Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's like watching a bunch of bee-keepers engage in a heated debate about a memory leak in your iOS app after reading an article and a Wikipedia page --not one of them being a programmer.
I'd love to hear from bee biologists or someone otherwise scientifically qualified in the domain. Everything else is just noise.
As an aside, I pass through Bakersfield a few times a year on our way to one of our camping destinations. It's interesting to learn that all those beehives are rented and trucked in.
If that's a serious question, because we're pattern-matching this issue with other ones we're emotionally invested in -- archetypical issues of technological progress and ecology. Pre-existing cached narratives.
As a satisfying hobby/project, it's great.
Help me understand please. How does owning land and leasing it to an almond farmer result in knowing quite a bit about this problem? I'll grant you that you might be seeing bees die and the effect this might have on crops. Not sure that helps understand the problem.
Are you a biologist? Perhaps a chemist? Virologist? Have you devoted decades to researching bee biology? Have you performed controlled studies on your land or lab to isolate potential vectors, contagions, chemicals and observe their effects over a number of populations and over time? Have you published any research papers based on your work?
Not taking sides other than to say that this is a complex problem that only true science can resolve. You could stop all insecticides and chemical treatments for a few years and see what happens. No need for a PhD on that one, but you have to be willing to make huge sacrifices in terms of crop yields.
I understand and share your desire for scientific rigor in this discussion, but don't be a prick about it.
My step-dad is an avid beekeeper, and an organic urban farmer. Its been "known" for years amongst that community that the collapse is caused by pesticides. Bayer has done an amazing job keeping this labeled a "mystery".
Do you have any scientific backing for your claims aside from... your step-dad "knowing" things?
Specifically the statement says one kind of pesticide "could be" an important "contributing factor". It's no smoking gun.
There have been calls for some restrictions of neonicitinoid use (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21277933) but research is ongoing and it's important to take evidence based action. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21793365)
Being careful with the science is a very different position from 'the science is bunk'.
With new chemicals that have concerns like this I would have thought a "guilty until proven innocent" approach would be more advisable.
Last thing we want is "Oh yes it was that stuff, sorry about that, any bees left?"
[1] http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news264587 (press release by Julius Kühn institute, German)
[2] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/maispflschmv/BJNR502300009... (neonicotinoid ban for corn seeds, German)
> No single cause of declining bee numbers has been identified. However, several contributing factors have been suggested, acting in combination or separately. _These include the effects of intensive agriculture and pesticide use_, starvation and poor bee nutrition, viruses, attacks by pathogens and invasive species – such as the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor), the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), the small hive beetle Aethina tumida and the bee mite Tropilaelaps – genetically modified plants, and environmental changes (e.g. habitat fragmentation and loss).
Looks like his step dad is a better source than yours.
Just out of interest, are you paid troll? Shame to see this kind of BS on HN
This is the reason why I think that off topic articles like this should be mercilessly squelched. They turn into flame wars within an hour or two.
Making shill claims is really not helpful.
"No single cause of declining bee numbers has been identified" "Several contributed factors have been suggested"
If that, in your opinion, amounts to "it's obviously the pesticides", then I guess you can think of me as some kind of troll. If, instead, you can understand that making simplistic and overreaching statements like "it's obviously the pesticides" does nothing to help the bees and instead just brings the conversation down to a third grade level, then no, I'm not a troll.
"15 of 16 imidacloprid- treated hives (94%) were dead across 4 apiaries 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. Dead hives were remarkably empty except for stores of food and some pollen left, a resemblance of CCD."
While none of the control hives died.
Their conclusion:
"Data from this in situ study provide convincing evidence that exposure to sub-lethal levels of imidacloprid in HFCS causes honey bees to exhibit symptoms consistent to CCD 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. The survival of the control hives managed alongside with the pesticide-treated hives unequivocally augments this conclusion. The observed delayed mortality in honey bees caused by imidacloprid in HFCS is a novel and plausible mechanism for CCD, and should be validated in future studies."
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/21/without_honeybees_we_may_cea...
I really don't feel like the EPA or USDA has our backs. Those organizations tend to be pretty well integrated with lobbyists from large agro-corps.
There seem to be multiple studies indicating that 'neonic' pesticides are responsible for large portions of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) symptomology [1,2,3]. However, your skepticism is not entirely unjust. Other scientists have linked portions of CCD to various factors involved in industrial bee culture, including artificial insemination of queens and lack of biodiversity.
