Is anyone else worried about the bees?

My wife saw a bumblebee the other day. It's the first one either of us have seen in years.

Joe(there are flowers all up and down our street)Nation

quite a few bumblebees "bumbling" around our garden - but we live somewhat north of you ! it seems that canadian bees wre not as much under stress - yet !
we've got plenty of wasps around - matter of fact , one nest of ground-wasps was next to our frontdoor . while they were not particularly threatening i sprayed some diat. earth araund the entrance and the wasps decided to pack up and to dig a hole some other place in the garden - smart creatures !
hbg

A really warm couple of days (for winter) last week & my Grevillea bush was covered with hoards of busy bees! I'm absolutely thrilled. What a buzz!

spoke to a beekeeper yesterday to order some jars of honey for the fall season .
he is also our postman , so he delivers free of charge !
asked him about the health of his bees and he told me , that his bees are just doing great .
he lives appr. 50 miles north of lake ontario/u.s. - canada border .
he had some problems with mites three years ago but was able to get them under control and now has plenty of healthy bees and plenty of honey .
waiting for monday's delivery !
hbg

I stumped out about 1/2 acre of woods and planted clover for the deer and bear to munch. The clover is high and has been flowering . Lots of bees on the flowers so Il expect that the clover will spread out as I stump some more land (cut trees to about a 2 ft stump and hit the stump with strait Roundup and the tree dies and Ive got a new pasture.) lAst time I checked was on Tues and it looks like there no lack of bees. Each flower had one and more bee on it.

farmerman wrote :



glad to hear it - hope you'll get lots of honey !
hbg

a song for your "honeybees" - whoever they are ! :wink:

Thanks for keeping up on this Fishin.

Joe(the subject bugs me)Nation

our "postman" delivered 4 pounds of fine honey from his bees for $10 .
hbg

Has Mystery of Bee Deaths Been Solved?
Has Mystery of Bee Deaths Been Solved?
By ANDREW BRIDGES, AP
Posted: 2007-09-07

Scientific sleuths have a new suspect for what's been killing billions of honeybees: a virus previously unknown in the United States.

Matt Cardy, Getty Images By using a novel genetic technique along with old-fashioned statistics, some scientists said they have identified a virus thought to be largely responsible for decimating the U.S. honeybee population.

The scientists report using a novel genetic technique and old-fashioned statistics to identify Israeli acute paralysis virus as the latest potential culprit in the widespread deaths of worker bees, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Next up are attempts to infect honeybees with the newfound virus to see if it's indeed a killer.

"At least we have a lead now we can begin to follow. We can use it as a marker and we can use it to investigate whether it does in fact cause disease," said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and co-author of the study. Details appear this week in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Experts stressed that parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain in the lineup of suspects, as does the stress of travel. Beekeepers shuffle bees around the nation throughout the year so they can pollinate crops as they come into bloom. The newfound virus may prove to have added nothing more than insult to the injuries bees already suffer, said several experts unconnected to the study.

"This may be a piece or a couple of pieces of the puzzle, but I certainly don't think it is the whole thing," said Jerry Hayes, chief of the apiary section of the Florida department of agriculture.

Still, surveys of honey bees from decimated colonies turned up traces of the virus nearly every time; bees untouched by the phenomenon were virtually free of it. That means finding the virus should be a red flag that a hive is at risk and merits being quarantined, scientists said.

"The authors themselves recognize it's not a slam dunk, it's correlative. But it's certainly more than a smoking gun - more like a smoking arsenal. It's very compelling," said May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entomologist.

The mysterious deaths have struck between 50 percent and 90 percent of commercial honeybee hives in the United States, sowing fears about the effects on the more than 90 crops that rely on bees to pollinate them.

Scientists previously have found blasting emptied hives with radiation apparently kills whatever infectious agent that causes the disorder. That has focused their attention on viruses, bacteria and the like, to the exclusion of other noninfectious phenomena, like cell phone interference, also proposed as culprits.

The earliest reports of colony collapse disorder date to 2004, the same year the virus was first described by Israeli virologist Ilan Sela. That also was the year U.S. beekeepers began importing bees from Australia - a practice that had been banned by the Honeybee Act of 1922.

Now, Australia is being eyed as a potential source of the virus. That could turn out to be an ironic twist, since the Australian imports were meant to bolster, not further damage, U.S. bee populations devastated by another scourge, the varroa mite. Meanwhile, officials are discussing reinstating the ban, said the Agriculture Department's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis.

In the new study, a team of nearly two dozen scientists used the genetic sequencing equivalent of a dragnet to round up suspects. The technique, called pyrosequencing, generates a list of the full repertoire of genes in bees they examined from U.S. hives and directly imported from Australia.

By separating out the bee genes and then comparing the leftover genetic sequences to others detailed in public databases - a move akin to running a suspect's fingerprints - the scientists could pick out every fungus, bacterium, parasite and virus harbored by the bees.

They then looked for each pathogen in bees collected from normal hives and others affected by colony collapse disorder. That statistical comparison showed Israeli acute paralysis virus was strongly associated with the disorder.

The technique is a model for investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases in people too, since it can rapidly pinpoint likely causes, Lipkin said.

Sela, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor, said he will collaborate with U.S. scientists on studying how and why the bee virus may be fatal. Preliminary research shows some bees can integrate genetic information from the virus into their own genomes, apparently giving them resistance, Sela said in a telephone interview. Sela added that about 30 percent of the bees he's examined had done so.

Those naturally "transgenic" honeybees theoretically could be propagated to create stocks of virus-resistant insects, Lipkin said.

