Pesticides hit queen bee numbers

Pesticides hit queen bee numbers

www.bbc.co.uk

Some of the world's most commonly used pesticides are killing bees by damaging their ability to navigate and reducing numbers of queens, research suggests.

The UK team found the pesticides caused an 85% drop in queen production.

But the most dramatic effect was on queen production. The naturally-fed hives produced around 14 queens each - those exposed to the pesticide, just two.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I have posted this thread again because my previous thread of the same name was 404'd by mod because it was "Already posted." I searched and found no such news article posted.

Now, to the point. This is very bad as it could damage crop productivity, with Queen Bees of affected hives having a reduced productivity of 85%. Furthermore, affected hoves will only have 2 Queen Bees instead of the normal 14. I wonder what the agenda is of the people behind the pesticides. What is ATS's opinion?

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

reply to post by daaskapital


If your thread gets 404'd again, would you please add your info to this one?

Neonicotinoid pesticides tied to crashing bee populations

Thanks.

As an apiarist in Ohio, I have been researching this topic a lot. What you are referring to is related to CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). There is no consensus on what causing CCD, but studies are showing that it is linked to 4 things, and possible the combination of all four:

1) Pesticides on crops.
2) Mites on bees.
3) Antibiotics used to treat bees.
4) Stress caused by hive moving hives for seasonal crop pollination.

We lost 1 hive this spring, it didn't die, it disappeared. Any beekeeper can expect a natural loss of 20% of their hives over winter, and we experienced a 25% loss. At first, it looked to us as a classic case of CCD, so I became seriously interested in my CCD research.

The symptoms of CCD are when a hive simply disappears, virtually overnight. They leave behind the queen, and a few workers, but not enough to support the hive, and the hive collapses. Basically, the whole hive collapses because, for still unknown reasons, the workers abandon the hive, get lost, whatever, but they never return, and the remaining queen and workers can't keep the rest of the hive warm, and there aren't enough bees to feed and care for the hive. Normal hive population coming from an over-winter should be about 30,000.

We did a frame by frame inspection of our "disappeared" hive, and found no queen dead in the hive. There were only a handful (less than 50) of dead bees total. All the honey was gone, there was no fresh or rotted brood, but there was two hatched queen cells, and 12 aborted queen cells. Basically, with our hive, it swarmed three times, each swarm taking a supply of honey, the old queen leaving first, then a new queen with her swarm, then finally the third queen took the rest of the honey all but the last few bees, and we wound up with an abandoned hive, in perfectly good shape, sans honey and bees. There must be a certain percentage of bees in a hive for temperature regulation, (core temp needs to stay around 95 degrees F) and without enough bees to generate heat, the remaining bees were doomed to die. Inspection of the other hives showed no abnormal activity, they were still honey bound, and producing fresh white brood. Healthy as hives can be during the spring pollen flow.

I am confused by this:

only have 2 Queen Bees instead of the normal 14.

A normal healthy hive only has 1 queen at any given time. You'll have to clarify that a bit, but let me continue:

A hive knows when their queen is healthy and happy because she is laying eggs. She is responsible for producing replacement bees. When a queen is old, or not laying properly, the hive will start building "queen cells", enacting a process called "supercedure", in which the hive will produce a new queen to replace the old one, and then the old queen will take a portion of the hive and swarm. This is usually done in the early spring or early fall, but usually during the spring. Supercedure is a perfectly natural process, one in which the hive creates their own genetically superior queen adapted to the local in which they forage from.

Studies have shown that commercially produced queens are being "superceded" by the hives (meaning replaced) at at 80% percent rate, in the hives they are introduced to. Queen bees are supposed to live for 3-5 years normally, but now the commercial queens are being replaced 12-14 times a years, as opposed to the normal 1-2 times a year. Why?

Commercial bee producers are treating their hives with antibiotics. The commercial bees are foraging in their environment, and gathering pollen from fields with pesticide residue, and gathering pollen and nectar from flowers that have also been treated. The current trend is to ship truckloads of hives to areas where fields need pollinated, often across the US, usually to California to pollinate the almond crops, then to Florida to polliate the Peach crops, up to Maine to pollinate blueberries, and hive transportation is a very lucrative way to make cash, as farmers pay the commercial bee keepers for their services. The farmers don't have the headache of keeping their own bees, and have become dependent on out-sourcing the bees they need for pollination. There is a problem with this, a very big one.

A normal bee will forage for a radius of 10 miles from their hive. The pollen and nectar they collect is brought back into the hive to be processed into honey. The pesticides used in CA are brought in trace amounts to FL, re-distributed in ME, and at each location the bees are sampling the local variety of pesticide and dosage, and suddenly a hive is saturated with a blend of 3 or more varieties of pesticides, and the queen becomes contaminated, and genetically, can no longer lay normally. The hive will promptly supercede a queen that is not laying properly. It takes 21 days for a hive to produce another egg-laying queen, so the hive misses pollen flows, and becomes weaker overall.

reply to post by Druid42

Thanks for posting your knowledge on the subject, that was a very educational read.
We are poisoning this planet with plastics and chemicals. In a very short period of time man has polluted the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat, the ground we walk on and our oceans. I guess you could say we're consistent. Leave it to man to constantly screw with things until its FUBARED.

You have to ask yourself. What is the motive if any for this attack on Bees? Less production of honey. And what does honey do for us mere mortals? It helps our immune systems. What does Monsanto and our facist governments hate the most?

They hate us improving our health. Hence the banning of vitamins and other old worldly healthy substances such as Colloidal Silver etc.

This kind of thing always reminds me of the X files episode with the giant dome tents of genetic bees.

I can imagine them saying, look we can cure this bee problem with these genetic ones we built earlier. Nothing would suprise me anymore.