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Weekly Archives:
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Sun, Jan 31, 2010
from Telegraph.com:
Row threatens plan to save bees
The British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA), the country's largest beekeeping body, believes that money put aside for a £2.8 million Whitehall initiative to protect the health of honeybees is being misspent.
The organisation has now walked out of the management board set up to run the Healthy Bees strategy, which is aimed at reversing the decline in honeybees in Britain.... The report says that without them, many crops would need to be pollinated by hand, an exercise that could cost 1.5 billion pounds a year.
If such action was not taken, farm income could slump by 13 per cent, costing the economy more than 440 million pounds.
The latest research has revealed that managed honeybee populations in England have declined by 54 per cent in the past 20 years while numbers of wild bees such as bumblebees have also plummeted. ...
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Bureaucracy trumps bees any day, right?
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Thu, Jan 28, 2010
from Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, via EurekAlert:
Fewer honey bee colonies and beekeepers throughout Europe
The number of bee colonies in Central Europe has decreased over recent decades. In fact, the number of beekeepers has been declining in the whole of Europe since 1985. This is the result of a study that has now been published by the International Bee Research Association, which for the first time has provided an overview of the problem of bee colony decline at the European level. Until now there had only been the reports from individual countries available. As other pollinators such as wild bees and hoverflies are also in decline, this could be a potential danger for pollinator services, on which many arable crops depend.... Through the investigation, the mystery of bee losses has by no means been solved, emphasize the scientists, who were however able to add another piece to the puzzle. Furthermore, the data would have to be interpreted very carefully because of the very different evaluation methods in individual countries. "With the limited evidence available it is neither possible to identify the actual driver of honey bee losses in Europe nor to give a complete answer on the trends for colonies and beekeepers...." ...
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What a buzzkill.
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Wed, Jan 20, 2010
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Bee numbers in England fell by more than half over the last 20 years
The University of Reading research found there was a 54 per cent decline in managed honey bee populations in England between 1985 and 2005 compared to an average of 20 per cent across Europe.
It comes as separate research in France suggested the reason bee numbers are falling is because of intensive agriculture that has led to a fall in the number of wild flowers and plants.... Dr Potts, who will be speaking on the subject in front of MPs this week, blamed the increased use of pesticides, bee disease such as the varroa mite and intensive agriculture.
Meanwhile, in a separate study, the National Institute of Agronomic Research in Avignon proved for the first time that a more diverse diet of different kinds of pollen can boost bee immunity.
This suggests that the monoculture used in today's intensive farming techniques may be contributing to the decline of the honey bee. ...
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I know! Let's spray bee-vitamins to boost their bee-immune systems!
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Thu, Jan 7, 2010
from Yale 360:
Behind Mass Die-Offs, Pesticides Lurk as Culprit
Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation's major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation's aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year.
But as regulators grapple with the lethal dangers of pesticides, scientists are discovering that even seemingly benign, low-level exposures to pesticides can affect wild creatures in subtle, unexpected ways -- and could even be contributing to a rash of new epidemics pushing species to the brink of extinction.
In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and -- most recently -- bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years. ...
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Aren't bats, frogs, and bugs simply pests anyway?
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Sun, Nov 15, 2009
from Boston Globe:
Bat soup in bat hell
Thomas Kunz emerges from Aeolus cave in East Dorset, Vermont, with a half-dozen metal ID bands -- smaller than SpaghettiOs -- cupped in the palm of his latex-gloved hand. They're tiny emblems of death, having once been affixed to the forearms of little brown bats. The renowned bat biologist from Boston University, who bears a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford, minutes earlier had recovered the bands while trudging, like a real-life Indiana Jones, through a slippery mud-like ooze of rotting bat carcasses, liquefied internal organs, toothpick-sized bones, piles of guano, and a strange white fungus on the cave floor.
If bats had come out of hell, it couldn't have been worse than this.
"What we saw was bat soup. There were a lot of bones of wings and skulls and emulsified bodies," Kunz says. "There were dead bats -- decomposing bats -- hanging from the walls of the cave. ...
