To Beekeeper~

[Sparks]

Bee~ I don't remember if your screen name has anything to do with your actually"keeping bees" or not but if so, I wonder if you can shed some light on the recent phenomenon in regards to the mysterious absence of honeybees?

The reports are really frightening. I always remember that Albert Einstein said that this planet would not survive without honeybees.

Do you have any info?

[beekeeper]

I'm not a beekeeper, but I collect bee pins with my Mom ... thus my screen name.

I've heard that cel phone towers may have something to do with bees dieing. Not sure how much truth there was ... but other than that, I haven't heard anything.

We would be in very big trouble without bees!

[girlllllll]

Honey bee populations have suddenly begun to decline, and some British researchers think the proliferation of cell phones is a contributing cause.

A limited study at Landau University has found that bees will abandon their hives when cell phones are turned on and placed next to them.

What is known is that there are suddenly fewer bees to pollinate plants. In case after case bee keepers in the U.S. and Europe have reported something called Colony Collapse Disorder. In CCD, a hive's inhabitants desert the colony, leaving only queens and eggs.

CCD reports escalated sharply last fall, with bee populations falling as much as 60 percent on the West Coast and 70 percent on the East Coast. Not only does that impact honey production, it also poses a threat to food production, since bees are needed to pollinate plants.

While mass-produced crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops rely mostly on honeybees. According to a Cornell University study, honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, and help generate some $14 billion in produce.

"Are honey bees the canary in the coal mine?" asks Jerry Hayes, an official with the Florida Department of Agriculture. "What are honey bees trying to tell us that we humans should be paying more attention to?"

While the cell phone theory might seem far fetched, the British study isn't the first to suggest that man's technology might be short circuiting bees' navigation systems. German researchers have show that bees' behavior is different near power lines.

A few scientists also think the introduction of genetically modified crops could also be linked to the sudden disappearance of the honey bee.

[Sparks]

Well, as Winnie The Pooh once said : "You never can tell with bees."

LOL

In all seriousness though, this is much more frightening than the global warming theory.
Thanks for the replies !

[Jasmine46]

www.organicconsumersSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMarticles/article_5194.cfm

Organic Bees Are Thriving While Pesticide Intensive Conventional Bee Hive Colonies Are Collapsing
"Natural" beehives appear less affected by the strange new plague dubbed colony collapse disorder.
By Sharon Labchuk
GNN - Guerrilla News Network, April 24, 2007
Straight to the Source


Colony Collapse Disorder in domestic honey bees is all the buzz lately, mostly because honey bees pollinate food crops for humans.

However, we would not be so dependent on commercial non-native factory farmed honey bees if we were not killing off native pollinators. Organic agriculture does not use chemicals or crops toxic to bees and, done properly, preserves wildlife habitat in the vicinity, recognizing the intimate relationship between cultivated fields and natural areas.

While no one is certain why honey bee colonies are collapsing, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. Most people think beekeeping is all natural but in commercial operations the bees are treated much like livestock on factory farms.

I'm on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee colony in a tree, for example, the cells bees use for egg-laying will be about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build the natural size.

The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It's the same factory farm mentality we've used to produce other livestock bigger is better. But the bigger bees do not fare as well as natural-size bees.

Varroa mites, a relatively new problem in North America, will multiply and gradually weaken a colony of large bees so that it dies within a few years. Mites enter a cell containing larvae just before the cell is capped over with wax. While the cell is capped, the bee transforms into an adult and varroa mites breed and multiply while feeding on the larvae.

The larvae of natural bees spend less time in this capped over stage, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of varroa mites produced. In fact, very low levels of mites are tolerated by the bees and do not affect the health of the colony. Natural-size bees, unlike large bees, detect the presence of varroa mites in capped over cells and can be observed chewing off the wax cap and killing the mites. Colonies of natural-size bees are healthier in the absence mites, which are vectors for many diseases.

It's now possible to buy small cell foundation from US suppliers, but most beekeepers in Canada have either never heard of small cell beekeeping, aren't willing to put the effort into changing or are skeptical of the benefits. This alternative is not promoted at all by the Canadian Honey Council, an organization representing the beekeeping industry, which even tells its members on their website that, "The limitations to disease control mean that losses can be high for organic beekeepers." [ref link]

Organic beekeeping, as defined by certification agencies, allows the use of less toxic chemicals. It's more an IPM approach to beekeeping than organic.

Commercial beekeeping today is just another cog in the wheel of industrial agriculture necessary because pesticides and habitat loss are killing native pollinators, and vast tracks of monoculture crops aren't integrated into the natural landscape.

In an organic Canada, native pollinators would flourish and small diversified farms would keep their own natural bees for pollination and local honey sales.

The factory farm aspects of beekeeping, combined with an onslaught of negative environmental factors, puts enough stress on the colonies that they are more susceptible to dying out.