An Answer To the Bee Disappearances

I created a new thread on this because I felt it was important enough not to get lost in the shuffle of the existing thread, and didn't want people to panic about all life dying out on Earth.

Now, admittedly, I need to give credit where credit is due. If it hadn't been for an episode of The Colbert Report giving an alert on bees, I'd have never remotely thought to check into this further. However, since I did, I think we can all relax now.

The Bees Aren't Dead. They Just Moved

I wanted to clarify a few things about Colony Collapse Disorder. One is that the issue is not that bees are dying off in massive numbers, the issue is that they are disappearing in massive numbers. That is a core point. The bodies haven't been found, they had been presumed dead after disappearing. The first reports of this started coming in around 2006.

However, it's recently been discovered that bees are flourishing in abandoned homes. In this article by the New York Times, from April of 2008, there's this particular quote:

Mr. Councell (ed. a fourth generation beekeeper and licensed bee remover.) said he noticed an increase in calls to vacant houses two years ago, and steadily more since then. “If that continues, then we’ve got a big problem,” he said.

Note the "two years ago" part, 2006. The same year that beekeepers started noticing the massive disappearances of swarms.

The U.S. Housing Market Bubble began its collapse in 2005, and by 2006, unoccupied homes began to significantly increase in number.

So I think the answer to Colony Collapse Disorder isn't a disease, virus, predator, toxin, or cell phone waves... It's simply that there's now large, unoccupied, undisturbed structures sitting vacant around many areas of the U.S. that act as a very attractive alternative for bees to occupy, and the availability of these unoccupied, unmaintained, undisturbed homes has increased in number each year following 2005, starting around 2006. The same year Colony Collapse Disorder was first reported.

It makes sense that it took a couple of years for people to realize this, and I bet dollars to donuts that this becomes the consensus in just a few weeks or months. So while it's still a good idea to remain prepared and vigilant against Situation X, I'm pretty sure the bees didn't die off, they just moved on.

Sounds like they want the security and comfort a nice home can provide...and since the silly humans build them then vacate them, something should live there.

Hopefully it will be found they have just taken up new homes and havent disappeared.

it almost seems human of them doesn't it? Choosing between the commercial hives, artificially created, rife with pests and pesticides and that get moved back and forth across the country and the will of the corps,
or a comfy, stable environment free of the keeper's interference, seems like an easy and logical choice.
the bees know what they are doing - good for them
it was "free willy" now its "free the bees!"
hurray!

I really liked this post here so Im going to copy and paste it here so others can get this info.

Originally posted by thelibra
I'm pretty sure the bees just moved into abandoned/foreclosed houses.

I posted a separate thread on the issue because I felt it was important enough not to get lost in the shuffle. The bees didn't just "die off," and that was never the actual assertion anyway, they had "mysteriously vanished." Entire colonies were just vanishing from beefarms and trees.

Well, it stands to reason: bees like a secure, undisturbed, sheltered environment to build their hives. What better location than houses that were foreclosed on, abandoned, and have sat unoccupied for months or years? If you're a hive-mind, what makes more sense? A small wooden box that gets opened on a daily basis and your honey stolen? Or a large, abandoned house that no one enters or goes near?

There's no shortage of the empty houses. Further, the abandoned homes are nation-wide, and since this typically affects entire neighborhoods at a time, there wouldn't be many people around to notice the problem of a bee-infested empty house. It would also explain why bee bodies haven't been found in numbers equal to the disappearance.

I can say that I did hear about this on the news channle. And many of the bee keepers where saying yes this is true.
The bees never did just vanish.
They simply took up new homes where it was safer and they had much more open space.. Many empty homes that make perfect hives!

Thanks for the info !