Fishin beat you by a day, bbb


Joe(but thanks anywho)nation

"Yes, the Bees Could Disappear"
Bernard Vaissière: "Yes, the Bees Could Disappear"
By Jean-Luc Goudet
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher
Futura-Sciences
Friday 07 September 2007

Bee populations are declining all over the world. That fact has been known for a long time and the press has recently latched onto the subject. Bernard Vaissière, an Inra [French National Institute for Agricultural Research] researcher and one of very few French pollination specialists, evaluates this question for Futura-Sciences.

Bernard Vaissière is responsible for research at Inra [French National Institute for Agricultural Research] Avignon, and is the principal for the Laboratory of Entomophile Pollination.

His team's research concerns the interactions between pollen, its vectors (wind or insect) and the pistil, pollinating effectiveness, and the relationships between bees and landscapes and the impact of pollination on agriculture.

Futura-Sciences: What do we really know about the global decline of bee populations?

Bernard Vaissière: We don't know their numbers exactly. The statistics that have circulated in recent press articles are not correct. First of all, you must know that bees are not the only pollinating insects - although they are the main one - and that among bees, there is not only the domesticated bee, as many believe in France.... There are a thousand species of bees in our country and 20,000 in the world! What is certain is that we have clear evidence showing a reduction in populations. In July 2006, an article published in Science showed the decline of wild bee populations (not counting bumblebees) in the United Kingdom and Holland. At the end of 2006, the results of an American study indicated a comparable decline in the United States.

For domesticated bees, we have also observed in the United States a very strong winter mortality, from 30 to 50 percent of colonies at the end of this winter and the 2005-2006 winter, versus five to 10 percent in a normal situation. In France and in Belgium, that winter mortality had reached the same level in recent years; however, according to the CNDA (Centre national du développement apicole [National Center for Beekeeping Development]), mortality was reduced last winter to eight to 10 percent.

FS: Do we know the causes for this apparent return to normal?

Bernard Vaissière: No. Is it a simple respite, due, for example, to a milder winter? The prohibition on Gaucho and Regent [pesticides] is also a possible cause. But we have no proof of that.

FS: An American team has just published an article in Science that points to the responsibility of a virus for the collapse of domestic bee colonies. Do you think that's possible?

Bernard Vaissière: They're talking about the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. The Acute Paralysis Virus was already known, also in France, and it is certainly possible that it is the primary agent responsible. But the causes of the mortality for domesticated bees may be multiple, and it is always difficult to sort out potentially multi-factor phenomena. It is also very likely that their food, pesticides, and the Varroa destructor, an acarid parasite, play a big role. That acarid weakens the bees and makes them more sensitive to other factors, as, for example, viral infection.

FS: Are the bees really in danger?

Bernard Vaissière: Yes. I think that today the likelihood of a significant decline in bee populations, even the complete disappearance of certain species, is real. The domesticated bee is sort of a barometer for wild populations, the numbers of which we have not the means of knowing. In France especially, there are very few researchers working on pollinators and insect pollination. In my team, we are three scientists, including two teacher-researchers. We have not hired anyone new for eighteen years! And specialists in pollinating insects are mostly over 60 years old.... On the other hand, we know that bees are fragile and we know why: they feed almost exclusively on the nectar and pollen that plants produce for them. That's the fruit of a long co-evolution with flowering plants. Herbivorous insects that eat leaves, for example, ingest all kinds of poisons such as alkaloids and tannins and protect themselves with the help of detoxification enzymes. Bees are very poorly endowed with such enzymes.

FS: Pollen is not only transported by insects: there's also the wind ...

Bernard Vaissière: We have studied this question. Apart from insects, flowering plants have two other main pollination modes in Europe: passive self-pollination (pollination takes place within the center of the same flower by way of direct contact between the anthers and stigma or by gravity - which is the case of wheat, for example) and wind pollination. But insect (essentially bee) pollination is involved in 80 percent of flowering plant species. As Jean Louveaux, who was the Inra director at Bures-sur-Yvette, used to say, pollinating insects represent a slight biomass, but they are nonetheless very important: they act as catalysts.

FS: Are crops involved?

Bernard Vaissière: According to an international study covering 115 crops and conducted in 200 countries by teams from France, Germany, the United States and Australia, three-quarters of crops are for the most part pollinated by insects. That's the case for most fruit, vegetable, oil-producing and protein-producing crops, as well as for nuts, spices, coffee and cocoa. Only 25 percent of crops don't depend on pollinating insects at all (mainly cereals, such as wheat, corn and rice). Overall, 35 percent of global food production comes from crops that depend on insect pollination.

FS: Is there significant awareness of this phenomenon?

Bernard Vaissière: In 2004, Europe launched the program, Alarm (Assessing large-scale environmental risks for biodiversity with tested methods) which will terminate in 2008. There have already been advances, such as the article on the parallel decline of wild bees and plants pollinated by bees, which appeared in the July 2006 issue of Science. There are also several leads being explored to reverse the trend, such as, for example, fields set aside to flower, on which work is underway to measure their impact on the maintenance of pollinating populations. But some phytosanitary companies have seized on that lead and the statistics published are sometimes iffy.... The impact is probably beneficial only if one carefully chooses the species planted and their flowering schedule and we still lack the perspective to make precise recommendations on the impact and minimum surfaces necessary.

FS: Does the situation seem reversible to you?

Bernard Vaissière: As long as the species have not disappeared, it does ... although the bees' haplodiploid system does not encourage small populations. And there are positive signs, such as the Alarm program. These actions remain modest, but, like pollinating insects, they could act as a catalyst.