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Bats as sympathetic characters... Who woulda thought!
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Sat, Oct 17, 2009
from Forbes:
Bad Buzz For Bayer
A documentary on the declining population of bees worldwide is causing a migraine for German drug company Bayer.
In Vanishing of the Bees, which opened in British theaters this month, beekeepers blame neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides produced by Bayer ( BAYRY.PK - news - people ), for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder. They theorize that neonicotinoids disrupt bees' navigational abilities, making them dizzy and unable to find their way back to the hive. There's more at stake than honey on your cereal. Without bee pollination, a third of the earth's food crops would fail. ...
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If only the bees had cellphones, equipped w/ GPS.
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Thu, Oct 1, 2009
from London Times:
Every species on the planet documented in new report
Almost 10 per cent of known species are threatened with extinction, according to the first comprehensive study of the world's wildlife.
Polar bears, whose habitat is threatened by melting ice, and Tasmanian devils, which have been pushed to the brink of extinction by a cancer, are just two of the tens of thousands of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians that are in danger.
The report, The Number of Living Species in Australia and the World , published by the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), says that 9.2 per cent of known animal species are endangered by habitat loss, climate change and other pressures.
More than a fifth of of all known mammals are endangered, as are 29 per cent of amphibians and 12 per cent of birds, according to the study, the result of an international effort to catalogue every known current and extinct species of plant and animal. ...
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It'll be nice to have that catalogue handy when we rue the loss of these species...
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Wed, Sep 30, 2009
from Memphis Commercial Appeal:
Enthusiasts aren't souring on oldest form of agriculture
Honey is in deep trouble. You could call it the Apocalypse of the Bees.
Late in 2006, beekeepers in North America noticed that worker bees were suddenly disappearing from their hives. Without worker bees to attend to the brood, to maintain the hive and gather nectar to turn into honey, the colony will collapse, hence the term "colony collapse disorder." The beekeeping industry was devastated. Colony loss in North America for 2006-2007 was 32 percent; for 2007-2008, 36 percent; from Sept. 2009 through April 2009 the rate of loss dropped to 29 percent.
"Oh, we've been hit by CCD," said Hughes, "and also by the South African hive beetle. I lost half my hives in one year, and now we're down to about 80 from 300."
"It's unquestionable that the beekeeping industry is facing very serious problems," said Richard Underhill, president of the Tennessee Beekeepers Association. "And it goes back beyond CCD. Bees have been declining in numbers for about 20 years, due to a variety of predators and viruses and to environmental conditions, like chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. CCD, of course, is the most obvious and sudden and visible of the issues." ...
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More sales of high-fructose corn syrup! What a boon to farmers!
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Sat, Sep 26, 2009
from Guardian (UK):
UK warned as plague of bee-eating hornets spreads north in France
For five years they have wreaked havoc in the fields of south-western France, scaring locals with their venomous stings and ravaging the bee population to feed their rapacious appetites. Now, according to French beekeepers, Asian predatory hornets have been sighted in Paris for the first time, raising the prospect of a nationwide invasion which entomologists fear could eventually reach Britain.... If confirmed by further testing, the find will raise fears that the spread of the bee-eating Vespa velutina is no longer limited to the Aquitaine region near Bordeaux, where it is believed to have arrived on board container ships from China in 2004, and the surrounding south-west.... Neither pesticides nor traps have proved particularly effective, largely because the creatures nest high off the ground in trees. The Vespa velutina has no natural predator on European soil. ...
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Not to worry -- their food supply will eventually just run out.
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Wed, Sep 9, 2009
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Pesticides blamed for killing bees
In recent years bee populations around the world have plummeted, with British bee keepers losing a fifth of hives over last winter.
But the cause of the sudden decline has not been identified. Now a new study by the insect research charity Buglife and the Soil Association has claimed the decline was caused in part by a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids.
The "systemic" chemical, that kills unwanted insects by getting into the cell of the plant, is widely used on farms in Britain for crops like oilseed rape and the production of pot plants.... The new study brought together a number of peer-reviewed pieces of research. It concluded that neonicotinoid pesticide damages the health and life cycle of bees over the long term by affecting the nervous system.
