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Sat 4 Aug, 2007 05:31 am
I am.
Worried about the bees. I keep thinking we will not have any fruit next summer. Or the summer after that. I need my blueberries.
Oh, and the stock market decline.
I am also concerned about that
Joe(but I'm having trouble connecting them.)Nation
Now I am. Met a fine fellow who happened to be tiling at my workplace, but struck me as more of an aging-hippie type.
Me having a cold, he pulls out this bag of bee pollen (he carries it with him?! yes! ) and starts filling me in on all this. Apparently, his passion is bee-keeping, but now he tiles. hee. Strange where life takes us, and who ya meet when you least expect it.
Anyhow. Would love to know the real scoop without having to go through 12 million articles and files on Bees.
(on a tangeant, would love to hear about experiences-opinions with Bee Pollen).
Bees are pretty fascinating! I had no idea they were in such jeopardy.
I'm allergic to bee pollen.
Joe(tried it with a bad reaction in my veggie-hippie days)Nation
It is interesting and needs further investigation but not to the point of major concern (for me anyway!) at this point.
CCD apparently is only seen in the Westeren Honey Bee which is one of 44 subspecies of honey bees.
Most of the fruit that shows up in my local stores comes from Mexico or South America where the CCD issue hasn't been seen (yet!).
Well, as long as the Mexicans and South Americans are okay.
Joe(there goes California)Nation
I never liked CA anyway!
(If/when CCD hits CA they'll have to find a different strain of bees... Unless someone figures out the cause and a way to resolve it by that time.)
I also read something in the NYT (I'll try to find it) that indicated this is far from the first mass bee die-off. That there have been a few waves of it -- last one was in the '70's, I think. There hasn't ever been a single convincing explanation -- people theorize and panic and then the bees come back after a while.
I think mites have been determined to have something to do with this one...
I've definitely been worried and hence reading everything about it I see.
Weve been teaching our cats to pollinate plants. They so dont get it.
The Italian strains o bees are also being affected, and thats the major hive bee in the East Coast. University of Maryland and Penn State ag schools are playing with Russian bees which seem to be immune to colony collapse.
Joe will need to strap on some wings and flit from apple blossom to apple blossom , and bluberry to blueberry. Otherwise train some cats.
Phoenix32890 wrote:I never worry about bees. It is their male offsprings that get my goat! 
What do Republicans want with your goat?
A couple of issues ago, National Geographic ran an article about America's earliest European settlements. It mentioned that before the settlers arrived, native American bee species were very specialized in the flowers they would fertilize. By being so selective, the bee species significantly limited the diversity of plants that would thrive in America's ecosystems. Then the settlers introduced the European honeybee, which is so "promiscuous" it pollinates almost every flower crossing its way. This triggered a boom in plant species, including an agricultural boom that benefitted both Indian natives and European immigrants.
This story has taught me two things:
1) Invasive species, a staple of environmental scare stories, can be enormously beneficial. So beneficial that the environmentalists who write those stories whine when one them decreases in population, and write new scare stories about that.
2) The European honeybee must be a pretty robust species, or it could never have held its own in the first place, in an environment it hadn't evolved in. I'm confident the population will recover from its present dip.
This story is interesting to me as an example of how science reacts to an economic problem, and how science interacts with society at large.
As I understand the story, there is no definative reason for the decline. The research is interesting, as is the discussion between researchers when no one has found a "smoking gun".
It seems like scientists have been pretty restrained in attaching a specific culprit. It seems like this is an example where the press has also been pretty responsible.
I don't think anyone is really predicting the end of humanity. It seems clear that this is causing economic problems... and if it continues, will hurt sectors of our economy-- particularly our agriculture.
.
This is the NYT article I referred to:
Quote:Bees Dying: Is It a Crisis Or a Phase?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: July 17, 2007
Over the last year, large die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies, from unknown causes, have raised concern that an agricultural crisis is at hand. Now, however, some experts on insect biology and bee rearing are questioning how unusual the die-offs are, saying commercial beekeeping has long had a pattern of die-offs, and without better monitoring, there is not enough information to know if anything new or calamitous is happening.
