Posted on 04/23/2007 1:11:12 AM PDT by Tulsa Ramjet
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Go to work, come home.
Go to work, come home.
Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.
Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.
The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil.
Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.
If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.
Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service.
"They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming."
Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
“What”s the buzz, tell me what’s a happening...”
If the bees go away regardless, we could start getting really friendly with Israel.
LOL!
You said — “My best guess is that something is eating the bees.”
From what I’ve read before, they find dead bodies elsewhere. They never make it back home. The speculation is that their navigation systems are getting messed up because of the cell tower signals and they lose their way home — can’t find it and die...
You said — “So I’m guessing the free market can’t solve this problem, right. Grow the food in a controlled environment and use a machine to cross pollinate or do some gene splicing or something. Sheesh.”
Well, there was some world-renowned scientist (can’t recall his name right now, but I thought it was amazing coming from him) — that said if the bees were to disappear, in three years the world would be starving.
They haven’t disappeared yet, but it sounds as if they’re going pretty fast — and it’s worldwide, too.
Every year, one or two swarms move into the walls of our 200 year old farmhouse. We’ve already seen them this year. Last year, they were swarming all around the house! It was a little unnerving. Also, we don’t have cell phone service out here, so nobody in our area can use cell phones. Coincidence?
Yes. Cellphones operate at between 800 MHz and several GHz, so it seems that some objective tests by an objective agency would be in order to check on that speculation. That’s nearly a billion cycles per second or more, BTW. It’s difficult to believe that bees can receive interference at such frequencies.
Oh well, it was just a thought. :-)
bz bz bz ... bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz ... bz bz bz
Roger that.
I suggest if they are getting lost that we glue thread to them, with micro winch to bring them home at the end of the day.
Or could put mini transmitter/receiver on their backs, so if they get confused they can call home.
It’s hard to see how cell phones would kill off bees. They generate radio waves, and radio has been around since 1900. Of course, there is a lot more now, but it should be easy to test if radio waves kill bees, shouldn’t it?
I blame Bigfoot, otherwise someone, somewhere would have seen the predator(s) capable of consuming billions of honey bees.
I am a beekeeper and the problem is mostly hype. Disappearing disease hits bees periodically and in some areas severely reduces the population. No one really knows what causes it but the bees come back just fine.
Almond pollination requires about a million colonies. The Almonds were pollinated. There was not a major shortage of colonies. The same for the east coast and blueberry pollination which requires about 60,000 colonies. There will be no shortage of colonies.
There is a problem but it is with the Varroa and Tracheal mites. Varroa controls have lost their effectiveness and most of the losses can be attributed to it. Tracheal has been under the radar for a long time, since it appeared to be under control. The current symptoms of the problem are almost exactly like Tracheal mites. Tracheal mites thrive when bees are confined such as winter and when bees are transported. Almost all the reports are from commercial operations where both conditions can be found.
All the losses in my State (which is no longer Fla) were from mites, but that did not stop one large operation from saying it was colony collapse, even though his bees had a high mite load before the collapse. Made the papers so more hype.
The cell phone trial was bogus since it was clear the testers did not have any knowledge of bees and how they forage.
All the usual suspects are attaching their cause to the “crisis” including anti-GMO, anti-pesticide, anti-cell phone, anti-industrialization, global warming, and people trying to make a buck out or hysteria.
The problem has been with us before and is with us now and the world did not come to an end.
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