"[Neonicotinoids] may be a significant factor contributing to current bee declines and could also contribute to declines in other non-target invertebrate species," the report read. ...
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Hooray! It's not cell phones!
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Mon, Aug 31, 2009
from St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Researchers find a clue to honeybee deaths
Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a clue in the gut of honey bees that might help identify a deadly disorder that's killing off some of the world's most important pollinators.
In bees affected by what's now known as a colony collapse disorder, or CCD, researchers found breakdowns in the factories, or ribosomes, that manufacture essential proteins. Healthy bees did not have as many ribosomal fragments in their guts as those affected by colony collapse disorder, according to the Illinois study, which was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"They are overrepresented in CCD bees, significantly overrepresented," said May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois entomology professor and one of the study's authors. "The one consistent indicator of CCD across samples collected and in multiple times and in multiple places was the overabundance of ribosomal fragments." ...
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Maybe we can get worker bees to stitch those ribosomal fragments back together!
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Tue, Jul 21, 2009
from Saanich News:
Bees are back as scientists uncover cause of colony collapse disorder
By the time it started to make headlines three years ago, colony collapse disorder had already wiped out thousands of hives across North America and Europe.
Beekeepers and biologists were confounded as to a possible cause. Theories ranged from man-made disruptions, like cell phone radiation or pesticides, to natural causes such as solar flares, parasites or viruses.... While the science isn’t completely settled, it’s increasingly pointing to a single-celled parasite, Nosema ceranae, as the prime cause... ...
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'Least my cellphone is off the hook.
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Sat, Jun 6, 2009
from McClatchy Newspapers:
Deadly bat disease spreading fast, scientists warn lawmakers
A mysterious disease that's killing tens of thousands of bats in the Northeast is spreading so fast that it could reach California within five years, biologists and officials of the Agriculture and Interior departments told lawmakers Thursday. Never in my wildest imagination would I have dreamed of anything that could pose this serious a threat to America's bats," Merlin Tuttle , a biologist with Bat Conservation International who's studied the creatures for 50 years, told two House of Representatives subcommittees.... The disease, called "white-nose syndrome," makes bats awaken from hibernation prematurely and leave their caves. Freezing, unable to find insects to eat, they fall from the sky and die. ...
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If this isn't one of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse, then it's time to add one.
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Mon, May 18, 2009
from Salon:
Pesticides indicted in bee deaths
Gene Brandi will always rue the summer of 2007. That's when the California beekeeper rented half his honeybees, or 1,000 hives, to a watermelon farmer in the San Joaquin Valley at pollination time. The following winter, 50 percent of Brandi's bees were dead.... Brandi has grown accustomed to seeing up to 40 percent of his bees vanish each year, simply leave the hive in search of food and never come back. But this was different. Instead of losing bees from all his colonies, Brandi watched the ones that skipped watermelon duty continue to thrive.
Brandi discovered the watermelon farmer had irrigated his plants with imidacloprid, the world's best-selling insecticide created by Bayer CropScience Inc., one of the world's leading producers of pesticides and genetically modified vegetable seeds, with annual sales of $8.6 billion. Blended with water and applied to the soil, imidacloprid creates a moist mixture the bees likely drank from on a hot day.... Imidacloprid and clothianidin are chloronicotinoids, a synthetic compound that combines nicotine, a powerful toxin, with chlorine to attack an insect's nervous system. The chemical is applied to the seed of a plant, added to soil, or sprayed on a crop and spreads to every corner of the plant's tissue, killing the pests that feed on it. ...
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It's so shocking when insecticides kill insects.
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Tue, Apr 21, 2009
from Associated Press:
Honeybee shortage worries Japanese farmers
People working in agriculture are worrying that a nationwide shortage of honeybees used to cross-pollinate strawberries, watermelon and other fruits and vegetable crops will hurt harvests soon...an investigation by the Chiba prefectural government found that farmers in the prefecture had secured only about 70 percent of the needed number of honeybees....The farm ministry... began negotiations with Argentina to import honeybees from there. Butprofessor Jun Nakamura of Tamagawa University's Honeybee Science Research Center said Africanized honeybees, which are highly aggressive and sometimes attack humans, live in the northern part of Argentina.