If the problem is worse than before, they say, it may be because more bee colonies are being housed and trucked by fewer beekeepers, raising the chances of infestations or infections spreading.
The official word, endorsed by many scientists and people in beekeeping businesses, is that a newly named syndrome, called colony collapse disorder,or CCD, is at work and poses a significant threat to American fruit, nut and vegetable crops.
An action plan released Friday by the Department of Agriculture used the phrase ''CCD crisis'' to describe the recent die-offs, even as it said it was ''uncertain whether CCD is a new phenomenon'' and described similar die-offs as long ago as 1898.
No one in the field doubts that commercial beekeepers in more than 20 states have seen large declines in hive populations in the last year -- more than 70 percent in some cases -- and that agriculture is facing problems pollinating some crops.
It is also clear that bees in the Americas, both wild native species and honeybees, which were imported long ago and are the commercial standard, have been hard hit in recent decades by mites and infectious agents.
What some scientists say is missing from the debate is historical context. ''Every time there are these disappearances, the ills of the moment tend to be held accountable,'' said May Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and led a National Academy of Sciencesreview of the status of North American bees and other pollinators that was published last year.
''In the '60s it was synthetic organic insecticides,'' Dr. Berenbaum said. ''In the '70s it was Africanized bee genes. In the 19th century, there is a wonderful report about this resulting from a lack of moral fiber. Weak character was why they weren't returning to the hives.''
One thing almost everyone seems to agree on is the need for consistent, frequent censuses of the country's bee populations, but money for monitoring has not been increased, bee experts said.
Eric Mussen, a bee expert at the University of California, Davis, said he did not understand the talk of catastrophe, noting that even after colonies are lost, beekeepers can quickly replace them.
Michael Burgett, a professor emeritus of entomology at Oregon State University, said the big honeybee losses in some regions could simply reflect unremarkable spikes above a common level of mortality of more than 20 percent in recent decades.
''In the late 1970s we had another scare similar to this,'' Dr. Burgett said. ''They called it 'disappearing disease' at the time. But we never found a specific cause for it, we continued to improve our bee management programs and 'disappearing disease' disappeared.''
One of the big areas of pollenation that has only been touched on is the grasses (mainly the leguminous ones) stuff like treefoil and alfalfa, amaranth,etc, are all major cattle feeds and seed crops are constantly in need. I have several alfalfa fields atht, in good years , will actually overseed from the last flowering (which we dont ever cut and leave to grow full and let the deer eat). These grasses will be severely affected as will the meat industry because much of the pelletized cattle and chicken fods use alfalfa or amaranth as a base..
Who knows how this is gonna play out. As Thomas said, and Ive seen it here in Maine, there are other insects, not bees , that have been pollenating the apple trees in the old orchards that were commonplace in the old, now abandoned , farmsteads all over the Maine woods. Near me,Near the town of MEddybemops, is what appears to be an old settlement (like Shamalyans "The Village) where an entire ag based town once existed and all that reamins, except for a few ruins , are scads of apple orchards where bears spend the summer and moose get the apples from the high branches.
I am worried about the bees, yes. But, the honey bees we have are non-native. I like them, but they are here to help non-native crops from europe to pollinate. We had fruit pollinating without them before they were imported. Things will be different if they leave us all together, but we'll still have fruit. I would, however miss honey.
Has anyone seen any info about what percentage of the pollination of common crops is done by honey bees?
This summer we have an abundance of bees here in southern Cal - my
dog just got stung by one, that poor baby.
Yet, they're probably killer bees instead of honey bees.
Calamity(lives in the land of milk and honey)Jane
Between the Africanized bees and the Varroa Mite, not to mention the Acute Bee Paralysis Virus, the Black Queen Cell Virus, etc., bees are very much in peril.
I don't know, don't things persist over diseases. You know, survival of the fittest and all. Has any species become extinct due to disease alone?
You have too much faith in natural selection K.
Things go extinct for many reasons. A good disease can kill every member of a species turning it into an evolutionary dead end.
Natural selection is no guarantee of survival.
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