Beekeepers Expect "Worst Year For Bees, We’re Facing The Extinction Of A Species.”

Originally posted by Blue Shift
1. Only commercial bees are affected. Wild bees are doing just fine.

Actually, the Bumblebees are in serious decline, some varieties being extinct now.
Especially, those native to The U.S.

insectasides = deasd insects bees are insects
this my friends is a no brainer

Originally posted by intrptr
reply to post by mountaingirl1111

 

Thanks for the Pbase link. I book marked it. Good photo resource link.
Judging by the comments below the picture, that Blue Steel Cricket Wasp sounds nasty.

Excellent work on this thread. People have brought a lot of good stuff.

You're welcome Thanks for getting me inspired to actually look the little buggers up! So, yeah, that's what we've been seeing, not the bees

Originally posted by georgeandrew
Albert Einstein once said: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”

its not quite that bad because all our majour grains are wind pollenated, as well as some friuts are pollenated by mosquitos. but we would lose alot, which if you follow the depoluation agenda is what is wanted

That is absolutely frightening. I believe that any species' extinction could produce a landslide or butterfly effect with consequences that even the scientists that spend their lives studying them could not fully predict. Starred.

Originally posted by rapunzel222

Originally posted by mountaingirl1111
Well, this is not good... and not surprising, either. I think I only saw a few bees all last summer here in CO, but boy, did I see wasps. I saw a kind of wasp I had never seen before, either, a very large shimmery blue kind, almost looked like metal. They got into our garage all summer and were very, very aggressive.

In other enviro news, we have buds--big buds and some even showing green leaf growth--on our neighborhood trees. This is odd to me because last winter, we had them in February, which I thought was strange enough. Now, mid-late January? We haven't had real rain where we are since September and snow has been a joke. We had arctic fronts and cold fronts from out west so many times in a row, just the past couple days is the weather nice. BUT, in the town I'm in, we've already had 3 separate brush fires in the past few weeks/month. So with the cold, dry weather, surprised the buds/leaves ARE EVEN EARLIER this year. I CANNOT remember such early springs and I'm 35 years old. We had leaves falling off of our aspen trees in late July and early August. It's like the seasons are off by a couple months. Now this, we'll have fall in June if that's the pattern again this year. How is this normal?

edit on 22-1-2013 by mountaingirl1111 because: (no reason given)

Yeah in oz we seem to be getting a lot of big aggressive wasps lately.

also i haven't seen a NORMAL sized house fly around our place for ages... all we get now are these gigantic scary looking horseflies or something similar that bite and they follow me when i walk anywhere on our property even 100s of metres away, and they bite...and constantly buzz around me...

they aren't normal looking flies
and i remember a time when we had plenty of normal houseflies out here and you only rarely saw the horseflies...
now its totally changed...

I noticed these, too, over the summer. Very large, very loud, and like our wasps, very disoriented or kind of dumb somehow. They follow us around as well, but if you trap them near a window or anywhere else, very easy to kill. I also noticed the sheer NUMBER of them last summer, very annoying. Also, we have lived in CO for about 6 years and we're at a pretty good elevation of almost 6500 feet. We've done plenty of hiking and camping while living here, but last summer I noticed that the mosquitoes were out of control. It was an especially hot summer and pretty dry, so I was surprised that they were so "bitey" considering those conditions. It was ridiculous, between the wasps, the flies, and the mosquitoes, it made being in our yard kind of a pain in the a**!

When you add the odd insect behavior and presence to the very early spring we had last year (as I said earlier in the thread, we had big buds on our trees in February, we have big buds on our trees NOW in January), it's getting harder not to notice that something cyclical or something in nature in messed up. People say nature has her patterns, blah blah, this is normal, blah blah, but i strongly, strongly disagree. Otherwise, would have noticed this before. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm adamant that something is off, regardless

Originally posted by exitusstatuquo
I have been following this growing problem for over a decade. My dad was a bee keeper and said watch the bees if something happens to the bees humankind will soon become extinct. He was not kidding. He is no longer with us but I remember his warning from so many years ago.

