I'm going to stockpile honey before the prices go through the roof.
The good news is that it stores quite well....one of the few natural products that needs no refrigeration or preservatives to keep from spoiling.
Welcome abord member number 272,215.
I'm betting it's either mites or a microbe.
A big problem here in So. Dakota, too.
It's not just honey and it's not just honeybees. Whatever is causing this, and it might be ourselves spraying this and that on the crops to reduce crop pests, many of the insects that do similar work are also down. GM crops might also have something to do with it.
Conga-rats or congratulations, looks good :D
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It will be fruit and vegetables that will be high priced. Gotta have those pollinators. When the mites, Varroa and the tracheal first came out, I participated in a study to see if there were native bees that would do the job. Answer: not enough of them. The honeybee as we know it is a European import. It came with the crops that needed the pollination; apples, cucumbers, almonds etc etc. Strawberries, a North American plant, will benefit from the added help. We have imported too much honey from places like China where this disorder probably came from. Your FRreeping Entomologist, Battle Axe
This problem (or a series of related problems) has been going on for some time. Penn State just renamed this problem and made a press release in February - that's why the media has it's undies in a bunch.
Make no mistake, though, this is a real problem. I had huge winter kill this winter myself and the postmortems I did on several colonies showed CCS was behind some losses. Then again, CCS was behind losses last fall, too. Researchers suspect a number of contributing factors, but chiefly, environmental stresses on the bees - significant - and mites acting as vectors for pathogen(s) unknown seem to be the avenues of suspicion. Whether it is viral, bacterological or fungal, or a combination, is unknown. The thing is, this is not a new problem. CCS related problems have been around for at least 5-10 years.
Bees are in trouble, though, and when they are in trouble, we're all in trouble. This is no joke, but the environmentalist idiots will fan the flames of this just as high as they can to feearmonger and agitate for more draconian measures totally unrelated to reality.
I bet Africanized honey bees would do the job.
Hives that are in areas where the colonies are widely separated...... enough to, at least, slow down this "bee plague".
It's almost a parallel to how small businesses are really the backbone of our economy.
The cranberry growers here in Massachusetts had their annual meeting recently, and this turned up to be a significant problem for them as well. Who a thunk that honey bees pollinate cranberries?
How do they get those SCUBA tanks over their tiny wings?
Fireweed honey is the best in my opinion.