[1] - Assessment of the environmental exposure of honeybees to particulate matter containing neonicotinoid insecticides coming from corn coated seeds.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22292570
[2] - In situ replication of honey bee colony collapse disorder
http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf
[3] - Neonicotinoid Pesticide Reduces Bumble Bee Colony Growth and Queen Production
Well, why could there not be several contributing factors at work here?
What's easier to believe?
1) The pesticides used on plants are perfectly safe and there's a much more complex answer to this mystery, or 2) Bayer's self interest prevents them from even caring to do the research to find if the chemicals they use are safe for bees, and the chances are that they are not safe.
Just on the face of it, #2 is far more likely than #1.
We don't have evidence that proves either, though, so I'm going to say we should be conservative and try to mitigate the problem by reigning in the pesticides.
Because neither science nor logic in general work that way.
[Random link]: http://www.beeman.ca/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/mob...
Also there has been a lot of usage of 2.4GHz devices in recent years.
bluetooth? - low power, doesn't travel far
wifi - been around long before 2005
cell phones - don't use 2.4 unless BT or wi-fi, have also been in the 1800/1900 gsm bands long before LTE/data networks
microwave ovens - been around forever.
Doesn't seem to add up.
not saying RF doesn't hurt, just playing devils advocate.
It is nearly impossible for researchers to make a definitive case. Colonies that suffer from CCD have consistently higher concentrations of pesticides than their healthy counterparts. But it's a mix of up to 200 distinct pesticides. If anyone wants to believe that pesticides are not the cause, it's easy to view the available data and say, "see, that's not proof".
In my opinion, one day we'll look back and figure out that bees and bats were our canaries in the coal mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_population...
Without sarcasm, I am amazed the burden of proof is on studies to show pesticides are UNSAFE. If there is colony collapse disorder and we know they are feeding on pesticide laced fields, shouldn't they have to prove they are not causing it. It is not that the pesticides kill the bees outright, it affects them subtly including their navigation.
Let's see if the European Commission enforces the ban on this neonicotinoids and what the results of such a ban will be.
> Denying that this is not true
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Ok, beekeeper, non-vegan here. I've got no horse in the vegan race, but I do know my bees and here is the sad truth: beekeeping is responsible for the decline of world-wide bee population for the last (roughly) 150 years, and for the precipitous decline since 1947.
Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive has been bad for bees. This is mostly because the hive design has movable frames and opens from the top. These innovations led to highly interventionist beekeeping, and copious fucking with the bees.
The movable frame allows the beekeeper to easily remove, inspect, replace, and swap comb, and led to migratory beekeeping. Bees are now trucked by the tens of thousands of hives across the country with the seasons for the pollination business (which is a bigger than the honey business). The results is that diseases and bee pests move too. The biggest colony killer in the US right now is the Varroa mite, introduced from Asia by humans in 1988, and spread by humans to hives across the country.
The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung, the nest atmosphere. Bees maintain a anti-microbial sauna inside the hive, at a contant tempurature with a complex scent. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off infection. The scent helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the hive destroys the atmosphere. It takes the bees days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for foraging, building, and preparing for winter. This weakens the bees, compromising their immune system and leaving them susceptible to infection and invaders.
Then there's honey. Bees spend all season making honey stores so that they can survive the winter. The beekeeper comes along and takes it, then feeds the bees sugar syrup in the winter. This also weakens the bees. Honey is a complex, nutritious bee food. Sugar water is a simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the bees with sugar, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)
In the pursuit of larger honey harvest, beekeepers have been artificially increasing the size if the bee's comb cell for about 100 years, by using comb foundation. Bigger cells is thought to mean more honey. So the bees you see today (with some exceptions) are "large-cell" bees, bigger than nature made them. Bigger cells means the workers are too big and the drones are too small (bees left on their own will make different sized cells for each type of bee). This weakens the bees. Some bees bred generations on foundation have lost their ability to create comb on their own.
These weak, immuno-compromised bees are then protected by the beekeepers with pesticides and anti-biotics placed in the hive to deal with the disease and pests that the bees can no longer fight off. This poisons the honey (yum!) and the bees, and breeds resistant pests.
Beekeeping is also dominated by artificial breeding of queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the queens which nature uses to find the strongest queen. This weakens the genetics of the bees, for thousands of generations. Most, in fact almost all, beekeeping is industrial farming, equivalent to factory farming chickens or cattle. And it has devastated the bees.
There are exceptions: look into vertical top bar hives (which open from the bottom except once a year); chemical-free beekeeping; and spring-harvest honey (taken from the surplus after winter is over).
