Posted on 05/07/2008 10:05:43 AM PDT by NYer
A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.
Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.
As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.
This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."
The survey included 327 operators who account for 19 percent of the country's approximately 2.44 million commercially managed bee hives. The data is being prepared for submission to a journal.
About 29 percent of the deaths were due to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn't.
"What's frightening about CCD is that it's not predictable or understood," vanEngelsdorp said.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania's Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.
The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honey bees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.
Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Daazs' varieties flavor depend on honey bees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.
Is this just a North American problem or world wide? I’m curious about the correlation between density of cell towers and bee problems.
I haven’t.
Most people have no idea how deep. Before there were bees there were very few flowering plants. When bees appeared the number and variety of flowering plants exploded. Today the vast majority of plants are flowering plants and a large percentage of those are primarily pollinated by bees. Apart from grains a huge percentage of plants grown for food depend on bees to pollinate them. There is no substitute.
It is hard to imagine but before there were bees, although the world was filled with plant life, a flower was a very rare thing. Fruit, of the kind that humans like to eat, was non-existent.
L-14, Lobby Level, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: S Pathikonda
Ecosystem services provided by wild bees in NJ and PA, US.
Winfree, Rachael*,1, Williams, Neal2, Kremen, Claire1, 1 University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA2 Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA
ABSTRACT- Ecosystems provide essential services such as water filtration, air purification, and nutrient cycling, yet few ecological studies have quantified the extent of such services, and fewer still have investigated their ecological underpinnings.
We studied crop pollination, an ecosystem service provided by wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apiformes), at 30 sites in the eastern USA. We identified 65 species of wild bees visiting the flowers of four crops (watermelon, tomato, muskmelon, pepper).
Three of the four crops were visited significantly (p ≤ 0.02) more frequently by wild bees than by honey bees, which are domestic bees farmers rent to provide pollination services to crops.
For one crop (watermelon), we developed a Monte Carlo simulation of the pollination process to quantify the magnitude of the ecosystem service provided by wild bees as compared to honey bees. The simulation uses data on bee visitation rates to flowers and per-visit pollen deposition to estimate the total amount of pollen deposited by different types of bees over the lifetime of a watermelon flower.
We found that wild bees provide more pollination services than do honey bees, and that wild bees alone fully pollinate the watermelon crop at 21 of the 23 farms we studied. Pollination services provided by wild bees were not related to environmental variables at either the landscape scale (amount of natural habitat in the surrounding landscape) or the local scale (organic versus conventional farm management).
The lack of environmental correlates may be due to the heterogeneous nature of our study landscapes, in which no farm field is more than a few hundred meters from a natural habitat fragment, and/or the fact that wild bees appear to use human-disturbed habitats in our study region.FWIW-
Maybe God doesn’t like it when we use His food crops to make fuel?
This is a very serious problem which not many folks do not know about. I only recently learned of the importance of honeybees to the pollination of many staple crops. Whether it’s a direct consequence of cell phone towers or disease, it’s crucial that science be given a free rein to investigate and hopefully determine causality...sooner not later.
The limited data is showing that increased hive collapses are localized. We have to remember there are huge parts of North America where this is NO problem. The Dakotas and Canada hardly have these problems. Also, where hives are used in more hilly and mountainous areas are not experiencing these problems. These are clues to figuring it out as well.
Also, we have a tendency to look for one-explanation, one-cause. It is harder for us to accept some notion of multiple-cause as THE cause for CCD. Lots of hives dying? That’s lots of bees to study.
. I think this is more than a little alarmist, for there are many other species of bees, and many other insects that could provide pollination if European honey bees completely die out.
In fact, there were no European honey bees in north American before European colonists brought them over in the early days of the colonies.
There were still vast hardwood forests ( flowering trees, all), native fruits and nuts ( think pecans ), and many, many species of native flowering shrubs and flowers of all kinds. All without European honey bees. Pollination still occurred.
Second, even the worst of die-offs do not kill all species. For example, beavers were nearly trapped out, and thought to be nearly nonexistent in much of the land after trappers nearly eliminated them just a short 100 years ago. But, if you visit the inter-mountain west today, you will find them to have expanded way beyond their pre-trapping era extent, proving that the power of regeneration is amazing, even among mammals, which are not nearly as resilant as insects.
Insects are even more quick to adapt to overcome environmental threats, that's why pesticides have to be changed so often: the insects quickly become resistant.
