So it wasn't the asteroid impact which killed the dino's, it was the loss of honey bees which wiped out their farming industry?
If honey bees, which are all imported, don't recover, then farmers will have to rely on native bees and other pollinating insects to make a resurgence and pollinate their crops. This will force farmers and orchard owners to take a hard look at organic farming. The widespread use of pesticides radically reduced the pollinating insect population and will prevent their comeback. To be effective native bees, which are mostly solitary, must live in the vicinity of farms and orchards in huge numbers to be effective.
According to a story in the latest edition of National Geographic, honeybees came over with the early English colonists. Bees have been in decline for some time. I suspect that insecticides are to blame. There's been a few extra rounds of spraying to kill mosquitos to cut back on West Nile.
Honeybee Die-Off Threatens U.S. Food Supply
Updated:2007-05-03 01:40:18
Honeybee Die-Off Threatens U.S. Food Supply
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP
BELTSVILLE, Md. (May 3) - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.
"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.
While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.
U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies _ or about five times the normal winter losses _ because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.
Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.
Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.
"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."
Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney 's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.
"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.
A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.
Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.
Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse _ and we took it for granted."
"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.
Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.
USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.
The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.
A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.
The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.
However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.
Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.
First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.
Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.
What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.
University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.
Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.
Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.
Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.
"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."
BBB: thank you kindly for that link. Very comprehensive view into the problem. I have quite a few people interested, along with myself, who clamored for just that sort of follow-up.
You could say that BBB put a bee in the doubters bonnet. Better to bee safe than sorry. Sorry, no stinging criticisms please for my humor.
Re: Honeybee Die-Off Threatens U.S. Food Supply
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:[...] Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons. [...]
Thanks for this Bee. I had no idea it was that extensive, including things like asparagus, broccoli, and celery.
Hopefully, a solution to this problem will follow.
Reyn
Reyn, I hope scientists are getting more serious about discovering the cause.
BBB
Town rejects mast to save bees after IoS report
Town rejects mast to save bees after IoS report
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Published: 06 May 2007
Independent UK
Council chiefs are rethinking plans for mobile telephone masts because of fears that their radiation may be causing bees to disappear.
Eastbourne's planning committee has refused permission for a new mast unless and until it is convinced there is no danger to the insects, and Bolton council has launched an investigation into the threat.
Last month, The Independent on Sunday reported exclusively that exploratory research at Germany's Landau University suggested the radiation interferes with bees' navigation systems. The German scientists, whose work has won two international awards, found that bees failed to return to their hives when "cordless DECT mobile phones" were placed in the masts.
The research was designed to indicate the effect mobile phone radiation and other "electrosmog" may have on human brains. But it may also provide a clue to the reasons behind "Colony Collapse Disorder", when hives suddenly empty, which has hit half of all US states and is spreading in continental Europe.
This was supported yesterday by Ferdinand Ruzicka, emeritus professor at the University of Vienna. He revealed that two-thirds of the beekeepers he surveyed who had a mobile phone mast within 300m had suffered "unexplained colony collapse". Professor Ruzicka believes the radiation may increase the insects' vulnerability to disease.
At the end of April, Eastbourne's planning committee overturned its officers' advice and refused permission for T-Mobile to erect a 14.7m mast on a roundabout.
Officially, the committee rejected it for aesthetic reasons, the only grounds open to it under planning law. But Councillor Barry Taylor, the chairman, said the threat to bees was "an important issue" and permission for masts should be refused unless they could be "proved" to be safe for the insects. Bolton council has asked its planning working party to investigate the issue.
Last month, one London beekeeper reported that 23 of his 40 hives had been abruptly abandoned; there are reports of similar collapses in Scotland and the North-west. The British Beekeepers' Association says the situation is "under scrutiny".
Wonder if mass extinctions began in just this way.
plainoldme wrote:Wonder if mass extinctions began in just this way.
Could be, but things are much more complicated these days with all our technology possibly interfering with things.
Yes, things are more complicated.
What if the pollen of genetically engineered plants -- the ones that produce their own pesticides -- are poisonous to bees?
What if the load of pesticides in the environment -- layers and layers, built up over the last century by commercial and residential gardeners -- reached a critical mass?
I think that with our modern factory farming it may be a long time before native pollinating insects would be able to take over the pollination of farm and orchard crops.
Large, repeated applications of pesticides to crops in huge agriculture areas has not only extirpated the native pollinators locally, it has also displaced their normal food sources with the crops, which they can't pollinate for the pesticides; therefore, populations of native pollinating insects are so reduced that it would take a long time to build their populations to a level adequate to pollinate crops even if the farms immediately go organic.
That's the problem with treating nature as just another cog of technology; it's so unreliable and uncontrollable.
veroa, spiracle mite ifestations, and a seasonal dieoff have been taking bees down for about 30 years or more. The name CCD has been only a recent title invented by science reporters.
The commercial apiaries have been swithing over to Russian Queens (from the old standby Italian Queens). The Russians seem to be adapting to the underlying cause of CCD.
The best theory, (I was told this on SUnday by some bee growers from Maryland) the nicoteninoid pesticides have been used a lot more and the CCD seems to be following a climate path, from S to N. They spray the pesticides most heavily on cotton and the areas that have the heaviest (by county records) hive losses are in the areas where the seasonal cotton spraying begins in January.
I never had a cell phone conversation in my life.
I'm chuffed I was helping bees unconsciously.
bees keep their cellphones on vibrate.
