Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

www.guardian.co.uk

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died (cont)

(visit the link for the full news article)

It is interesting to me that we are 4 years into this looming catastrophe and we still have no idea what could be causing it.

The article seems to suggest that pesticides could be at fault but still suggest that it could be anything

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

Yet another looming ecological disaster. We certainly do live in interesting times.



www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Originally posted by Karlhungis

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

I think it is a deadly combo of all of these things.

They are being hit from every side all at once. No wonder the die offs are of catastrophic levels.

Ton's of things are killing them. It's not just 1 single cause.

We need to consider all of these possibilities, and maybe even a few that we have not thought of yet.

Wasn't one of the leading theories that it was all our cell phone towers? Or was that disproved?

In my area bees are going crazy. I cannot say if they are all or one, honeybees, but there are very small bees and very large aggressive ones, and far too many red wasps this year. The red wasps are particularly aggressive this year. I had one attacking my window the other day, it slammed itself into the glass until it fell to the ground, got up and started it again!

Originally posted by LifeInDeath
Wasn't one of the leading theories that it was all our cell phone towers? Or was that disproved?

Cell towers were mentioned in the article so I don't think they have been completely dismissed yet.

Here is an article from last August that still mentions the link.

Originally posted by Karlhungis
It is interesting to me that we are 4 years into this looming catastrophe and we still have no idea what could be causing it.

can anyone say

CHEMTRAILS !!!

think it was planned this way ???

Well apparently the only way to save the bees is to create excessively large habitats, where an entire ecosystem could be created and maintained without human intervention... but we all know thats not possible. Humans have to touch and play with everything, just like little kids.

Global Warming/Cooling
CO2 Levels in Ocean/Atmosphere
Possibly the reversal of the poles since bees use some weird sort of navigation
Colder + Longer winter?


I think its just natures way of saying... quit ####### with me.

KARL-

I think it could be cell towers too... hard to say for sure though... Cell towers have been around for a long time, but only recently have they started using different (technologicaly advanced signals )... maybe that is the problem?



[edit on 2-5-2010 by rjmelter]

I also think the bees are getting hit from many sides, cell towers, pesticides, change in weather, magnetic shifting, pollution and disease.

Someone ? (Snopes.com says it wasn't Einstein) once said,

If bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live.”

In 1950’s there were 500,000 beekeepers in the US. Now there is less than 1600.

75% of beekeepers make their money by taking their bee’s to California to pollinate almond trees.

In 2007 just before the almond tree pollination – 20 billion bees disappeared. Leaving many beekeepers becoming bankrupt.

Almond trees are totally dependant on Bees.

In recent years honeybee populations across the continent have plummeted by as much as 70%, and biologists are still scratching their heads as to why and what to do about the problem which they have termed “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD).

Many believe that our increasing use of chemical pesticides and herbicides, which honeybees ingest during their daily pollination rounds, are largely to blame.

Bee populations may also be vulnerable to other factors, such as the recent increase in atmospheric electromagnetic radiation as a result of growing numbers of cell phones and wireless communication towers.

Biologists also wonder if global warming may be exaggerating the growth rates of pathogens such as the mites, viruses and fungi that are known to take their toll on bee colonies.

A recent gathering of leading bee biologists yielded no consensus, but most agree that a combination of factors is most likely to blame.

According to Jerry Hayes, apiary inspection chief with the state’s Division of Plant Industry – If honeybees ceased to exist, two-thirds of the citrus, all of the watermelons, the blueberries, strawberries, pecans and beans would disappear.

The bee’s role is very important within the various life cycles of different species. Without bees, there would be no honey, but more importantly, certain plants would not be able to reproduce and would thus become extinct. In turn, this would lead to the disappearance of certain animal species.

Research shows that bee’s made their first appearance on earth 80 million years ago, the bee has accompanied the human journey. In the earliest cave paintings there are images of men harvesting honey. In hieroglyphics, representations of ancient Mesopotamia and China in the first centuries of recorded time, honey harvesting has been depicted. The Promised Land is the land of milk and honey. The bee’s product seems to have been the first sweetness in mankind’s tough early days. It seems that even now, in the early 21st century, mankind can’t do without the bee.

Let me ask you again -“Should we be really worried about the death of bees?”

So what can we do to help this travisty? – I hear you say.

Becoming a honey beekeeper is a great way to help, but there are other simple steps that everyone can take.