A note about honey: most of the honey you buy at the grocery store is not. It is heated and filtered and pollen-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of honey, cut eith corn syrup, beet syrup or other sweeteners, and laced with pesticides and anti-biotics. If you want honey, buy unfiltered, unheated honey, from a beekeeper you know. If you want honey and are concerned about the bees, buy from a beekeeper using Warré topbar hives, doing a surplus harvest. A note about Colony Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial farming pesticides, which destroy bees' navigational abilities, and they can't find their way back to the hive. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the chemical companies, primarily Bayer. But in the context of bees weakened by generations of industrial beekeeping, trying to forage on thousands of acres of monoculture crops, having been trucked thousands of miles from their home territory, it is an easy lie to sell.
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http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midni...
Interestingly enough I found that comment after going way down through the comments of this article yesterday: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/bees-buzz-each...
I thought, awesome trivia knowledge! And now my comment foraging is extremely relevant to a post today.
This may all be true, but none of it addresses the huge, sudden, new losses that are being reported in this story:
Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.
And even though this poster points out that boutique chemical-free beekeeping exists, he doesn't say that such beekeepers have been spared this blight. I don't know if they have in fact suffered less or not, but you'd think that if they had, that would be both something worth mentioning and kind of a huge clue into whatever degree of mystery the collapse disorder really represents.
And the colony died, randomly. Also happened to some friends' hive. The beekeeper we bought the supplies from hypothesized it was the cold, but we didn't have an unnaturally cold winter and we live in the bay area (not really known for being freezing).
are you sure there's no pesticide on the plants on the lands nearby? that would also explain the CC of your friend's if he lives in the same area
Our only hope is that it's actually a false choice and that human innovation can, at some point in the future, cash the checks we're writing with industrial farming, pollution and others without significant harm to our race. The checks will be cashed either way, it's just a question of how painful that will be.
People live paycheck to paycheck, have children without being prepared, get married without being ready, party every weekend and do things they don't even remember, destroy their bodies with chemicals, treat their fellow man with little to no regard, eat garbage, refuse to exercise, get less than required amount of sleep, sit on the couch and watch TV for consecutive hours at a time.
What are the results? Divorce, suicide, diabetes, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, murder, rape, bankruptcy, debt, family feuds, domestic violence, child abuse, homelessness.
This planet is temporary.
(I am quite ready to believe there are cheaters, but if it is more or less industry practice, it should be easy enough to document it)
The guy (in the reddit comment) probably has a point about the filtering and heating (and more broadly, the sourcing and purity of the honey). Tossing it in there with some rabble about other sugars being added makes me wonder if his agenda is one that I would like.
"By the time the FDA said it realized the Chinese honey was tainted, Smuckers had sold 12,040 cases of individually packed honey to Ritz-Carlton Hotels and Sara Lee said it may have been used in a half-million loaves of bread that were on store shelves.
Eventually, some honey packers became worried about what they were pumping into the plastic bears and jars they were selling. They began using in-house or private labs to test for honey diluted with inexpensive high fructose corn syrup or 13 other illegal sweeteners or for the presence of illegal antibiotics. But even the most sophisticated of these tests would not pinpoint the geographic source of the honey."
And then in several other parts of the article it mentions the tainted Chinese honey that has the pollen footprint removed.
It doesn't come out explicitly to say "Chinese honey is tainted and diluted with artificial sweeteners." Because Chinese honey as pointed out in many parts of the article is run through ultra-filtration techniques to eliminate the only foolproof way of eliminating origin, which is the pollen footprint.
So, it could very well be that some of the honey with sweeteners comes from other places, and not from China. But there seems to be a strong link between Chinese practices and the tainted honey, as the article seems to allude to.
Anyway, the paragraph just prior to the two you quote makes it pretty clear that the first paragraph you quote is specifically about antibiotics. And, repeating myself, the notion that packers are testing suppliers is not particularly an impeachment of the honey industry.
I replied to Anigbrowl because their reply was rather terse and this article is not the sort of smoking gun I talked about in my first post.
I replied to lilsunnybee because they imply that I was lazy in my reply, and I wasn't.
Vague allusions to the idea that Chinese honey is sketchy is hardly what I had in mind in my original post. That it doesn't come right out and say anything sort of suggests that they don't really have any documentation that it is happening.
I like this one. Probably meant Nestduftwärmebindung (Nest=nest Duft=scent Wärme=warmth Bindung=binding).
Ok, Hacker News regular, non-redditor here. I've got no horse in the reddit race, but I do know my Hacker News and here is the sad truth: reddit is responsible for the decline of the world-wide Hacker News community for the last (roughly) 6 years, and for the precipitous decline since 2012.
