and our natural habitat, the clover, the legumes are being plowed up and going

away. we have to look at things in the long hall and look at what is stainablsustainable, and we havk at the whole environment as a whole. bees are an indicator species. we're close to the tipping point right now, and it's really demoralizing if you lose over half of your outfit. do you want to reinvest in that operation again just to see it collapse next year? >> i have to cut you off there. thank you for joining us. thanks to our guest guests in washington. that brings us to the end of "inside story." in washington, i'm ray suarez.

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