THE Bees Thread (merged)

[joewp]

They think it is more likely that the general health situation of bees has deteriorated through intensive man made inbreeding. In all, much more research is needed, they say.

That's a curious attitude. The proliferation of cell phones has taken off over the last 5 years or so, while this problem with the bees has gotten worse, and the worst cases seem to occur on both US coasts, where there's a very high concentration of cell phones. They already have some evidence of bees refusing to return home due to cell phones, and instead of pursuing that, they think it's the "general health" from inbreeding that's doing it? If that's the case, why is the problem happening in the US west, where African bees have interbred with the domestic bees for a decade?
Voltaire comes to mind : "Men argue, nature acts".

[Chaparral]

They think it is more likely that the general health situation of bees has deteriorated through intensive man made inbreeding.

European honeybees have been intensively bred for decades. In a way, they've become like any other domesticated species: highly bred for a few traits at the expense of robustness and survivability. Beekeepers will purchase queens via mail order from breeders half-way around the world and will exercise very strict control of which queens rule in their hives. I've a colony of wild bees at my current place and they're doing just fine. Still, I'd not rule out EM interference.

The EM problem should be easy enough to study and results could be obtained within a couple of years. I'd design it around a one factor ANOVA for starters and then if a link is found, a regression analysis with distance from (or strength of) RF source being the independent variable could be devised.

[waegari]

They already have some evidence of bees refusing to return home due to cell phones, and instead of pursuing that, they think it's the "general health" from inbreeding that's doing it? If that's the case, why is the problem happening in the US west, where African bees have interbred with the domestic bees for a decade?

They do not rule cell phones out as a possible cause, but if the two would be related, cell phones would be more like a trigger in a generally weaker health and environmental situation (less variety in wild flowers through monocultures). At least, that seems to be implied.

These very same researchers The Independent is weaving its story on, simply say in their native German that their findings are not conclusive yet, which means that The Independent seems to have exaggerated the thing for a bit, at least. There will be follow up experiments.

[Valdemar]

I find, thanks to a post by a friend, that the mobile phone cause is severely lacking in real credibility.

[Lore]

I find, thanks to a post by a friend, that the mobile phone cause is severely lacking in real credibility.

The theories are getting a little wacky. Next we will be hearing that missing bees are declared victims of alien abduction.

[NoLogos]

Let me remind everyone that these 'stories' are in the same MSM that won't report PO. Have any professors specializing in bee culture made comments on TV or in the newspapers? (I wouldn't know... )
The best report I have seen on CCD was posted in Sharon Astyk's blog a few days ago, espeically the comments it generated. An insecticide called imidacloprid was introduced in 1994/1995, and sales took a few years to take off. It is a systemic compound, one that will be found in most plant tissues, including pollen. link

[billg]

If I was a bee, I would tell the conventional commercial beekeepers to "f...off" too. This is the best article I've seen on the subject so far. Here is an excerpt from it: Please Lord, Not the Bees

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies. (13)

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com. Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page: Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells. (14)

Are you surprised that the major media reports forgot to tell us how the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

“We’ve been pushing them too hard,” Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. “And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances.” Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above. (24)

This conclusion is not surprising, considering how the practice of beekeeping has been made ultra-efficient in a competitive world run by free market forces. Unlike many crops, honey is not given subsidy protection in the United States despite the huge importance of the bee industry to food production. The FDA has hardly moved at all to protect American producers from “honey pretenders” – products containing little or no honey that are imported and sold with misleading packaging. Rare is the beekeeper that does not need pesticide treatments and other techniques falling under the rubric of ‘factory farming.’ (15)

[billp]

Just before reading your bee post, I watched the future of food.

Austin, TX vets have been reporting health problems developing in pets which they attribute to GM foods.

Reasons for the bee population decline given in your quote appear more reasonable for bee population decline than EMR.

[Windmills]

The need for a sound scientific backing goes without saying, but I still appreciate the presentation of other possible explanations, especially as courses for further study. It wouldn't be the first time that insatiable capitalism combined with the environment has equated to an avoidable disaster. That's surely an understatement. Most of the MSM articles I've seen on this subject present it as a problem that has just appeared out of the blue, without any consideration that it might be yet another in a great string of self-inflicted ecological wounds.

[Homesteader]

If reversing the decline of bee populations is as simple as reverting to natural sized combs then why the decline in wild bee populations? I was going to get bees this spring but decided not to.

[jupiters_release]

Just before reading your bee post, I watched the future of food.

Excellent video! Destroy culture and life will shortly follow. I've said this before: die-off already happened for most of the world, we're just waiting for the physical manifestation to realize. Hats off to TPTB.

[Ludi]

Our local feral honeybees are tiny, maybe 1/2 " long. There is a solution to the bee problem, and that is to encourage the native pollinators. After all, fruit grew in the New World before the introduction of European honeybees. Native pollinators, though, require plant diversity, especially a large number of composite flowers, and so don't fit into industrial monoculture, even industrial organic. To ensure our food supply, we're going to have to move away from the industrial monoculture model.

[killJOY]

I just read a report that links illness in pets to the use of organic bee practices and particularly to the use of cells having a 4.6mm diameter. Apparently, the smaller 4.6 mm size, which is unnatural because in nature the bees choose their own size

This is either a misprint or an error: the smaller size IS the natural size. The larger Langstroth cell size is what's apparently the faciliatator of VARROA MITE, NOT colony collapse.

[killJOY]

It's not a big deal, but this is incorrect:

the smaller 4.6 mm size, which is unnatural

link

[Ferretlover]

Organic Beekeepers Report No Losses While Conventional Operations Report Massive Colony Losses

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa's House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada's fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

"I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies."

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site <http://bushfarms.com/bees.htm> , where Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

"Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?"

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

more at:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/article ... e_5094.cfm

[pstarr]

so this information (what I read of it) suggests that it is not microwave cell phone tower emmisions that are confusing the bees but some chemical.

organic is very groovey and I eat virtually nothing less. (except my diet pepis )

[NEOPO]

Is there anything that the "smart" humans cannot screw up?

[Baldwin]

Lesson learned: Nature knows best.

[TWilliam]

Lesson learned: Nature knows best.

Lesson, yes. Learned? Doubtful...

[Newsseeker]

That's interesting. Perhaps it is genetically modified crops after all?