Richard

Interesting article in today's news:

Study: Parasitic Fly Could Explain Bee Die-Off : NPR

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jeffreyp

It makes alot of sense, though hopefully nature will find a way for a resistant strain of bees to overcome the parasite.

mikevan

More rubbish being used to create false job security. Nothing new being seen here. Just the usual predators and pests that the bees have been dealing with for eons. CCD is a myth used to explain man's own incompetence in being responsible stewards of the Earth. My bees are 100% non-treated and selected for survival as nature does and are quite happy - even with the extreme drought we've had here. Coddled bees are weak and disease/pest prone and very poor at survival and these are multiplied and sold around the nation.

Richard

Wow, that's an alternate take!

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Worm_Farmer

The bee's are dyeing because of GMO pollen, and all the aluminum being spraying in our sky's.

Richard

Really?

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Worm_Farmer

Pretty solid proof IMO that it is GM crops.

Death of the Bees. Genetically Modified Crops and the Decline of Bee Colonies in North America

Proof Bees Dying From GM Crops?

Jack Daw

African killer bees - their numbers don't seem to fall. Maybe they are THE strain of the future.

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Zeitgeist - Corporatocracy 101 (~2hrs)

Zeitgeist - Moving Forward (~2.5hrs)

dekkard

Yeah well, with beekeepers in the family, we have been following the CCD story for years. Having done so, I doubt a parasitic fly could be the lone guilty party, but more like another usual suspect that has a walk-on part in the rigors of bee life.

Looking at the time-line, one sees a rise in CCD (not a myth b/c it actually happens) and the increase in bee hive transport around the country for pollinating giant GMO factory monocultures. Such an aspect to commercial pollination is unnatural for bees. Given all the stress factors bees are inevitably exposed to including: tractor-trailer transport across hundreds/thousands of miles, exposure to high quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, misc. chemicals monocultures rely on to maintain profitability for investors, and unnatural characteristics of GMO crops (including pollen), opportunities are created for many natural hazards, including parasites, to exploit an over-stressed, and thereby physically weakened bee. Such stress induced weakness is the same for all creatures including humans.

It would be convenient for advocates of status-quo agriculture policies to point to a parasitic fly as the culprit, but in reality, bees have dealt with such parasites for as long as bees have existed. What is new, are the chemical cocktails bees are exposed to, sum total of GMO hazards (the full story of which is yet untold) and the forced transport of bee hives all over the country.

It would be nice if humans could push away from monocultures for many reasons, but for the purposes of this thread, the negative impact on the health of bees is dire enough for we as responsible stewards of our environment to just say enough already. If bees die off, humans will find it very difficult to survive and enjoy the same level of variety and nutrition in food we do today.

Monoculture factory farms could maintain local bees to pollinate their fields and avoid importing out of region bee hives to do this and bee health would benefit. However, this would make it necessary to maintain a large number of hives during off-season months and this would present an overhead cost such farms would not be willing to pay. The importation of bee hives makes good business sense only in the short term, b/c long term, bees have shown us they cannot maintain the stressful lifestyle and when they die-off, there is no pollination for anyone. Public policy chooses to subsidize the short-term success of these monoculture factory farms to the detriment of long-term sustainability of all bee pollinated agriculture everywhere on the planet.

One thing is for sure, we will not have an "easy out" of this problem by selling people yet another chemical to spray around for the latest pest du jure, parasitic flies. Smaller, local beekeepers will have to work together to meet the needs of agriculture instead of larger beekeepers who truck their hives around the country. Bees, as a specie, simply can't meet the demands of the latter service provider forever.

Poor bees, collectively, we ask so much of them and yet often treat them so shamefully in their own domain. Do yourself a favor, hug a bee today . . . well okay maybe not.

mikevan

CCD is a myth. Incompetent beekeepers and an incompetent agricultural industry kills colonies. But who wants to say they're incompetent? Blame it on something else, some mystery something. Kinda like big-foot and the other myths. But researchers aren't arguing - a mystery gets government grants and they're raking it in and coming out with a host of moronic and crazy ideas, all paid for by tax payers and all guaranteeing job security.

