RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)--North Carolina is trying to boost the buzz surrounding the state's crops.

As farmers leave tobacco and move into new crops such as cucumbers, melons and berries, the state is confronting a crisis: It simply doesn't have enough honey bees to pollinate all those flowering plants.

"I feel that if we don't do something now about (this) we may be heading toward an agriculture crisis in the state," said David Tarpy, the state's cooperative extension apiculturist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

In the late 1980s, the state had some 180,000 managed bee colonies, each of which contained at least 30,000 bees. But over the past 20 years, the state's healthy population of wild bees has been ravaged by mites.

Now, there are about 100,000 managed bee colonies, and the state's beekeepers last year had to turn down requests for some 10,000 new ones. Farmers must rely on bees from a dozen or so commercial beekeepers to pollinate their crops.

The bees are needed because without their flower-to-flower flights, farmers can't get the maximum yield from the new crops, which now account for $100 million every year, according to state agriculture officials.

As bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen, they transfer pollen grains from one flower to another, fertilizing them and boosting seed and fruit production.

Bill Harrell is gradually moving out of tobacco, which doesn't need pollination to produce, and into cucumbers and melons.

At one time, the Wilson County farm that his grandfather bought during the Depression had roughly 85 acres of leaf under cultivation. Last year, Harrell grew just 38 acres of tobacco. And this year, he's planting 100 acres of cucumbers and some 60 acres of melons.

Six years ago, he said, he could find plenty of bees to pollinate his flowering crops.

"Now there just ain't enough to go around," Harrell said. "(Without) the bees to help us pollinate you're up against the wall."

Jack Tapp, a retired sheriff's detective who has run Busy Bee Apiaries in Chapel Hill since 1998, warns that startup costs are high and the payoff delayed in the bee business.

"You'll spend $200,000 with no forecast of making any profit for the next two or three years, so you're not going to get many people jumping into it," he said.

North Carolina State University hopes a program it is starting will lure more people into the hobby. All aspects of bee cultivation--including breeding and production of honey, pollen and beeswax--generate $10 million annually for the state's economy.

The school is providing 250 qualified applicants with two hives of Russian honey bees and bee hives. Participants have to invest $50 to $150 for beekeeper protective clothing, smokers and additional hive equipment.

The one-year program is being funded with a $164,000 grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation, which administers money received by North Carolina from its settlement with cigarette manufacturers. Applicants from traditional tobacco- growing areas will get priority for funding.

Tarpy, the apiculturist, said he's already received about 600 applications and the deadline isn't until Feb. 11. And organizers of annual introductory classes on beekeeping are reporting that their enrollment has doubled and tripled since the N.C. State program was announced.

"We hope that of these 250 new beekeepers, some will take it seriously and expand to the point where they may start doing it commercially," Tarpy said.

Date: 2/24/05

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