THE Bees Thread (merged)

[billg]

Perhaps, the human race is choosing not to bee...

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter

The Observer, Sunday 2 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... s-collapse

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. "Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers," he said, adding that a solution may be years away. "Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms."

In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain's estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers' Association, said: "Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none." Results from a survey of the association's 15,000 members are expected this month.

John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers' Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. "There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances," he said. "We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them."

Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the "alarming" decline of honeybees.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be "ring-fenced" for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.

WHY BEES MATTER

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

[Narz]

That sucks.

Where you at these days g?

[Narz]

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators.

That's just pathetic (considering how much money we spend on war (or just about anything else).

[Pretorian]

Good riddance I say. Most honeybees are invading species anyway. Invaders must die. As for all the pollination benefits, well-- nothing is more killing and destructive than cheap and available food.

[Pretorian]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3EIogaE ... re=related

[mos6507]

Pretorian's trolling aside, bees and doomsteading go well together. As has been mentioned elsewhere on the site, honey is a good barter commodity. It stores well, and the pollination benefits are important, especially for fruit and nut trees.

Also, the process of keeping bees helps tune people into an ecological mindset because bees don't honor borders and therefore absorb all the toxins within their flight radius. It's in any beekeeper's best interest for the entire town to be pesticide and pollution-free. I know it sounds cliche, but if everyone were beekeepers, I'm sure that would help clean up the planet.

I just installed my a bee package into my first ever hive today and I'm hopeful they make it.

[Pretorian]

Pretorian's trolling aside

Aside? Do you mean you are able to refute any of my arguments that you call nothing short of trolling? Please indulge me, I'm all ears.

[Cabrone]

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse?showallcomments=true

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

[bobcousins]

I think this is both worrying, and a puzzle. I understand that the hives are just abandoned over winter, and the dead bees are not found. I would really like to know where the bees go - do they swarm and leave, or leave individually?

It seems like a combination of environmental factors and lack of genetic diversity may be cause of CCD. But then I would still expect gradual decline of the affected colony, rather than sudden loss.

[mos6507]

Aside? Do you mean you are able to refute any of my arguments that you call nothing short of trolling? Please indulge me, I'm all ears.

The history of mankind is nothing but the introduction of foreign species where they weren't before, in the form of food plants, livestock, and beasts of burden. So if you want to go down that path, you have to slam not just honeybees but the introduction of tomatoes, corn, and potatoes outside of the americas, for instance. The introduction of the horse to the americas. Really, the list is long.

If you read any Michael Pollan you'll see that homo sapiens has a symbiotic relationship with the species that support us. Where we go, those species are brought with us. It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be that way, in the sense that yes, we were able to survive only on native flora and fauna, but the genie is out of the bottle and it seems kind of pointless to debate it now that so much of the planet has become a planned ecosystem for food production.

[Pretorian]

The history of mankind is nothing but the introduction of foreign species where they weren't before, in the form of food plants, livestock, and beasts of burden. So if you want to go down that path, you have to slam not just honeybees but the introduction of tomatoes, corn, and potatoes outside of the americas, for instance. The introduction of the horse to the americas. Really, the list is long.

yes i am aware of that, however I wanted to hear why exactly this is good.
And why the reverse trend is bad.

If you read any Michael Pollan you'll see that homo sapiens has a symbiotic relationship with the species that support us. Where we go, those species are brought with us. It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be that way, in the sense that yes, we were able to survive only on native flora and fauna, but the genie is out of the bottle and it seems kind of pointless to debate it now that so much of the planet has become a planned ecosystem for food production.

If so, there are absolutely no point of debate on whether overpopulation is a problem or not, or whether such a thing even exists, considering that properly managed land and sea surfice can maintain 20 -30 times more people than we have now. Needless to say that even cows and sheep will have to move to the museums in that case. If the bus doesnt stop here, where will it stop Mos? Tell me, where will it stop?

[mos6507]

yes i am aware of that, however I wanted to hear why exactly this is good.
And why the reverse trend is bad.

Why don't you make your statement clear enough first? Are you an Agent Smith type who thinks humans are a virus on the planet? If so, there isn't much room for reconciliation of our viewpoints.

[Pretorian]

yes i am aware of that, however I wanted to hear why exactly this is good.
And why the reverse trend is bad.

