Posted on 04/07/2007 7:02:03 AM PDT by Nomorjer Kinov
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.
Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent.
According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.
"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.
It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.
There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s.
And the number of beekeepers has halved.
The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.
Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.
"The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California," Brandi said.
California's almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.
The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.
The usual suspects to which bees are known to be vulnerable such as the varroa mite, an external parasite which attacks honey bees and which can wipe out a hive, appear not to be the main cause.
"CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill," entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told the Congress committee.
In cases of colony collapse disorder, flourishing hives are suddenly depopulated leaving few, if any, surviving bees behind.
The queen bee, which is the only one in the hive allowed to reproduce, is found with just a handful of young worker bees and a reserve of food.
Curiously though no dead bees are found either inside or outside the hive.
The fact that other bees or parasites seem to shun the emptied hives raises suspicions that some kind of toxin or chemical is keeping the insects away, Cox-Foster said.
Those bees found in such devastated colonies also all seem to be infected with multiple micro-organisms, many of which are known to be behind stress-related illness in bees.
Scientists working to unravel the mysteries behind CCD believe a new pathogen may be the cause, or a new kind of chemical product which could be weakening the insects' immune systems.
The finger of suspicion is being pointed at agriculture pesticides such as the widely-used neonicotinoides, which are already known to be poisonous to bees.
France saw a huge fall in its bee population in the 1990s, blamed on the insecticide Gaucho which has now been banned in the country.
Beam me up Data!
Without a "mission" (so to speak) are the bees losing their way and dying elsewhere?
I'm thinking along the lines of "viagra" in the broadest sense of thought. Obviously, viagra supplies a chemical to the male organism which bypasses a existent problem. Without the viagra -- no "can do".
(Yep, I'm slow this morning.)
It's not that unusual for some of them to split off and go make another hive somewhere nearby. You've got to rob the honey and keep them busy so they don't do that. Keeping them busy keeps them from being agressive, too. Capturing the queen helps, also. My neighbor's let a couple of their hives go last year and some bees turned up in my wisteria vines. They made a comb, but didn't survive the summer. Some others wound up in a hollow tree in another neigbor's yard across the road, but none were more than a half mile from the original hives. The fact that they are just disappearing and not showing up elsewhere is very strange, especially when they're not finding dead bees.
We need guest worker bees to do the jobs that American bees just won’t do.
sw
The Chinese took them.
HKS killed them. Drunken
Mexicans hit them.
Giuliani ate
them. They left to get away
from Katie Couric.
Tom Cruise made them join
Scientology and now
they're too cool to buzz . . .
(I apologize
if I missed someone's tin foil,
this was off the cuff . . .)
But then again, perhaps Monsanto plans to announce their newest R&D commodity for sale.
That sounds more like simply that most stores were selling hybridized seeds that don’t breed “true” from the seeds they produce.
There are still a lot of “wild” flowers though, things like clover and such, as well as fruit tree flowers, which for the most part are the same varieties they’ve always grown. Something else might be at work here. Also ornamentals.
Some folks plant ornamentals to keep rodents away and reduce "mess". Could an ingredient in the ornamentals be contributing negatively to loss in bee colonies? I wonder.
Yes, and there was a huge “liberal” political movement behind this.
Invest in tinfoil.
I agree with the possibility of agri-terrorism. IIRC, there was something about the Middle East and honey at one time and I thought it was associated with Usama.
Bee afraid.
Bee very afraid.
Somewhere, home owners got sold on the uniform green grass lawn which requires constant maintenance, care and tons of lawn chemicals to remain uniform.
I've gone the other way, encourgaging clover growth and actually get quite a few bees in my yard to the point that I've thought about putting out a hive.
But that isn't the whole solution either-- bee habitat has not disappeared at near the rate at which bees have disappeared. The loss of honey bees is a genuine crisis, it deserves a lot more attention than the manufactured global warming crisis. My grandfather was an etymologist. He's been gone nearly 20 years now but I do remember him warning of a potential crisis if we don't train new people to enter the field.
And they can take the fire ants with them too!! Ouch! :-(
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