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Those Africanized honeybees are SUCH a bad influence!
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Fri, Mar 6, 2009
from BBC:
'No proof' of bee killer theory
Scientists say there is no proof that a mysterious disease blamed for the deaths of billions of bees actually exists.
For five years, increasing numbers of unexplained bee deaths have been reported worldwide, with US commercial beekeepers suffering the most.
The term Colony Collapse Disorder was coined to describe the illness.
But many experts now believe that the term is misleading and there is no single, new ailment killing the bees. ...
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I still say it's 'cause the bees are using their cellphones too much!
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Sun, Feb 1, 2009
from London Times:
Plight of the humble bee
Native British bees are dying out -- and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done?...Most people do now get the point about honeybees. Following the multiple crises that continue to empty the hives -- foulbrood, varroa mites, viral diseases, dysfunctional immune systems, and now the mysterious but globally devastating colony-collapse disorder (CCD) -- it is understood that the true value of Apis mellifera lies not so much in the sticky stuff that gives our favourite insect its name as in the service it provides as a pollinator of farms and gardens. If you add retailers’ profit to farm gate prices, their value to the UK economy is in the region of 1 billion a year, and 35 percent of our diet is directly dependent on them. It is an equation of stark simplicity. No pollination: no crops. There is nothing theoretical about it. The reality is in (or, more accurately, not in) the hives. The US has lost 70 percent of its honeybee colonies over the past two winters. Losses in the UK currently are running at 30 percent a year -- up from just 6 percent in 2003. ...
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Honey, I ruined the planet... and there's no where to hive!
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Tue, Jan 27, 2009
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Supermarket chain bans use of pesticides in bid to save bees
The supermarket chain Co-op has banned foods grown using pesticides that harm honey bees.... The use of pesticides have been blamed for the collapse and yesterday the Co-operative announced it was banning any foods grown using the chemicals from their own range of fresh products.... Co-operative Farms -- the UK's biggest farmer with 25,000 hectares -- will also invite beekeepers to establish hives on its land as part of a 10-point "Plan Bee". ...
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Hey Safeway, Giant, Kroger... whadda you got!?
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Fri, Jan 9, 2009
from Yahoo/AP:
Tangerine growers tell beekeepers to buzz off
Is it trespassing when bees do what bees do in California's tangerine groves?
That is the question being weighed by state agriculture officials caught between beekeepers who prize orange blossom honey and citrus growers who blame the bees for causing otherwise seedless mandarin oranges to develop pips.... Beekeepers say that, with development in the state's agricultural regions, there already are a limited number of places to take the bees for feeding.
"Our winter losses are increasing (because of colony collapse), and part of the problem is finding places to put bees where they have access to natural food, and citrus is part of that," said Gene Brandi, a Los Banos beekeeper and legislative liaison for the California State Beekeepers Association. [thanks, Janet!] ...
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This is somehow like that orange-burning scene in "The Pips of Wrath."
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Sat, Dec 6, 2008
from Science News:
Honeybee CSI: Why dead bodies can't be found
...Beehives across North America continue to lose their workers for reasons not yet understood, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. But new tests suggest how a virus nicknamed IAPV might be to blame for one of the more puzzling aspects of the disorder—the impression that substantial numbers of bees vanish into thin air.
In tests on hives in a greenhouse, bees infected with IAPV (short for Israeli acute paralytic virus) rarely died in the hive. Sick bees expired throughout the greenhouse, including near the greenhouse wall...Outdoors, the bees could scatter across the landscape where the occasional dead insect wouldn’t be easily noticed before scavengers found it.
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If they'd listened to my idea -- fit each worker bee with a tiny GPS device -- they would have known this long ago.