Commenting as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the reddit has been bad for Hacker News. This is mostly because the reddit has lots of posers and trolls who talk when they should listen. These newbies led to highly interventionist commenting, and copious fucking with serious community members.
The web-based interface allows the commenter to easily troll, hate, argue, and pontificate, and led to migratory community hopping. Threads are now trucked by the tens of thousands of uniques across the internet with the seasons for the community forum business (which is a bigger than the software business). The results is that viruses and on-line pests move too. The biggest community killer in the US right now is the stepfather, introduced from reddit by trollers in 2012, and spread by anonymous users to communities across the web.
The opening of the web destroys pg's carefully maintained arc application, the HN atmosphere. Posters maintain a anti-microbial discussion inside the forum, at a contant atmosphere with a complex culture. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off trollers. The software helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the community destroys the atmosphere. It takes the moderators days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for debugging, troubleshooting, and scaling for eternal September. This weakens the users, compromising their karma system and leaving them susceptible to spammers and hackers.
Then there's language wars. Developers spend all season building tools so that they can survive the bubble burst. The troller comes along and takes it, then feeds the devs javascript on the server. This also weakens the infrastructure. Software is a complex, nutritious business food. Frameworks are simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the programmers with frameworks, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)
In the pursuit of larger karma harvest, trollers have been artificially increasing the size if the comment thread for about 4 years, by using friends. Voting rings are thought to mean more karma. So the nicks you see today (with some exceptions) are "karma-whore" users, bigger than the community made them. Higher karma means the users are too big and the lurkers are too small (members left on their own will make different sized comments for each type of thread). This weakens the community. Some programmers bred generations on frameworks have lost their ability to create software on their own.
These weak, immuno-compromised devs are then protected by the community with fluff and drama placed in the forum to deal with the spammers and trollers that the moderators can no longer fight off. This poisons the community (yum!) and the members, and encourages resistant trolls.
Reddit is also dominated by artificial breeding of drama queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the commenters which nature uses to find the strongest poster. This weakens the genetics of the members, for thousands of generations. Most, in fact almost all, web forums are industrial trolling, equivalent to factory trolling Facebook or twitter. And it has devastated the community.
There are exceptions: look into Ask HN posts (which come from legitimate users except once a day); YC related news, and anything from patio11. (taken from the surplus after he's done blogging).
A note about karma: most of the karma you get on Hacker News is not. It is sheeplike and filtered and wisdom-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of subject matter experts, cut with antecdotes, suppositions or other non sequitors, and laced with drama and bullshit. If you want karma, make unfiltered, unheated obsevations, from a hacker you know. If you want karma and are concerned about voting rings, post when most users are present and trollers are busy at reddit. A note about Community Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial trolling and posing, which destroy real hackers' cerebral abilities, and they can't find their way back to the data. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the fluff communities, primarily reddit. But in the context of forums weakened by generations of industrial trolling, trying to forage on thousands of threads of popculture posts, having been FTP'd thousands of links from their home url, it is an easy lie to sell.
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So, IMO this is about half true and a lot of it is conjecture or outright tin-foil-hatism….
What he/she says about the screwing around in the hive is at least partly true. But most experienced beekeepers don't go in the hives more than they need to (I've been in mine [I lost one over the winter] twice since like October). This is typically a new-beekeeper phenomenon (and more new beekeepers are not the problem).
The Langstroth hive does allow for more easily managed beekeeping. Top bar hives are en vogue among the hippie beekeeping crowd - they are more common in third world beekeeping. There are even some advantages to them (they are much easier to build, e.g.). Without the Langstroth, there would probably be very very few backyard beekeepers.
Copious fucking with the bees is definitely part of the problem. The largest issue, which the author points out, is all of the bee migration: going out to pollinate almonds in CA, and then blueberries in MI, etc. This is, as they point out, a MUCH bigger business than honey. Honey is a by-product of pollination business. This is only news to non-beekeepers.
Most of the pesticide issues with bees is from bee contact with things NOT used directly by the beekeeper. Bees are extremely sensitive to pesticides. If you are carrying bees all over the place, especially to farmland, you have a higher chance of them interacting with pesticides. But I have a similar risk if one of my neighbors within, say, a mile, decides to pesticide up a plant that is flowering and my bees happen to be using it for food.
