what has happened to my bees?

Plantress, there are several threads on this topic.

I'll try and bring back a link or two for you so you can join the folks who've been discussing this.

Mystery of Dying Bees ... click

Cell phones possibly causing death of honey bees ... click

And you might note that CCD is only being seen in European Honey Bees. It isn't an issue with wasps, bumble bees or hornets.

I'll send you some pests. There seem to be plenty around my garden/house this spring.

You might want to Google "bee colony collapse" to get the big picture.

Our native bees are fine, but honey bees have been dying at a fast , abnormal rate. It's not the cell towers, colony collapse has been around longer than the towers. What is not understood is why so many colonies are dying at this time and in so many locations.

Native bees seem fine in my area (NY north of the city) and our peepers and frogs have just started a good racket. There are areas in the country that have shown a great decline in amphibians, but the cause is unknown and probably a combination of factors. Many groups are investigating these events and you should have no trouble finding information in great detail.

Are GM Crops Killing Bees? ... click

thanks guys. I'm glad that some of you have bees. I'm telling you, it's freakin me out, man!

ya. My dad has been sending me articles about honey bees and I've noticed that over the last couple of years in my garden. The honey bees are the ones I always want to pet. There have always been bumble bees and yellow jackets etc though and they are just GONE

In Hive or Castle, Duty Without Power
May 15, 2007
In Hive or Castle, Duty Without Power
By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times

I never much cared for royalty, although I admit that, for reasons my family and I are still struggling to understand, I named my first cat "Princess Bubbles."

Nevertheless, as I watched Queen Elizabeth II float serenely last week through her swooning colonial multitudes, here chatting with Goddard engineers on the wonders of the space age, there catching the president on blunders about the queen's age, I couldn't help but doff a small mental tiara to the great lady.

Such sober poise and unpompous stances! She's majestic, all right, her regalness clearly born, made and thrust upon her every day of her life. In so many ways, Elizabeth reminded me of another monarch I admire: the honeybee queen, that stoical, beloved mother to the worker masses in a beehive. Sure, Her Highness may go in for pastel solids and Her Hymenoptera for fuzzy stripes, but both are tiny, attractive celebrities prone to being swarmed. Both are kept meticulously well-groomed by a retinue of handlers and are fed high-quality foods generally unavailable to the proletariat. Both are, yes, long-lived. And both share the dubious honor of having enormous social responsibility but very little power.

"The queen bee, like the queen of England, is not the ruler, and she doesn't tell anybody what to do," said Gene E. Robinson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But she makes things work, and she makes everything better by being around."

Dr. Robinson and other researchers are trying to understand the deep nature of the honeybee: why it behaves as it does, how a young bee knows it's time to grow up and get out of the house, how an older bee finds its way back to the house after a hard day's work, and what distinguishes a queen bee from the tens of thousands of worker bees that surround her.

The researchers are driven by more than a perfectly understandable besottedness with bees. They see bees, with their comma-sized brains, compact genomes and circumscribed set of stereotyped behaviors, as offering a relatively simple and politically unobjectionable system for deciphering the biology of behavior. To that end, they are mapping out the chemical sequence of honeybee DNA and recently published a rough draft of the bee's 11,000 or so genes.

Researchers are also scrambling for clues, any clues, into the recent, baffling disappearance of honeybees across the United States, a potentially catastrophic trend that threatens the hundred or more food crops dependent on bees for pollination.

Unlike the great bee die-offs of the past, when mites or other deadly pathogens left mounds of bee corpses lying by the hives, in the newest crisis there are as yet no bee bodies to forensically explore. The bees are simply flying off by the billions as though into the void. When beekeepers check affected nests, the combs are filled with pollen and honey, but there is almost nobody home: the workers have largely vanished, leaving the queen in an unnatural state of quiet near-solitude, helpless on her own.

That a queen cannot survive without her court is a testament to the incomparable interdependence of social insect society, the pulsing, groupthinking superorganism that is the honeybee hive. Honeybees in a colony are as close-knit as cashmere, sharing up to three-quarters of their genes, compared with the 50 percent link between human siblings, and that strong kinship helps explain their highly cooperative style. They are also nearly all female. Less than 1 percent of the hive dwellers are drones, short-lived, bug-eyed males built to mate once with a queen before dropping dead to the ground with an audible pop.

