Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.
Welcome to my career.
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 ...
Somebody will connect this to “global warming” and then that will be all over the news.
like I said, “Global Swarming.”
I was just reading Revelation 9 and I’m thinking that those might be praying mantises too. Ironic that they’d be involved in the end of the world.
ROFLMAO!!
I love this place. I figured at some point, some one that actually knows what they are talking about would post some actual information. And I got a couple of good laughs going through the posts to get to the real info.
I hope that there truly is a logical explanation. Poster KeyWest has provided some good commentary on this. However, the one bee colony that I want to see go extinct is the McClatchy Bees.
I read this, and thought it hysterical hype to the extreme. I don't care who said it.
Life existed all across North AMerica, and flourished, without honeybees, which were introduced by early European settlers. Go out and check your flowers some time, lots are visited by other insects, and these other insects will fill the niche.
We just need to import mexican honeybees. You know, the bees that will do the jobs american honeybees won’t do.
“I am a beekeeper and “
Thank you!! It’s been literally impossible to get a straight story on this from anywhere. Once again FR provides the facts.
LOLZ
Welcome to my career.
Must be more common than I thought. Given the relative size and weight differences, you'd think a preying mantis wouldn't stand a chance against a hummingbird. Watching the male hummers fight at the feeder, they seem like vicious critters, too.
Bees run a HUGE amount of the pollination process, with out them, ... shudder... This is a real issue folks. Not something to take lightly.
That was the funniest line in the whole Album! I laughed my butt off when I was a kid and first heard it.
My mom gave that album away to Goodwill or something.
I wish I still had it somedays...good times.
It’s Bush’s fault.
I’m not sure why, but it has to bee.
You are correct this is not new.
Now to go get me some tupelo honey.
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