Furthermore, the oft repeated threats of pesticide blow off are not substantiated. Pesticide application is highly regulated, and any die-offs caused by this would have been documented by the professional beekeepers themselves. After-all, if a farmer who had hired your bees, kills them by accidentally over applying pesticide, don't you think that a claim would be filed ? Since there never seem to be any references to these deaths, I think they may be claimed, but not substantiated, like so many claims of environmental disasters.Believe me, if there was some hard evidence, it'd be all over.
The cell phone tower claim, though oft repeated, has never been substantiated by any data, even anecdotal. We just recently got cell phone towers in these parts, yet the fruit industry seems to be fine pollination wise. And my own fruit trees have bees, and lots of other pollinators aplenty. That's not scientific evidence by any means, but it's just as much as the "everything will die if we don't have European honey bees "people have provided.
All the research I've seen with hard data seem to point to a mite, probably imported with some bees that were imported from Russia. Some will die, some will be resistant and survive to provide the population.
Could it "bee" that bees evolved and lived before flowers appeared to brighten up those ancient landscapes?
That is what I was saying so I don't see the controversy. The article merely extends the known date of the appearance of bees. I can see where you might argue that there were no flowering plants before bees based on that info. but I think that is still up for debate. I was only saying that the great diversity of flowering plants came after the appearance of bees.
While there is only hard proof of such flowers existing about 130 million years ago, there is some circumstantial evidence that they did exist up to 250 million years ago. A chemical used by plants to defend their flowers, oleanane, has been detected in fossil plants that old, including gigantopterids[6], which evolved at that time and bear many of the traits of modern, flowering plants, though they are not known to be flowering plants themselves, because only their stems and prickles have been found preserved in detail; one of the earliest examples of petrification.
It was my understanding that there are some primitive and ancient flowering plants that rely on pollination schemes that evolved before insects could even fly. One family of such plants still lives on represented in the U.S. by Aristolochia spp..
You really sent me back to school, Old Professer. It's a hard day when I have to spend 30 minutes researching to make a reply. ;^)
Unfortunately I can't turn in a finished paper on the subject. Although I found a wealth of research papers on the evolution of the Aristolochiaceae family it is all genetic research and in a quick glance through voluminous technical treatises I find that they aren't speculating on any dates for its appearance. (I suspect cowardice on the part of botanical geneticists. lol)
I concede the ground to you. In utter exhaustion I give up. Uncle! The bees have it.
But if we come back to the present we have a few knowns...I think. Most of our food plants depend on bees to pollinate them. The bees are in trouble.
Good points all.
There are some differences though between early American plant life and its pollinators and the current situation. Most of the plants we rely on for food also came from Europe. The structure of today's societies and the massively bigger world population couldn't survive on wild native plants. A lot of our domesticated crops do depend on honeybees.
It is true that insects adapt quickly and there is no clear data as to why some bee hives are collapsing so it certainly wouldn't be rational to panic. The other side of that coin is that honey bees are so important in feeding mankind today that if they did disappear, practically speaking, it would be a disaster for man. The consequences of not understanding what the problem is or how far it might go has a large potential for disaster.
What I'm trying to say is that IMO it would be more difficult to adapt to a world without honeybees than it would a warmer or cooler climate. Or from replacing petroleum as our main fuel source. If there is a problem with bees it should be more of a concern than those things.
I don't agree for the reasons I listed above. If a catatrosphic die off of honeybees were to happen ( which I think is highly unlikely; we, and nature , would adapt.
I don't think climate change is any big deal either. We are not so fragile, nor is our agriculture.
Grains, none of which are pollinated by bees, feed the world. There would be no need for the world population to survive on wild plants, as the vast majority of the world's foods are grains ( wind-pollinated). Every modern fruit and vegetable crop we have is perfectly able to be pollinated by bees species that aren't affected by CDC, and other insect pollinators.
They are not dying. They’re buzzing off for deep space ahead of the Vogons.
“So long and thanks for all the honey.”
FNC just had an “expert” from the bee industry saying it is the bee mite, which was introduced from Europe, that is killing the bees.
Wrong.....
They navigate by fixing on the sun
Aside.... there are no wild swarms any more.
I’m curious about the mechanism by which cell tower RF interferes with a bee’s navigation. Do you have some sources (links) on that? Thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.