Yes, the chemicals used on bees are much like the chemicals used in, say, poultry or beef production. Preventative and abused by overuse. FWIW, I have all the chemicals, but have never treated mine. Treating when it's appropriate is better than letting the bees get sick or overrun by parasites. There is something called IPM (Integrated Pest Management) advocating this kind of appropriate treatment when necessary, along with other non-chemical preventative management. Beekeeper certifications are based on these methods.
There are guidelines to when chemical treatments can occur to keep it out of the honey flow. I'm pretty sure no matter how poorly these treatments are done, any "poisoned" honey is much healthier than any produce you'd get that's ever had pesticides applied to it (or, say, spraying yourself with DEET). Remember bees are _extremely_ sensitive to toxins.
Varroa are the biggest bee pest since they came to the US in the 80s. Again this would only be news to non-beekeepers. They are here to stay and we're now in the business of managing them…there's no getting rid of them entirely and the statement about how humans are spreading them around is a bit disingenuous -- bees are spreading them around just as well. This is the same story as throughout the biological world where an invasive species is introduced via this new thing we call "global travel".
Cell size might be a contributing factor to some things (like mite populations), so I'll let the author have that one.
The hive I lost this winter was FULL of honey (> 10gal). The bees still froze/starved. They were just too weak eventually to maintain temperature and to get to the honey they did have. Bees, given the proper conditions will produce WAY WAY more honey than they need and in fact, leaving it all on there increases the size of the hive they have to maintain, and can weaken their ability to fight off cold, disease, and intruders. Sometimes nature gets the best of the bees. The long warm fall/winter we had left the bees in a more active mode for longer with less incoming food and then the erratic winter didn't help.
I do feed my bees syrup or pollen patties or a combination of the two maybe twice a year. Usually this is just pre-winter to keep them from eating into the valuable honey right next to the hive body before winter or to give them an easier/quick source of food coming out of winter. This is only a supplemental source of food, the bees are almost entirely eating pollen and honey.
The bit about store honey is fairly accurate. I would hesitate to buy honey from a store if I had a better source. I'm not sure about the whole "benefit" thing -- I tend to believe that honey is mostly a simple sugar that isn't all that good for us and I don't buy into the whole eating honey with pollen will stave off allergies claim. I eat it because I like how it tastes, not because it's a health food. So some of that is also granola/hippie handwringing IMO.
BUT HERE'S WHERE THE BIGGEST BS COMES IN: The author's pontification on the cause of CCD. Even if you know nothing about bees, just reading that paragraph sounds like conspiracy paranoia. There are a lot of stressors on bees: parasites, disease, pesticides, commercial migration, etc. CCD, however, is a very specific condition: In simplest terms, the colony just disappears entirely. The latest findings I read about were pointing to a combination of a fungal infection common in bees called Nosema with a secondary cause, perhaps a bacterial infection like Foulbrood or a viral one like Deformed Wing virus. But the truth is we don't know. It's not a conspiracy of government and big business. Newsflash: Also, the moon landing wasn't faked.
My $0.02. Or well this is long enough to be more like $0.10.
The decline of honey bee since 1947 has nothing to do with the top two points this guys claims. (Removable frames and opening the top)
After WWII, there was a drop off of number of beekeepers. This was due to changing agriculture and the dynamics of the family farm, with a huge surge towards cities and jobs. I will not even try to guess about the down fall of beekeeping due to removable tops, except to say that this is a key point in the narrow minded approach of the Warre hive crowd.
Up till the mid 1980's, beekeeping was healthy and productive. Losing 10% of your hives were considered a bad year. The worst thing that could of happened was getting AFB. (Which by the way was controlled by the removable frame Langstroth hive. AFB prior to removable frames were as high as 50% in some areas, and the basis of most inspection programs years ago. It was a serious matter destroying beekeeping back in it's day. The removable frame (and being able to inspect hives) was why AFB is controlled...even to this day.)
Then we had the introduction of varroa mites, trachea mites, various viral and bacterial issues associated with mites, a new nosema, and now small hive beetle. That does not even scratch the surface in regards to pesticides and the new classes of chemicals out there.
But the Warre crowd sprinkles the conversation with all the key words and talking points, to bash anyone not using a Warre hive, and tailors, or better yet,,,"warps" all information to best fit their ideology.
But how can you claim that the downfall of beekeeping is caused by the Langstroth hive with removable frames and a removable top, and yet claim the root of CCD is chemicals and farming practices. I guess the Warre hive is immune to chemicals. ;)
Anyhow...read the above post. And you can get a sense of the agenda and the promotion of the Warre hive.
not agreeing with either :). but he points that this brought a boost in production not the downfall. later he argue it wasn't sustainable in the longer term. but he never says the introduction of that type of hive start the decline of bees.