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Mon, Nov 17, 2008
from Telegraph.co.uk:
The animals and plants we cannot live without -- five experts
Nearly 17,000 species are now considered to be threatened with extinction and 869 species are classed as extinct or extinct in the wild on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List. In the last year alone 183 species became more endangered.
Now, in the face of the growing threat posed by environmental changes around the globe, five leading scientists are to argue whether there is a single type of plant or animal which the planet really cannot afford to lose.
The debate, titled Irreplaceable -- The World's Most Invaluable Species, will see five experts present the case for the world's most important animals and plants from a shortlist of five: primates, bats, bees, fungi and plankton. ...
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We have to choose?
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Tue, Oct 28, 2008
from The Argosy:
Biosphere barely balancing
The environment appears to be swiftly falling to pieces around us. Though television commercials about carbon emissions, and reusable shopping bags signal greater awareness of the issues, our environment is in crisis, particularly our biodiversity. In the Americas alone, bats, bees and bananas appear to be in serious danger, which in turn threatens human life.... In a world where every ecosystem is connected and every species has an impact, losing biodiversity means a lot more for the human race than just having to shorten the 'B' section of the Children's encyclopedia. ...
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But... but... but...
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Tue, Oct 21, 2008
from London Daily Telegraph:
Bumblebee decline threatens British countryside
The continuing decline in bees will destroy the British countryside as important iconic plants die without pollination, experts have warned. They are also key to a number of rare flowers including fox gloves, honey suckle and a range of wild orchids that cannot be pollinated by other insects. However bumblebees are in sharp decline. Of the 25 species found in the UK, three are nationally extinct and many more are seriously threatened. ...
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Perhaps we could release animatronic bumblebees into the British countryside!
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Sat, Oct 18, 2008
from Natural News:
Cell Phones May be Wiping out Bees and Affecting Health of Humans
But one of the most popular theories is that electromagnetic radiation given off by cell phones and other hi-tech gadgets is causing this worrying phenomenon. The theory is that radiation interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to the hive, which is a hallmark trait of bees.
And there is actual evidence to back this up. German research has long shown that bees change their natural patterns of behavior near power lines.
In addition, a study at Landau University has found that bees do not go back to their hives when cell phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
[Editor's note: from International Herald Tribune: "Good story for sure, except that the study in question had nothing to do with mobile phones and was actually investigating the influence of electromagnetic fields, especially those used by cordless phones that work on fixed-line networks, on the learning ability of bees. The small study, according to the researchers who carried it out too small for the results to be considered significant, found that the electromagnetic fields similar to those used by cordless phones may interrupt the innate ability of bees to find the way back to their hive."] (Thanks, Bud)
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The subscriber you are trying to reach is not available in its hive.
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Sat, Sep 13, 2008
from Dallas News:
Researcher says numbers of bumblebees declining, too
Ms. Colla took field surveys of bumblebees between 2004 and 2006 in southern Ontario, comparing the results with data gathered in the early 1970s. She could find only 11 species, down from 14, and of those 11, four were in decline.... The Xerces Society is assembling the data of approximately 30 scientists in North America to document the state of the bumblebee, which is also an important pollinator.... "You look at all their data, and what we see is really discouraging," says Scott Hoffman Black, the society's executive director. "It's a picture of a really drastic decline toward extinction." ...
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Let's just genetically modify all those pollination-requiring plants to reproduce via spores.
That'll solve it!
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Thu, Sep 4, 2008
from Detroit News:
Stung by mysterious die-offs, Michigan beekeepers worry about impact
As beekeepers harvest honey this month, they face an uncertain future that could bring higher food prices as bees mysteriously continue to vanish from hives... Experts calculate a quarter of the estimated 2.4 million colonies across the U.S. have been lost in the last two years to colony collapse disorder. The reason -- or reasons -- remains unknown. The use of pesticides, a fungus, parasitic mites and even stress and the bees' diet are all theories.
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Wasn't there a time when bees' overuse of cellphones was proposed as a cause?