Here are 5 easier ways:

Stop using chemical insecticides. Rather than buying the chemical products available from most garden centers, try using more natural ways of ridding your garden of pests. Try also to encourage your neighbours to do the same and work together.
Get a bird bath. It may surprise you but the bees get thirsty too. Fill a birdbath or similar container with water, especially on hot days. It doesn’t matter if the water gets muddy as this will provide the bees with much needed nutrients. It’s a good idea to keep it shallow or put a few pebbles in the container to make it easier for the bees to access the water.
Keep your garden (a little bit) wild. It’s a good idea to leave an area of your garden a bit untidy with a few wild flowers growing, and some dense foliage. These days too many of us are paving over our gardens, or installing decking. This may look nice to us but doesn’t provide food or shelter to wildlife.
Lots of variety in your garden. It is believed that one of the reasons for the disappearing bees is the lack of variety in their diet – vast fields of one crop for example. Like any animal, bees need a variety of nutrients to function correctly, so vary your plants and also remember the winter months.
Plant wild flowers secretly. This may sound slightly mad, but why not buy a packet or two of wild flower seed and scatter it in areas of local wasteland to provide more areas of food for the local bees. Just be careful of the spot you choose – don’t select an area where the seed could blow into local gardens, or spoil a local flower display.
These are just a few of the ways in which you can start keeping honey bees from extinction. If everyone works together to tackle this problem we can still save the honey bee, if not, we may just find out whether Einstein was right.

Thanks to Jane Vaughan


www.dawnpugh.com...

I do know that from living on a farm, you need bees to pollinate apple, pear and cherry trees.

To me, bees buzzing symbolize summer in all her glory.

I think bees are necessary in the food chain so if we lose all our bee buddies, it's going to affect our food supply.

[edit on 2-5-2010 by ofhumandescent]

What’s Killing the Honeybees?
March 4, 2010
by brokeharvardgrad
This article was gleaned from the Environmental Working Group. It seems that illegal pesticides have been killing honeybees. According to judge from Manhattan, the EPA failed to follow proper procedure when they approved a pesticide that has been linked to honeybee death:

A U.S. District Judge from Manhattan has banned the sale of spirotetramat, a pesticide produced by Bayer CropScience. Citing allegations by environmental groups and commercial beekeepers that the pesticide is toxic and is killing off the nation’s honeybee population, Judge Denise Cote has declared that sales of spirotetramat must cease after January 15.

According to Cote, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not follow proper procedure when approving spirotetramat. The EPA did not take public comment about the pesticide before approving it and the agency failed to publish both the Bayer application and the approval documents in the Federal Register. The EPA and Bayer CropScience have 60 days to appeal the decision.

According to Bayer CropScience, spirotetramat is perfectly safe and does not harm honeybees, insisting that the pesticide has been extensively tested. The company laments the fact that the chemical was banned because of procedural faults but did not indicate how it would proceed.

According to Aaron Colangelo, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), spirotetramat is a potentially hazardous insecticide that should be pulled from the market and evaluated further. The NRDC in conjunction with the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation group based in Portland, jointly sued the EPA over its approval of the pesticide.

Amazingly, the EPA admits that it approved spirotetramat illegally but has argued that its actions should have no consequences. This speaks volumes to the agency’s arrogance in how it views its role as a regulatory agency.

Dave Hackenberg, one of Pennsylvania’s largest beekeepers, is appreciative of the judge’s decision. After all, he has been losing more than half of his bees every winter due to what he believes are pesticides. He leases his bees out to various growers every year to assist in pollination but he says that each year, more and more bees are dying. This past year, he lost about half of his bees by midwinter which was the largest amount to date.

Maryann Frazier, a researcher from Penn State University, agrees with the notion that pesticides play a large role in what is now being termed “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD), the massive die-off of bees with no clear explanation as to why they died. She believes that a number of factors contribute to CCD and that further research must be done.

Bees are a necessary insect that must be preserved. Without them, there would be no food. According to the Department of Agriculture, bees pollinate over $15 billion worth of U.S. crops.

unaskedadvice.wordpress.com...

Last summer we had only a few bees show up. Each year it get's less and less.

I think it's the pollution, pesticides and cell towers.

There also doesn't seem to be as many ants, spiders, rabbits and birds.

We still have our coyotes howling across the street in the MSD Patch though.

reply to post by boondock-saint


That's a real possiblity.

reply to post by Karlhungis


Doesn't look like anyone in England really knows what is causing the decline or whether there is really an exotic disease related decline:

Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers.

Bees are very sensitive to weather related changes. We have had significant cooling in northern latitudes in recent years which could have significant impact on bee populations and health in general.

reply to post by Karlhungis


I wonder if it could be caused by chemtrails.

the muslim prophet muhammed said that when the bees die so will everything else.