Actually, without the movable frame system hives wouldn't have much of a chance to survive (At least in our part of Germany). My only hive died this winter, because there was too much honey in it. When the hive cools down to the lower 20°C range in winter the honey crystallizes and becomes too hard for the bees to eat. If done properly, taking the honey and feeding the right syrup (which is not just sugar and water) will keep them alive, as it doesn't crystallize.
I'm quite sure the cell foundation you get in here are of natural size and I have not experienced any problems with the bees building natural combs for drones. Here again the frame system is just great for helping the hive: It allows for the drone combs to be removed after the cells have been sealed, which reduces Varroa, as these prefer drones as hosts.
Another considerable advantage of Langstroth vs. classical skeps: You don't have to kill the hive to get honey/wax. Plus you get pure honey and not some honey - dead bee - crushed larvae - coctail.
Secondly, California's acres in bearing almonds has more than doubled in ten years. It's a classic agribusiness gold rush, where for some reason the growers are unable to restrain themselves from overproducing a single crop. Almond prices actually peaked in 2005. It takes 5 years for an almond orchard to bear fruit, so all the bonanza-chasers who planted after 2005 are just coming online. This will increase the stress placed on honeybee colonies by increasing the demand for pollination services.
Third. It is an established fact that almond pollination works better in the presence of wild pollinators, which for California almond orchards means native honey bees and bumblebees. These pollinators are also capable of pollinating the crop by themselves, without Apis, except the growers have systematically poisoned them with pesticides and herbicides. Growers of organic almonds (which, by the way, market for 2-3x the price of conventional almonds) will eventually win this game by not poisoning their native pollinators, and because they maintain inter-row habitats for beneficial insects instead of the toxic bare soil that stands between the rows in a conventional orchard.
I have an inclination to disagree with the "No one knows why" part. I was given the firm impression way back in 2011(?) that colony collapse disorder was understood to be linked to neonicotinoid pesticides pretty firmly, albeit through a slightly byzantine mechanism.
Here's an article from early 2012 in wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-bee...
The long and short of it is:
1. Farmers grow CORN, and treat the corn with this class of relatively new pesticides.
2. The corn is used to create corn syrup.
3. The corn syrup, being produced on an industrial scale, retains trace amounts of the pesticides, given the slightly imperfect production processes, with loose tolerances that allow for impurities.
4. The corn syrup is fed to the bees, as part of a normal commercial practice, whereby the bees, being transported to unfamiliar territories need a familiar food source while they acclimate to their surroundings and locate reliable local sources of their normal food (flower nectar, etc, etc).
5. The corn farming is not organic, and the bee keeping is not organic. No one cares how the corn is grown because they're feeding it to bees, not humans. Bees don't read labels, and don't sue for damages.
6. Given that the contaminant is a pesticide, specifically designed to inflict death upon insects, bees are uniquely affected by even trace amounts of the toxin, in ways that humans are not. This is not unlike the unintended side-effect DDT has on ospreys.
7. The side-effect has been described loosely as "getting bees so 'drunk' that they get lost, and wander far away from the hive, aimlessly, and fail to return alive."
8. An individual bee inflicted with the trace quantities is capable of recovering to normal health, when the toxin is administered under direct observation, and can be reintroduced to the hive without noticable effects. So, while the dosage is not immediately lethal to the bee, when applied to many or all in a hive, the effect is disruptive to their cooperative behavior. This would explain why the populations dwindle over time, and the bees don't just drop dead.
That's my amateur understanding. Makes sense to me?
Here's another reasonable article: http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-linked-c...
Then it just comes down to which growers actually use these new pesticides on corn? And then which corn syrup companies source their corn from these farmers?
Anyway, here's a research paper that purports some evidence: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/chensheng-lu/files/2012/10/in-si...
Interestingly enough, it looks like I got my bee biology, and bee keeping practices completely wrong in #4. I completely misunderstood the whole honey production/cold winter/hive temperature principle, and the honey harvest/corn syrup substitution thing.
It's outlined in the paper. The hive temperature thing plays a key role, in that the bees feed on the corn syrup while it's cold, during periods when they would normally feed on honey, and stay inside to keep the hive warm. The bees that are intoxicated abandon the hive, and fail to assist in providing the elevated temperature of the hive, leading to the hive's failure.
There's probably more to it than that, but like I said, that's my amateur understanding. I am not a bee keeper.
That beekeepers are good enough at and persistent enough about shopping for the relative quality of the syrup they are buying to be relevant is entirely unbelievable.