There is no top-down structure to honeybee society, no central command post or leaders with whips. Power is disseminated through the hive, and daily decisions about, say, whose turn it is to feed the larvae, take out the trash or fan the nectar into honey are made consensually and regionally, through a constant exchange of chemical, tactile and visual cues. "It's a lot of local responses to local stimuli," Dr. Robinson said. "Little things collectively give rise to decisions."

As for the queen, she is so far from being a decisive potentate that she can seem goofily out of the loop. When a colony is ready to move to a new hive, for example, about three dozen scout bees appraise the local real estate, consult with one another and with other workers and finally, communally, settle on the best new spot. Come moving day, the queen has no idea where to go and must be shown the way.

The queen hasn't time for gossip or bee-blogging. She is too busy laying eggs. That is her sole job, and one that she alone can do, for the other females in the hive lack working reproductive parts.

Day in, day out, the queen remains in her climate-controlled chamber laying eggs, one or two per minute, maybe 2,500 a day. All the while she is pushed, provisioned and plucked by her retinue of nurses, her bristles kept spotless, her mandibles kept stuffed with the nutritious, high-calorie, egg-enabling delicacy called royal jelly. "I'd say that being queen is the absolute worst job in the hive," said May R. Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. "At least the foragers get out for fresh air and some scenery."

What the queen lacks in liberty, though, she makes up for in longevity. Whereas worker bees live only two or three months, a queen lives two or three years, and some have been known to survive to age 8.

Scientists are just beginning to understand how the queen so dramatically outlives her workers, when she and they arise from the same genetic roots. Dr. Robinson and his colleagues reported last month that a queen's early exposure to royal jelly, which allowed her to mature into a queen rather than a worker, may offer her a lifetime of antioxidant protection against cellular decay.

However she manages, the queen bee defies the normal rule in biology that organisms must choose between a long life and high fecundity. Her loyal subjects need her, and so she doughtily broods on. Now will they please return the favor and come back home?

Bumblebee Economics
One of my all-time favorite books is Bumblebee Economics by Bernd Heinrich. Can you believe my 1979 copy is now worth over $100?---BBB
Publisher Comments:

In his new preface Bernd Heinrich ranges from Maine to Alaska and north to the Arctic as he summarizes findings from continuing investigations over the past twenty-five years by him and others into the wondrous energy economy of bumblebees. Reviews of the previous edition: This is a remarkable and rewarding book, complementary to, yet in some respects going far beyond, its predecessors. It is highly recommended. Caryl P. Haskins, New York Times Book Review Extraordinary the implications of work such as Heinrich's seem to me more resonant than the promise of a rich harvest of new research.

Fred Hapgood, Harpers Magazine: A magnificent book that combines the best of both writing and science Heinrich has performed a masterful job of sharing his personal research efforts and those of others in his field. He has written an extremely interesting book and in the process has shown how one kind of organism can be used as a model to investigate behavior, physiology, ecology and evolution. Bumblebee Economics should serve as a model for good scientific writing.
---Matthew M. Douglas, Quarterly Review of Biology

Review: A magnificent book that combines the best of both writing and science...Heinrich has performed a masterful job of sharing his personal research efforts and those of others in his field. He has written an extremelyinteresting book and in the process has shown how one kind of organism can be used as a model to investigate behavior, physiology, ecology and evolution. Bumblebee Economicsshould serve as a model forgood scientific writing.

Review: Extraordinary...the implications of work such as Heinrich's seem to me more resonant than the promise of a rich harvest of new research.

About the Author: Bernd Heinrichis Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont. He has written several memoirs of his life in scienceand nature, including One Man's Owl, and Ravens in Winter. Bumblebee Economicswas twice a nominee for the American Book Award inScience, and A Year in the Maine Woodswon the 1995 Rutstrum Authors' Award for Literary Excellence.