Why don't you make your statement clear enough first? Are you an Agent Smith type who thinks humans are a virus on the planet? If so, there isn't much room for reconciliation of our viewpoints.

Virus? Of course not. No. Viruses, as any other parasites, develop a pattern which tends to minimize the damage to the host with time. Many might even end up being neutral or even beneficial either on individual or specie level.Otherwise they simply go extinct.
Now, cancer cells, are a bit different.

[Arsenal]

Funny. All three of my hives made it this year.

[deMolay]

So claims these Indian Researchers. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildli ... y-bee.html

[wisconsin_cur]

There were a lot of wild swarms this year. I guess I cannot make a solid argument for it but I would contend that it is not the honeybee that is in "terminal decline" but rather industiral, migratory beekeeping which is in decline. Of course their are crop systems which exist in a symbiotic relationship with contemporary beekeeping. Some of them will need to change or seek out other pollinators.

I wouldn't go to the stake for it but I am not too worried about the speicies Apis mellifera or at least no more worried than for any other species.


A swarm I hived this year

[yeahbut]

There were a lot of wild swarms this year. I guess I cannot make a solid argument for it but I would contend that it is not the honeybee that is in "terminal decline" but rather industiral, migratory beekeeping which is in decline.

This is my theory too. I have been very pleased to see a few more wild bee's nests the last year or two near where I live. It seems to me that wild bees should be able to evolve in response to all the new problems, from disease and predators and parasites, to pesticides etc. While there are massive crashes in their populations when they first encounter these factors, the remaining, resistant bees should pass on their genes and cause a resurgence in population(just as rabbits have responded to massive die-offs caused by the man-made and introduced viruses myxomatosis and calici in Australia, for example).

I suspect that commercial bee varieties, however, are not being selected for their resistance to these problems as much as for characteristics that make them attractive to humans- passivity, honey production etc- anthropogenic selection, as opposed to natural selection, you might say.

Of course, the wild bee varieties that survive may not be very easy for us to bend to our needs- aggressive perhaps, or constantly swarming to leave parasites behind, or not heavy honey producers etc. I'm sure they will survive, only maybe not in quite as useful a form for humans

They certainly are up against it tho. Global movement of people, goods, and bees means that every single bee disease, predator and parasite is being presented to bees at once, whereas in the natural world they would only have had to cope with one at a time, with very long periods of time to adapt.

[dbruning]

This year has been odd for a number of reasons...but one that I have noticed out in the garden over and over again...

We don't seem to have yellow bees around anymore...rather we have a black and white looking bee, about the same size as a bumblebee, rather docile and not aggressive at all...but where have the regular guys gone?

I know we have a few readers from the island on this forum, have you noticed anything like this yourselves?

Rumor has it these new bees have been imported to ensure pollination occurs, but I've heard absolutely nothing about this on the radio or news...and I'd like to think it would have come up if this was the case.

This may be a local thing, but if anyone knows something more solid than rumor I'd love to hear it.

[yeahbut]

Hi db, those sound like they might be 'cuckoo' bumblebees to me. Cuckoos are parasitic bumblebees that decided to quit the hard work of actually gathering pollen a long time ago, and just take over a regular bumblebee's nest and get them to do all the labour! They are about the size of a standard bumble, but with mainly black and white markings. We don't have them here as far as I know, but I remember reading about them years ago. I wonder if that's what yours are?

As for the lack of honey bees at your place, that is a world-wide phenomenon it seems. It's certainly in full swing here in New Zealand, altho I'm hopeful that wild honey bees are starting to make a bit of comeback. All the wild nests that I knew of where I live were empty for many years after varroa mite first got here, but lately I have seen a couple of nests again for the first time in ages- a very cheering sight. Still, the number of bees around in back yards is a fraction of what it was when I was a kid. Due to the transportation of bees and honey around the globe, nearly every bee disease and parasite from every corner of the world has been taken nearly everywhere. So instead of having time to adapt to one challenge at a time over millions of years, bees are being hit with multiple attacks all at the same time.

Commercial bees are at a particular disadvantage because they are often worked very hard, transported, don't get a variety of food, and of course are exposed to pesticides and many other chemicals. They also are at a genetic disadvantage because they don't get to evolve in the face of these challenges because of human selection as opposed to natural selection- they are bred for properties attractive to humans ie docility, heavy honey production etc, rather than for vigour and resistance to disease.

[Cid_Yama]

Could be a variety of leafcutter bee.
link