If pesticide contamination of feed syrup does end up being a big factor, that's great, other types of sugar or not robbing the honey are easy ways to have pollinators.
I'm going to paraphrase that statement a bit: "It's entirely unbelievable that a beekeeper's decisions in corn syrup selection could be relevant to colony collapse disorder."
That seems to operate on the assumption that every 5 gallon bucket of corn syrup is perfectly identical, no matter the supplier.
But I'll shoot down my own assumption that every bee keeper, who has experienced colony collapse disorder affecting their hives, has actually even used corn syrup explicitly as bee feed for their bees. I'm only taking that technique from the premise of the research I read about.
Everyone is very passionate, and has at least 1-2 anecdotes, though no real evidence.
I'm not saying this is the case here but I've seen it on other issues. It's an easy trap to fall into "we just don't know and there are different voices". In a functioning society, there's a clear channel from the science to the public, via the journalists.
No. The protest to the "we already know, it's pesticides" camp is the concern that colony collapse may be more complicated than a single factor. That doesn't mean that those people believe there couldn't be a corporate cover up or bias in research, but that they are cautious about evidence and the scientific method.
I haven't found a single comment here that says "no, pesticides aren't the problem." Instead, there are plenty of comments saying it's just not clear how significant of a problem it is in relation to colony collapse.
Not only that, but of the people who say "no there is no mystery," not everyone agrees on what this incredibly obvious conclusion is. Is it susceptibility to parasites from neonics, or is it that neonics cause them to lose their sense of direction (the latter seems much less likely from the research I've perused.) Is it just a pervasive environmental effect, is it from bees foraging in Bt-corn, is it from neonic treated corn syrup? Or is it from pesticides that are totally different than neonics?
Do you really think we should stop research into parasites like Apocephalus borealis or Varroa or electromagnetic interference? If not, then it's nowhere near a foregone conclusion, perhaps even a 'mystery.'
If that's the concern, then changing a single factor would be a good idea. We could ban neonicotinoid pesticides and measure the results.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-...
Obviously this beekeeper is not from Tennessee.
The current situation is like having a bug that only shows up in production. At first it wasn't so bad, but we're in day 8 and now half the data is disappearing.
You can't identify the cause without getting in there and trying things. Change. Monitor. Repeat. With a solid lead (and we have one with CCD), it is the quickest way to solve this problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_imp...
That's encouraging and frustrating at the same time. Encouraging to see that minds can change; discouraging to see another illustration that it so often requires being screwed over personally to change it.
Since neonicotinoid pesticides were introduced in 1992, 10 million honey-bee colonies have died globally.
Bumblebee and bird populations have crashed in every country where "neonics" are used. Researchers at Stirling University fed bumblebees minute doses of neonicotinoids. The colonies produced 85% fewer queens than usual. Professor Dave Goulson said: " Only queens survive the winter, so reducing their number by 85% means far fewer colonies next year - the long-term effects are likely to be profound."
The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust recently appointed Professor Michael Usher as its chairman. Horticulture Week reported: "Professor Usher said that neonicotinoids, implicated in bee deaths, should continue to be used as insecticides. The former SNH chief scientist argued that neonicotinoids have a place in crop protection, despite damning research released this spring from Stirling University."
Prof Usher was quoted as saying: "We need pollinators but we need our crops too."
The Trust itself seems confused; the pesticide issue is not mentioned on its website, even though Prof Goulson was the trust's founder. The impact of neonicotinoids on bees, birds and wildlife is catastrophic; we are facing ecological Armageddon. Usher must resign, or be sacked; if not, the Trust will be dismissed as mere "greenwash". The trustees must encourage staff to actively campaign against these pesticides. If they don't, the Trust may find its membership sliding to extinction faster than the bumblebees.
Graham White, Friends of the Bees
Philip Chandler, Friends of the Bees
Dr Rosemary Mason, life member, BBCT
Palle Uhd Jepsen, past adviser on nature conservation to the Danish Government and life member, BBCT
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuk...
They don't make harvestable honey, so they aren't a 100% replacement for the current model. However, they might be able to fill the gap for commercial pollination. They are also not colony insects in the same sense as honey bees, so it's possible that they might be more resistant to large-scale die-offs.
[1] http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-...
I figured the bees are flying low across the street, because they fly near the ground following their memories and searching for food, and passing back and forth countless times over the street they were bound to get struck.
Of course I'm not saying cars are the primary cause, but I believe getting struck by motor vehicles may have a major impact on the population. Considering the number of deer-vehicle collisions and similar, it is at least worth considering.
