Beekeepers Mark Robar, left, and Ed Lafferty examine the laying patterns of their queens in some of their 40 hives at Trail’s End Farm, in Richmond. Robar hopes to develop a stronger strain that will better resist illnesses.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / Kris Craig

As a mysterious malady kills thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, Mark Robar will attempt to breed a better bee for New England. Rhode Island beekeepers have lost as many as 80 percent of their honeybees this season, he says.

At Trail’s End Farm, in Richmond, Robar is about to build a bee barn where he can work through the winter to develop a new strain of honeybee that will thrive in New England’s climate and resist many of the illnesses and pests threatening bees.

Rhode Island has about 300 beekeepers, says Robar, basing his estimate on the membership roster of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association. All but a handful of them are hobbyists, and the few who do derive some income from honeybees are part-timers, as he is.

An 80-percent loss is devastating for full-time beekeepers who maintain thousands of hives, but it is statistically insignificant among hobbyists who keep only a colony or two. Like Robar, there are a few beekeepers in Rhode Island who rent bees to orchards, vegetable farms and berry growers for pollination, but a loss of honeybees here does not affect the state’s two principal crops, turf grass and ornamental landscaping plants, which do not need honeybees for pollination.

Honeybees help produce one out of every three bites of food Americans take, according to Penn State University, one of the leaders in bee research. Even milk cows depend on clover and alfalfa pollinated by honeybees and wild, native bees. The value of honeybee pollination in the United States is $14 billion a year, according to Maryann Frazier, senior extension agent and honeybee specialist at Penn State.

Honeybees are not native to the Americas; Europeans brought them here in the 1600s for honey. Like some of the other animals the Europeans brought with them, honeybees soon became feral. In the 1980s, however, two kinds of parasitic mites wiped out feral bee colonies and threatened hived bees. Many beekeepers responded with chemical miticides. (South American bees that have bred with African bees recently have established feral colonies in the Southwest.)

Today, bees also face threats from fungal and bacterial illnesses, invasive hive beetles, and a mysterious new problem that researchers are calling Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). It is killing thousands of honeybee colonies in the 27 states where it has been identified. A professional beekeeper in Pennsylvania lost 1,000 of his 1,200 colonies. CCD has not been identified in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, but that doesn’t mean it is not here. Apiarists in Connecticut have identified CCD in their bee yards, and Mark Robar wonders whether CCD might have killed most of the honeybees in his apiaries, which normally hold 55 to 60 hives.

Last week, entomologists and other researchers from around the country met at the federal bee lab in Beltsville, Md., to discuss the deadly new illness.

The symptoms are unusual, says Penn State’s Frazier. “One week, the bees can be quite strong and a week later, they have dwindled down to nothing.”

Beekeepers say it appears that the bees go out to forage for flower nectar and pollen, and then forget how to get back to the hive.

Frazier says that honeybee colonies may be collapsing for a variety of reasons including diseases carried by mites, a new fungal pathogen, pesticides that some beekeepers or farmers may be using, poor nutrition, or a combination of several factors.

Honeybees are expensive. This season, Rhode Island beekeepers are paying bee breeders in Georgia and other southern states about $65 for a three-pound package of worker bees (about 3,500 bees per pound) with a queen that will build a colony. A small colony that is already established in a hive costs about $100. Queens from exceptional breeding cost $15 to $20 each.

Robar believes that breeding exceptional queens and artificially inseminating them with the semen of superior males, or drones, will produce better bees for New England.

“All the problems we’re having have been imported with the bees,” he says. “Whether it’s mites or hive beetles, these problems have come with bees that have been transported into the area. We’re thinking that if we can develop an indigenous stock of bees, we’re going to eliminate some of the problems.”

Some beekeepers feed their bees antibiotics mixed with confectioners’ sugar as a prophylactic measure against bacterial infections. Others, Robar included, use herbal preparations to keep their bees healthy. Still others belong to the laissez-faire school of beekeeping and let nature take its course.

Robar plans to breed the daughters of queens that have proven to be survivors: bees that have stayed healthy and hardy with little or no intervention from a beekeeper. He had three such queens ready for the project, but all of them died mysteriously this spring. “Were back to square one,” he says.

He estimates the project will cost $30,000. He has already received a $10,000 grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, and he has applied for a $6,000 grant from the Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture. He is working with Tony Mallilo and Whitney Langone of the University of Rhode Island; Jim Lawson, the state apiary inspector, and Ed Lafferty of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association.

Robar has purchased a used greenhouse that he will convert to an apiary house, allowing him to work with the bees even in the dead of winter.

tmeade@projo.com