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Wed, Sep 3, 2008
from London Daily Telegraph:
English honey harvest halved after catastrophic drop in bee numbers
The annual English honey harvest has dropped to half of its normal level this year, with the appalling summer weather compounding the effects of the sudden and unexplained collapse in the number of bees.
Keepers, farmers and industry have held their first crisis talks over fears that the British honey bee population could be facing near extinction within five years.
There are now fears that English honey could disappear altogether unless the dramatic decline in bee colonies is arrested. ...
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If it was money instead of honey that was so threatened, you better believe there'd be a solution!
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Wed, Aug 27, 2008
from Popular Science:
New research finds higher-than-expected levels of pesticides in hives
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates agricultural pesticide use, but this regulation does not account for the interaction of these chemicals that inevitably takes place through the bees' pollination processes. Some of these combinations of pesticides have been found to have a synergistic effect hundreds of times more toxic than any of the pesticides individually, says James L. Frazier, professor of entomology at Penn State.... These changes include immune system blocks and disorientation, which may help to explain the CCD crisis of late. ...
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Sort of like mixing gin and tequila.
Only lots worse.
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Tue, Aug 19, 2008
from San Francisco Chronicle:
Lawsuit seeks EPA pesticide data
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is refusing to disclose records about a new class of pesticides that could be playing a role in the disappearance of millions of honeybees in the United States, a lawsuit filed Monday charges. The Natural Resources Defense Council wants to see the studies that the EPA required when it approved a pesticide made by Bayer CropScience five years ago.
The environmental group filed the suit as part of an effort to find out how diligently the EPA is protecting honeybees from dangerous pesticides..." ...
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Just whom, do you suppose, the EPA is protecting?
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Wed, Aug 13, 2008
from Guardian (UK):
UK Honeybee deaths reaching crisis point
Britain's honeybees have suffered catastrophic losses this year, according to a survey of the nation's beekeepers, contributing to a shortage of honey and putting at risk the pollination of fruits and vegetables.
The survey by the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) revealed that nearly one in three of the UK's 240,000 honeybee hives did not survive this winter and spring.
The losses are higher than the one in five colonies reported dead earlier this year by the government after 10 percent of hives had been inspected.
The BBKA president, Tim Lovett, said he was very concerned about the findings: "Average winter bee losses due to poor weather and disease vary from between 5 percent and 10 percent, so a 30 percent loss is deeply worrying. This spells serious trouble for pollination services and honey producers." ...
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I think that honey jar is 2/3 full!
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Sat, Aug 2, 2008
from The Daily Green:
Evidence That Pesticides Are Seriously Messing Up Our Honey Bees
"...They've found some incredible numbers taken from samples taken last year - one bee, a single, solitary bee, had 25 different insecticides hidden within her tiny body. And she wasn't even dead. The cleanest bee they found had only five insecticides. Only."
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So, are we, like, gonna ignore that little cell phone she's using all the time to call her, like, honeybee-friends?
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Wed, Jul 23, 2008
from NaturalNews.com:
Colony Collapse Disorder Debunked: Pesticides Cause Bee Deaths
"The great mystery of bee deaths has been solved. Colony Collapse Disorder is poisoning with a known insect neurotoxin. Clothianidin, a pesticide manufactured by Bayer, has been clearly linked to die offs in Germany and France.
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Oy. Trying to follow this story... it just gives me a headache!
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Mon, Jun 30, 2008
from Society for General Virology, via EurekAlert:
Bee disease a mystery
Deformed wing virus (DWV) is passed between adult bees and to their developing brood by a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor when it feeds. However, research published in the July issue of the Journal of General Virology suggests that the virus does not replicate in Varroa, highlighting the need for further investigation.... "[W]e still don't know exactly how these viruses are passed from the mite to the bee." ...
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"More study is needed.
Well, um, yeah.
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Mon, Jun 2, 2008
from Guardian (UK):
Last flight of the honeybee?