There's a quote about that which had been attributed to Einstein (though it probably wasn't him who said it, just someone who wanted to give the statement more weight by attaching Albert's name to it) that if bees became extinct, humans would follow within 4 years.

Luckily, that isn't likely at all, as humans don't 100% depend on bees. However, certain foods would become drastically more expensive (mostly fruits.) this doesn't mean we would starve though - it just means crops dependent on bees to produce bigger yields would fail, and be torn out to plant food crops not dependent on bee pollination. Food production, especially certain foods would take a hit. Best case, we would lose some very healthy foods. Worst case, there would be more starvation and yes, population decline (both rapid and over time from lowered health because of the missing fruits) would occur.

More importantly - domino effects. Other insects and animals somewhere on the line depend on the flowers the bees help to bring forth. The world would definitely be different, and we would be significantly harmed, but by no means would the disappearance of bees result in the extinction of humanity.

That said, I believe crops grown with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and GMO crops should only be allowed in closed environments, domed off from the outside air, unattached to ground water. These things taint the world, taint clean crops, and destroy whole species (not just humans and bees.) if they want to do it, they should be required to do it without poisoning the rest of the world. If that means GMO corn costs $35/ear, then maybe the demand for such garbage will evaporate. It's unnecessary, and it is proven to be ineffective at increasing yields. The only thing it does is increase food Corp profits.

I thought of one experience last night, and thought I would toss it into the ring.

About early November we had an out of town medical appointment in a fairly large city in Ontario.

London Ontario to be exact, anyways we ended up staying in the closest place to the "University Hospital" as possible.

Here is the link to where we stayed.....www.windermeremanor.com...

And this is the reason I am posting this.....www.windermeremanor.com...

Here is the numbers for the city.....en.wikipedia.org...

According to the above link the population is about 366,151 people so this is not a small city.
Now to my point, when we checked out the Bees nests on site they looked just fine.
This was in early November and it was cold for that time of year but the Bees were a buzzing and we were fascinated by it all being that we never have seen so many hives up close.

This Inn is right smack dab in the middle of the city and very close to all major arteries (Roads).
It does back on to a parcel of land that is all woods and yes deer too.

My point is two fold, where are they getting the pollen from, secondly someone mentioned they might actually seek out woods/bush to survive.

Anyways I thought this might be interesting enough to post, and yes we bought 3 jars of honey from the inn and it is very good.
Really tasty but very sticky.

Regards, Iwinder

Originally posted by HumveeSleeper
That is absolutely frightening. I believe that any species' extinction could produce a landslide or butterfly effect with consequences that even the scientists that spend their lives studying them could not fully predict. Starred.

Discovery channel

Scientists have estimated that over the course of Earth's history, anywhere between 1 and 4 billion species have existed on this planet. Be it through disease, genetic obsolescence, over-predation or any number of other factors, the overwhelming majority of these species are now extinct. Of these billions of species, roughly 50 million still survive into the modern era. While these numbers are certainly extreme at first glance, it serves as proof that extinction, while a sad occurrence, is a part of life for all living things.

Don't get me wrong i believe losing the bees would certainly change the world.... But don' worry about extinctions having a knock on effect.... Many many many more species have become extinct on this planet than are currently on it .. and yes we could be next at any time . because it is a natural cycle of life...

Originally posted by burntheships

Originally posted by Blue Shift
1. Only commercial bees are affected. Wild bees are doing just fine.

Actually, the Bumblebees are in serious decline, some varieties being extinct now.
Especially, those native to The U.S.

Not wild honeybees, though, which is what everybody's all wound up about and throwing the blame around for. Actually, a bumblebee decline while other wild bees are doing fine just adds more credence to the notion that all the other blame heaped on pesticides or global warming or AXE Body Spray overload is a lot of crap, because that stuff should affect all bee populations equally.

reply to post by burntheships


The big gmo companies do not care because they will simply engineer bees to work with their crops.