Fact of the matter is, aside from the normal colony loss every season, which can be about 25% of colonies, there is the syndrome of doped hives - colonies that are poisoned with the idea that they're being protected from mites. There's the chronic (and fairly recent trend) feeding hives with HFCS. Unfortunately, HFCS contains HMF, which is a mild toxin to honeybees. But that's not all - HFCS is toxic to the microbes honeybees use to digest pollen into bee-bread. Pollen is honeybees primary source of protien, so that results in malnurishment. Weaker bees are more prone to problems - just as we are more prone to disease if we persist in obesity and/or little sleep or continue to stuff our faces with processed foods. This practice also coinsides with the general trend of robbing colonies dry, then feeding back HFCS and soy-protien cakes - neither suitable foods for bees. Beeks also have this idea that if they keep their bees on 5.4mm foundation they'll produce more honey - an idea that's been debunked by small cell beekeepers but still persists because humans have this "bigger is better" fetish. The honeybees are not naturally 5.4mm - not unless they're Apis dorsata. Apis melifera will always range from 4.6 to 5.1mm and the median cell size is generally 4.9mm. The mite life-cycle is geared to exploit drones and drone-cells and honeybees have adapted to this trend by using drones as part of the colonies immune system. However, 5.4mm is close enough to drone cells and that results in catastrophic breakouts of mites into the worker brood. Combine that with coddled, weaker strains of bees that are over-robbed, fed back junk and mildly poisoned and you have a recipe for disaster. Complicate that with mono-crop food. The greater majority of colonies in the USA are migratory colonies and they're shipped off to regions that are veritable deserts to honeybees - where there's only one thing flowering and that's the crop at hand. Nectars are different and pollens are different and the diversity is needed to maintain bee health. Take that away and it's like feeding your kids nothing but twinkies for years. Finally, breeding queens has become a factory process where a single queen can produce thousands of queens. So the weakness of one queen gets multiplied thousands of times. Some of those queens are AI fertilized - bypassing natural selection - which further introduces chronic weaknesses to the genetics line. These are multiplied and spread across the nation every year. Some beeks requeen with these atrocities every year - some even twice a year, as if that increases production. Which it doesn't. So every step of the way, honeybees have the cards stacked AGAINST them by man's incompetence.

Add to that the chronic use of pesticides that contaminate beehives. Sure, they may try to spray when crops are not flowering, but the problem is, honeybees don't just collect nectar and pollen, but they also collect sap from which they make propolis. This propolis is an integral component to bee-combs - what makes white beecombs yellow. It is also applied to virtually every exposed bit of wood - because it's a marvelous preservative. And finally it's used to seal cracks. Bees produce and use a LOT of propolis regardless of flowering timing. So they're out foraging even when nothing is flowering. Additionally, honeybees use water to cool the hive. They'll collect water and will apply it to the surfaces of the colony then they'll move air over those surfaces. The result is a swamp-cooler effect that can makes hives 10F or more cooler than ambient. Over-spray on crops tends to contaminate surface water that honeybees collect. Do the math. Finally, honeybees collect minerals from soil and from piles of manure and/or urine spots. Yep - disgusting, but true. The soil around crops are also usually contaminated with pesticides, and our livestock are usually up to their eye-balls in antibiotics and hormones.

All this isn't even taking GMO's into account. Frankly, as bad as GMO's are, they're actually barely a tiney fraction of a threat to honeybees. Bees feast on tens of thousands of acreas of GMO canola with zero problem at all. Bt modified crops could potentially pose a problem, but Bt toxins are very specific.

So you have thousands of weak colonies, kept on large cell foundation that makes them more susceptable to infestation, are doped with poisons that further distress them (consider sitting around watching TV while bug-bombs are being used in your home), over-robbed and fed unsuitable and mildly toxic food that also ruins their bee-bread, parked on mono-crops over the year so they're malnurished, kept in areas that industrial pesticides, chemicals and hormones are used and that invariably gets into the colonies (and also the honey you buy at the grocer), and people wonder why colonies are dying?

Combine this with drift. What happens in one beehive in an apiary invariably affects neighboring colonies because bees drift from colony to colony. Which means if one colony becomes hopelessly infected/infested, their neighbors - even if they're strong - will likewise suffer. Put one sniveling flu infested fella in a room of athletes for a few days and then watch those examples of supreme health become reduced to shivering, vomiting, miserable sicko's. It's a matter of threshold. Healthy bees have a higher threshhold of resistance but even that can be breached by nearby colonies that are immensely infested.

Additionally, colonies are not stupid. A colony can recognize a hopeless situation. In an apiary, a weak, sick hive will often be abandoned by the colony. In some cases, they'll make a new queen then abscond, leaving the old queen and emerging brood behind. In Oregon the same year this CCD thing manifested students noticed a sharp increase in feral populations. This wasn't published widely tho - it doesn't support CCD which is a cash-cow. Other cases, they'll just leave the hive altogether and merge with a strong colony, likewise leaving the queen and emerging brood behind. In either case, you have the classic symptoms that are endimic to this CCD myth. This is not unusual - bees naturally do this anyway. However, we've maginfied this by magnifying the poor conditions they're forced to live in, and magnified it by keeping thousands of beehives together in massive migratory parking-lots. Hence, 25% losses that are not unusual become 30% or even 50%.