Close on two million colonies of honeybees across the US have been wiped out. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD), is also thought to have claimed the lives of billions of honeybees around the world. In Taiwan, 10 million honeybees were reported to have disappeared in just two weeks, and throughout Europe honeybees are in peril.... "It's those new neonicotinoid pesticides that growers are using," he says. "That's what's messing up the bees' navigation system so they can't find their way home." ... With innocuous brand names such as Gaucho, Assail and Merit, these pesticides are used worldwide, from sunflower fields to apple orchards, lawns to golf courses. The chemicals they contain are an artificial type of nicotine that acts as a neurotoxin that attacks insects' nervous systems on contact or ingestion. ...
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Neonicotine gives these bees too much of a buzz.
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Sun, May 25, 2008
from London Guardian:
So what's Plan Bee?
"In the last few months, the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA), which claims almost 12,000 members, has begun speaking words of doom. 'Nation's honeybees could be wiped out in 10 years' the organisation claimed in December." ...
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Honey, I screwed up the planet.
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Sun, May 11, 2008
from The Milford Daily News:
Honeybee deaths still on the rise
"Colony collapse disorder started appearing in hives in the past two years and is marked by massive desertion and die-offs in bee yards. Theories on its cause range from microwaves from cell phone use to a combination of poor nutrition, varroa mites - an external parasite of honeybees - and stress. This week, a national survey of bee health from the Apiary Inspectors of America showed 36.1 percent of beehives were lost since last year. That's up from the previous year's losses of 32 percent." ...
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To our knowledge no one has theorized that the drones are sick of slaving for the queen!
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Fri, Apr 18, 2008
from Bergen County Record:
Honeybees on rebound in North Jersey
"Honeybees are on the rebound in North Jersey. After a strange affliction known as colony collapse disorder devastated honeybee colonies nationwide and caused a 45 percent mortality rate in New Jersey a year ago, local beekeepers are reporting far fewer deaths." ...
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Our bonnet has been full of bad news about bees but this news is the bee's knees!
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Sat, Apr 12, 2008
from London Daily Telegraph:
Pollution is making flowers smell less
"Air pollution from power plants and cars is destroying the fragrance and thereby inhibiting the ability of pollinating insects to follow scent trails to their source, a new University of Virginia study indicates. This could partially explain why wild populations of some pollinators, particularly bees - which need nectar for food - are declining in areas around the world, from California to the Netherlands.... The result, potentially, is a vicious cycle where pollinators struggle to find enough food to sustain their populations, and populations of flowering plants, in turn, do not get pollinated sufficiently to proliferate and diversify."
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Maybe the flowers need little gas masks.
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Tue, Mar 11, 2008
from Science Daily (US):
MegaBee Nourishes Beleaguered Honey Bees
... [A] new, convenient source of proteins, vitamins and minerals that bees need for good health. Bees can eat MegaBee as a meal or snack when days are too cold for venturing outside of their warm hive, for example, or when flowers -- bearing pollen and nectar, the staple foods for adult bees -- aren't yet in bloom.
Better nutrition might be a key to reversing the decline of honey bees, Apis mellifera, in the United States. A mostly mysterious colony collapse disorder is blamed for losses of once-thriving colonies, as are problems caused by mites, beetles, Africanized honey bees, diseases and pesticides. ...
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Sweet! A nutritional supplement for the bees.
We hope they have one for bats, soon. Not to mention all those wild pollinators. And the fishes, don't forget the fishes, and the songbirds...
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Mon, Feb 25, 2008
from 60 Minutes:
Honey Bees and Colony Collapse
"Normally, if there weren't soldier bees to protect a hive's honey, all the honey would be poached by bees from other hives in short order. But, this beekeeper said, "The hives are like a ghost town. The honey's there. The other bees won't touch it." He showed the honey, just sitting there in the dead hive." ...
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The bee colonies are still collapsing; this week's 60 Minutes story may create help some buzz.
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Sun, Jan 13, 2008
from The Canadian:
Catastrophic Bee de-populations
"It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature."
In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed." ...
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Some suspect that the genetically modified pest-resistant plant pollen might be causing the bee problem. 40 percent of US fields are planted with the GM crops.
Gosh, insect toxins built into the plants -- why would bees be affected?
Whattaya mean, you didn't test for that?
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