A painter works on the finishing touches on a memorial cross to commemorate the first year anniversary of a landslide in Guisaugon town, southern Leyte, central Philippines February 16, 2007. More than three thousand residents were killed and buried by landslides in the mountain village of Guisaugon a year ago.
REUTERS/STRINGER/PHILIPPINES

Mysterious ailment wiping out bees

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday.

Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries.

"It's unusual in terms of the widespread distribution and severity," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem.

Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who reported the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder to researchers at Pennsylvania State University in November, said he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months.

He estimated that he will lose as much as $350,000 after accounting for lost income and the cost of replacing bees.

Researchers from state and federal agriculture agencies have been frustrated in their search for a cause because affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees.

The number of bees in a hive typically diminishes over a period of days to the point where there are very few or none left, Hackenberg said. There is no indication of where the bees have gone or what drove them away, he said.

"The rate of loss is startling," said Jeff Pettis, a bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland.

Pettis said the bees may have been killed off by a combination of factors including parasitic mites and a lack of nectar in pollen. Scientists are also looking into whether there is a link with significant recent bee losses in some European countries, particularly Spain.

Bromenshenk of the University of Montana said the symptoms are similar to "Dwindling Disease" that affected the U.S. bee population during the 1960s. Some beekeepers have told him that they have been seeing the problem for up to two years but have not reported it to authorities.

"It remains to be seen whether this is something new," he said.

21st victim dies after Florida tornadoes

LEESBURG, Fla. - An 88-year-old man has become the 21st victim of the deadly tornadoes that struck central Florida earlier this month, officials said Thursday.

Albert Gantner died Wednesday in a hospital from injuries he suffered when a tornado destroyed his home in the middle of the night, Lake County officials and son Roger Gantner said.

He and his wife, Doris, lived in a Lady Lake mobile home belonging to his son. Doris Gantner, 81, was killed the night of the Feb. 2 storms.

Relatives found Albert Gantner about 50 yards from his wife. He suffered a concussion, a broken collarbone and broken vertebrae, his family has said.

He battled Parkinson's Disease and had been confined to a wheelchair for the last several years.

Including Gantner, the storms have left 21 dead and hundreds homeless in a 30-mile path in central Florida.

January hottest on record

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever.

The broken record was fueled by a waning El Nino and a gradually warming world, according to U.S. scientists who reported the data Thursday.

Records on the planet's temperature have been kept since 1880.

Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) warmer than a normal January, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit (0.56C), which meteorologists said is a lot, since such records often are broken by hundredths of a degree at a time.

"That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much," said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling. "I was very surprised."

The scientists went beyond their normal double checking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models "just to make sure that what we're seeing was real," Easterling said.

It was.

"From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a new record because we've become accustomed to having records broken," said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief.

But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.

The temperature of the world's land and water combined -- the most effective measurement -- was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit (0.96C) warmer than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree.

Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record. In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4C) warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.

But the United States was about normal. The nation was 0.94 degrees Fahrenheit (0.63C) above normal for January, ranking only the 49th warmest since 1895.

The world's temperature record was driven by northern latitudes. Siberia was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5.1C) warmer than normal. Eastern Europe had temperatures averaging 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.55C) above normal. Canada on average was more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.88C) warmer than normal.

Larger increases in temperature farther north, compared to mid-latitudes, is "sort of the global warming signal," Easterling said.

It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month.

Meteorologists aren't blaming the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.

Easterling said a weakening El Nino -- a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that tends to cause changes in weather across the globe -- was a factor, but not a big one.

But Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said El Nino made big changes worldwide that added up.

Temperature records break regularly with global warming, Trenberth said, but "with a little bit of El Nino thrown in, you don't just break records, you smash records."

As much of the United States already knows, February doesn't seem as unusually warm as January was. "Even with global warming, you're not going to keep that cold air bottled up in Alaska and Canada forever," Easterling said.