I am amazed that people do not see the how these people think. It is about monopolizing everything. Heck I would spoil the earth for natural plants and engineer plants made specificially to grow in that type of earth.

reply to post by Blue Shift


Who said other bees are doing fine?

Originally posted by votan
It is about monopolizing everything. Heck I would spoil the earth for natural plants and engineer plants made specificially to grow in that type of earth.

Some people think they are doing that already...
and they are testing aluminum resistant seeds...

reply to post by Iwinder


Nice photos, Iwinder...
I like the bee village!

Maybe the key is it is not next to a corn field?

Originally posted by burntheships

Originally posted by votan
It is about monopolizing everything. Heck I would spoil the earth for natural plants and engineer plants made specificially to grow in that type of earth.

Some people think they are doing that already...
and they are testing aluminum resistant seeds...

Yeah I have heard of that. Those speculations and their attitude really makes it probable. They cause a problem and meet the demand for a solution.

reply to post by burntheships

Not near any corn fields crossed our minds as well.....
I am serious when you walk out to the parking lot all you see is Hi-Rises and the Hospital.
The good news is that the Inn is on the Grounds of the University Of Western Ontario.

Big brains there......the same ones that discovered BPA is very toxic.
en.wikipedia.org...
www.cbc.ca...

At the same time the back of the INN is solid bush/Forrest for about a mile or so.
Perhaps some of the brains at the University will focus on the bee hives right in their own back yard and get some data.
Regards, Iwinder

Forgot to add this quote from the INN 's bee information......

* As well as our honey tasting great, our bees will be producing a healthier honey, the City of London has a pesticide ban in place. This means our urban bees’ exposure to pesticides and the plants they use to make honey, are greatly reduced compared to their rational country bee cousins.

reply to post by burntheships

Bees are nice.

And much much too important to lose since the flowering plant kingdom depends on them, it doesn't even matter about the crops alone, they are integral to the whole food chain.

reply to post by burntheships


Yes this is a serious problem one of the solutions is for us to start keeping bees the natural way . You can do it in your backyard too! Here is a great site with great forums etc. www.biobees.com... There is a growing movement for natural bee keeping.

I got my first swarm last summer and they are over wintering now. It's been extremely cold and I am worried about them but no way to tell if they made it till spring without opening the hive and I don't want to do that its to cold and to hard on them when you do it.

Its not just pesticides it is also GMOs and commercial bee keeping practices like trucking them all over he country for thousands of miles to polinate monocrops that are contributing to it. Natural bee keepers are not having hardly any of the problems that commercial beekeepers are having.

We also need to start establishing Sepp Holzer permaculture enclaves for the bees and ourselves so they have pesticide free and non gmo flowers to gather their nectar from and to re-beautify the earth. www.abovetopsecret.com...



www.youtube.com...

here is some of my bees:

Some quick Honey bee facts from Windermere Manor......
*
The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.


*
A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour, hence it would have to fly around 90,000 miles - three times around the globe - to make one pound of honey.


*
It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.


*
Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.


*
Honey bees produce beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of their abdomen.


*
Honey bees must consume about 17 - 20 pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce each pound of beeswax.


*
Bees maintain a temperature of 92 - 93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest, regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.


*
A populous colony may contain 40,000 to 60,000 bees during the late spring or early summer.


*
The queen bee lives for about 2 - 3 years. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength.


*
The queen may mate with up to 17 drones over a 1 - 2 day period of mating.


*
The queen may lay 600 - 800 or even 1,500 eggs each day during her 3 or 4 year lifetime. This daily egg production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees.

* Worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks in the spring or summer, but up to 6 weeks during the winter.

* The average honey bee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

* Honey bees fly at up to 15 miles per hour.

* The honey bee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.

* A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.

* Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis Mellifera, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.

* Fermented honey, known as Mead, is the most ancient fermented beverage. The term "honey moon" originated with the Norse practice of consuming large quantities of Mead during the first month of a marriage.

Regards, Iwinder

reply to post by burntheships


Every bee should have one of these.