Not so fast! Underlying cause of bee deaths still unclear.

Jerry Bromenshenk, bee investigator

What a scientist didn't tell the New York Times about his study on bee deaths

A cheer must have gone up at Bayer on Thursday when a front-page New York Times article, under the headline "Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery," described how a newly released study pinpoints a different cause for the die-off: "a fungus tag-teaming with a virus." The study, written in collaboration with Army scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center outside Baltimore, analyzed the proteins of afflicted bees using a new Army software system. The Bayer pesticides, however, go unmentioned.

What the Times article did not explore -- nor did the study disclose -- was the relationship between the study's lead author, Montana bee researcher Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, and Bayer Crop Science. In recent years Bromenshenk has received a significant research grant from Bayer to study bee pollination. Indeed, before receiving the Bayer funding, Bromenshenk was lined up on the opposite side: He had signed on to serve as an expert witness for beekeepers who brought a class-action lawsuit against Bayer in 2003. He then dropped out and received the grant.

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Bromenshenk's company, Bee Alert Technology, which is developing hand-held acoustic scanners that use sound to detect various bee ailments, will profit more from a finding that disease, and not pesticides, is harming bees. Two years ago Bromenshenk acknowledged as much to me when I was reporting on the possible neonicotinoid/CCD connection for Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, which folded before I completed my reporting.

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Don't you just love fraud in all its forms?

Here is the original thread discussing the 'alleged' biased study:

Cause of Mass Honeybee Die-Off Found by team of Army and Entomologists.

every six months a new study gets released claiming to 'know' the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. Nobody actually, definitively knows.

I posted this in the thread you are referring, and i will repost it here:

They are constantly giving new reasons for a problem they dont fully understand. But some sort of virus/fungus seems the obvious liklihood.

I just want to add: people often talk about how important honeybees are for food production when they speak on this issue of Colony collapse disorder, but the reality is that numerous insects contribute to pollination, from ants to wasps to wood bees to flies. The reason colony collapse disorder is effecting the food industry is because so many crops are grown in large, monoculture settings that discourage a natural array of pollinators. So they have to truck in semi-trailer loads of bee hives to pollinate entire fields of commercial food crops. And bees that are raised by these beekeepers (if they can be called that) who raises hundreds or even thousands of hives are even more suseptable to CCD than a smaller small-time bee keeper because they are less healthy and disease spreads faster.

On a small farm, you will see proper pollination of crops from the various critters that exist in a healthy ecosystem, certainly including a few bee hives, but absolutely not limited to only honeybees by any degree.

This isnt to say the CCD is a serious thing, and that it wont have effects on the food we eat. But it is meant to put some of the facts about bees and pollination in perspective.\

Great job OP!
I smell a conspiracy indeed.

I think part of the reason why bees are dying, has to do with cellphones, and experiments having to do with free energy, that alter the vibrations of the ionosphere, which then disrupts the entire atmospheric system on some level, if you think about it.

Bees, like bats, operate off of sound, something that is not really talked about, but it is true. Bees are able to find their way back to their individual hives, because they hear the unique "buzz" music their Queen Bee makes, they hear the sound of their home. But, with all of this technology that is creating noise pollution, (that we humans cannot hear), the bees hear it, and it is messing up their signals, it is drowning out The Queen Bee's voice, and the bees die, trying to find their way home. They starve in most cases, from flying for so long in search of their hive.

Sound, noise pollution, satellites, radio frequencies, cell phones, 3G 4G networks, Haarp, Canada's Free Energy Program/Testing, that is what is killing the bees, they cannot find their way home.

Signal Interception.
If people found this out, all of that money, all of those corporations that have invested that dig into us, it would really turn this world upside down. People are going to have to choose, do you care about Mother Nature pollinating your food, or is your iphone and "free energy" more important to you?

There was a radio article some months back that highlighted the commercial pressures of bee keepers in the US. It drew attention to the pressures placed on bee colonies and their exploitation for financial reasons.

Commercial colonies are fed on fructose syrup and transported across the nation in step with the seasons. The upshot of the program was that bees are fed artificial food and live beyond the seasonal boundaries that nature has dictated. In simple terms, *jet-lag* might well be a factor.

As ever, there's likely a myriad reasons for the decline of honey bees in the western world...there's rarely a simple or singular explanation. On the basis of the research featured in the radio show, it could be that exhaustion and lowered immunity is at least partially responsible for declining populations.

The people that came out saying they knew probably worked for agribusiness and big pharma, and wanted government grants to find something to kill the fungus - and who knows the ramifications of something like that.


ETA: IMO it probably has to do with all the insecticides used in industrial farming and/or climate change and/or GMO's