Like when your site is going down and you hope it is just that you need more memory in your web serverSo you add it and then you run out of DB connections so you fire up some slaves but then you start having disk i/o problems so you go SSD then the network ports are saturated..
In practice, it may be difficult to test the safety of any particular integrated pesticide, for example because of political pressure on the researchers [1].
(But then again, people are allowed to sell foods containing evolutionary novel toxins like gluten, peanut agglutinin, and canavanine, with no safety testing.)
Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
Jim Wilson/The New York Times A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year was particularly bad. By MICHAEL WINES Published: March 28, 2013 101 Comments FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS
¶ BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » ¶ A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
¶ The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.
¶ “They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”
¶ In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.
¶ In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.
¶ The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”
¶ Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.
¶ Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.
¶ “We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week.
¶ “They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.”
¶ Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.
¶ Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.
¶ Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.
¶ Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.
¶ This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.
¶ “But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.
Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses. Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big Sky Honey.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bill Dahle, the owner, described a startling loss of honeybees last year. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.
While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.
The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.
Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.
Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.
“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”
Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.
He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.
A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife.
The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France.
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
Monsanto is the biggest player in that field (by far, I think).
There is so much GM hate by people who have only read or heard soundbites. My experience with GM crops has been that they have resulted in massively reduced levels of pesticide spraying (from an agricultural background) with the side Benicia thet the farmer saves money and insects are spared
Bees forage in corn. That means they are exposed to and possibly affected by GMO Bt-Corn pollen endotoxins and the neonics they treat the corn with.
GM crops (in general, not limited to roundup) allow a dramatic reduction in pesticide use. While they might not improve the predicament of bees being fed pesticide-contaminated corn syrup, they will reduce the overall background levels of pesticides in many hives' environments.
so the propaganda goes ... In fact, the opposite happens:
http://earthopensource.org/index.php/5-gm-crops-impacts-on-t...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesti...
The way to reduce pesticide use is organic farming.
The organic label is meaningless, while true organic farming is resource-intensive and unsustainable as a global agricultural strategy.
The most upsetting fact is that most GM opponents simply refuse to acknowledge that genetic modification not only holds great promise for agriculture, but is simply a more efficient way to manipulate crops in ways that we have been doing for tens of thousands of years. This gets us farther from the goal of GM safety and agricultural sustainability, not closer.
It says: "At least for the short term, it looks as if more expensive and more hazardous chemical inputs will continue to increase in use for corn, soybeans, and cotton because of pesticide resistance which is growing at an alarming rate."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-mons...
"Multiple possible causes of CCD have been identified. In 2007, some authorities attributed the problem to biotic factors such as Varroa mites and insect diseases (i.e., pathogens[5] including Nosema apis and Israel acute paralysis virus).[6][7] Other proposed causes include environmental change-related stresses,[8] malnutrition, pesticides (e.g.. neonicotinoids such as clothianidin and imidacloprid[9][10][11]), and migratory beekeeping. other possibilities have included both cell phone radiation[12][13] and genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics although no evidence has been found to suggest this.[14][15]
Emphasis mine.
[14] http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-...
[15] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonie...
If someone has a greater understanding than the Wikipedia consensus and the sources to back it, please respond (or update Wikipedia!)
That Wikipedia text quote is full of the former kind of phrase, using "Possible causes have been identified", "other proposed causes", and "other possibilities".
The sentence you emphasized starts with such a phrase:
"other possibilities have included […] genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics"
And then further weakens the statement with "although no evidence has been found to suggest this.*"
So, if I read that Wikipedia article, I mostly read "we don't know."
And I can't find any evidence of any of that.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-science-pestici...
Monsanto itself is actually purchasing companies that develop bee-safe pesticides, so obviously they believe it's a problem, too, even if you'll never hear them come out and say it in so many words:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q1M0UO0.htm
Also, I have to take issue with the headline here, "No one knows why" doesn't appear to be true at all, even according to the NY Times article itself. Just a lot of hand-waving by those who profit from GMO/pesticides to throw off the trail while they figure out what to do behind the scenes, hoping it's not too late.
The real thrust of which is that its a limitation on liability to protect them from future monetary claims against their various GMO-Pesticides, etc.
Of course this counteracts the inherent protections that markets give, so instead of being sued out of existence for their mistakes - they are enshrined into law.
I know for a fact that pesticides are super-deadly to bees. Twice I've had colonies wiped out by poison spread by one of my neighbors - it is really sad to watch the dead bees pile up in a mass die-off.