Not only have we (in UK at least) been having more rainy summers the last few years, bees are also highly sensitive to the earth's magnetic field - more so than any other creature on earth (was on QI last night!)

Magnetism and electromagnetism are fundamentally connected, as anyone with a basic understanding of physics will confirm.

Last.. 3(?) years there's been a right surge in mobile technology, more and more people have internet on their phone (I finally gave in to it this year!), TV and radio signals are being upgraded to digital, everyone has wireless routers everywhere from homes to coffee shops to trains...

theres a helluva lot more EM radiation out there now than even 10 years ago, and that combined with pesticides (which are infact biocides, just not strong enough to be lethal to humans) and parasites and everything else... I'm expecting a full-on ecological disaster in my lifetime, the rate of change certainly seems to be accelerating as of late...

reply to post by plumranch

"In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers."

Yeah typical government BS! Blame it on so called amateurs and not the pressure of commercial honey farmers who tax the bees and don't leave them enough honey to survive the winter so they supplement them with sugar water... Sigh! Now what do you think is more healthy for the bees to live on in the winter? Thier own honey which is what its for, or sugar water made with processed sugar with no nutrient value?... Jerks!

We all can do something about this and that is to raise bees organically ourselves. Most people can have a hive or two in the back yard if they like. But do it naturally with top bar hives not like the commercial bee keepers.

Check out www.backyardhive.com... And quit expecting government to do something about this. Just like everything else if we want something to change we are going to have to do it ourselves. Government has never protected us they are in fact harming and oppressing us in many ways. Some boldly but many very subtly like all the chemicals in the food supply and water etc.

[edit on 2-5-2010 by hawkiye]

This is the first part of a YouTube Playlist I set up for just this occasion (really any occasion to play it), instead of just telling people to find it themselves...get's a bit old.

Anyway, it's got some interesting information in it that leads one to believe that it's at least partly Monsanto's Cyberseed Program's (hyp.) DNA pesticides that might be causing the bee die-off.

It would be wise to note that this bee thing seems to correlate with the spread of these super-money-making, small farm-killing seeds, but that no direct relation has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt...blah blah blah.



I'd just click the link and play through the playlist, but here's the first one to wet your appetites (no pun intended there :\ ).

Originally posted by rjmelter
I think it could be cell towers too... hard to say for sure though... Cell towers have been around for a long time, but only recently have they started using different (technologicaly advanced signals

)... maybe that is the problem?
[edit on 2-5-2010 by rjmelter]

Originally posted by ofhumandescent
I think it's the pollution, pesticides and cell towers.

It has to be a world wide reason, because bee populations are dwindling all over the planet.

Pesticides? A globally distributed pesticide in that case, that came into use in the early 21st century,

Cell towers? A very plausable cause.

Pollution? Possible, but what changed recently that had such an adverse effect on the bee population?

CO2 levels? That should be pretty easy to prove, hold a bee in front of the exhaust pipe of your car and see what happens... joke.

Natural enemies or bacteriological attacks due to the greenhouse effect?

reply to post by Karlhungis
Karl my friend,

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I will say that in my area of North-west Georgia I am actually seeing more wasps and Carpenter bees than I recall seeing in the past several years; I will see if I can garner any info from some of the local bee keepers in the area.


I work outside, and this has been one of the longest, wettest, and coldest winters we have had here in the deep south for many years now, but i have noticed that as the weather has started to warm that in one day as I sat on my dozer taking a break that there was at least 5 different species of wasp buzzing around me plus 2 different sets of carpenter bees; yesterday I saw a large hornet buzzing around.

I do feel the weakening of the planet's magnetic field is adversely affecting the bees' navigation systems, and the lack of bee corpses in the hives may be due to their inability to find it after leaving it.

Over use of pesticides and Gmo crops are not good; along with the out of control spiral in food costs here in the South, I and many others are planting large gardens this spring and are using organic methods plus traditional natural seeds and plants.

As soon as I can garner any info from the bee keepers I will post it here.

Good work and OP, my friend.

seeker

Originally posted by the seeker_713g
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I will say that in my area of North-west Georgia I am actually seeing more wasps and Carpenter bees than I recall seeing in the past several years; I will see if I can garner any info from some of the local bee keepers in the area.

I'm in SC and definitely have noticed a huge increase in carpenter bees. In fact, I'm looking at two of them outside my window as I type this. I've noticed this over the past 2 or 3 years. How do you think this may relate to the decline of the Honeybees?

Edit to add: I am quite certain if I were to go out back I'd see at least 6 or 7 more. It is normal, at any given time, to be able to find at least 10 around my house... I'm constantly caulking up holes.

[edit on 2/5/2010 by Iamonlyhuman]