5 replies to this topic

[TTHQ Staff]

FYI: I was talking to a local farmer here in the Cincinnati area. She's been less affected by the absence of bees that the killing freeze we had in the last 2 weeks, but she is concerned about the reduced pollination activities. It's her opinion that the 'transported bees' rented out to local farmers nationally and internationally aren't vanishing. She thinks they're just going home.

Who knows?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Go to work, come home.

Go to work, come home.

Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.

Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.

The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.

If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.

Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service.

"They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming."

Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.

"It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.

Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder.

"What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said.
Small workers in a supersize society

The problem has prompted a congressional hearing, a report by the National Research Council and a National Pollinator Week set for June 24-30 in Washington, but so far no clear idea of what is causing it.

"The main hypotheses are based on the interpretation that the disappearances represent disruptions in orientation behavior and navigation," said May Berenbaum, an insect ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

There have been other fluctuations in the number of honeybees, going back to the 1880s, where there were "mysterious disappearances without bodies just as we're seeing now, but never at this magnitude," Berenbaum said in a telephone interview.

In some cases, beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder, with some suffering even higher losses. One beekeeper alone lost 40,000 bees, Pettis said. Nationally, some 27 states have reported the disorder, with billions of bees simply gone.

[OEXCHAOS]

She added that these bees are stressed and fed (in her view) improperly. When bees are stressed they swarm and take off, sometimes without the queen, or so I'm told. Meanwhile, we're seening MORE honey bees around here, not less. Funny, that.

[Rogerdodger]

Tulsa World has a "DYING BEE" article with a local twist.

I did not know this:

...the situation is not as widespread here as it is in California and elsewhere, an Oklahoma Department of Agriculture spokesman said.

Similar bee deaths have happened in the past. In 1975, honeybees mysteriously died in 26 states, much like today, Bromenshenk said.
Another big loss came about a decade before that.

At OSU, Mulder is concerned but "not worried enough to scream that the sky is falling."
"I haven't reached that point yet," he said.

[OEXCHAOS]

MULDER?!?!? DOOD! (cue X-Files theme here)

[BipolarBear]

Thought you'd want to know that you guys aren't alone with the bee stuff. It's everywhere: Web Abuzz on Bee Weirdness May 2 03:08 PM US/Eastern By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer BELTSVILLE, Md. (AP) - The answer to what happened to America's vanishing honeybees is simple, a caller told entomologist May Berenbaum: Bee rapture. They were called away to heaven. No, wait, it's Earth's magnetic field, another caller told the University of Illinois professor. And when Berenbaum went on the Internet, she found a parody news site that quoted her as blaming rapper Kevin Federline and his concerts for the disappearance of the bees. Berenbaum loved it. The sudden disappearance of one-quarter of America's honeybees has brought out some strange ideas and downright myths. "I just can't get any work done," Berenbaum said. "I'm overwhelmed by e-mails. I can't keep up." A couple of bee myths are big on the Internet. A small German scientific study looking at a specific type of cordless phones and homing systems of bees exploded over the Internet and late night television shows. It morphed into erroneous reports blaming cell phones for the honeybee die-off, which scientists are calling Colony Collapse Disorder. The scientist who wrote the paper, Stefan Kimmel, e-mailed The Associated Press to say that there is "no link between our tiny little study and the CCD-phenomenon ... anything else said or written is a lie." And U.S. Department of Agriculture top bee researcher Jeff Pettis laughs at the idea, because whenever he goes out to investigate dead bees, he cannot get a signal on his cell phone because the hives are in such remote areas. Also on the Internet is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein on how humans would die off in four years if not for honeybees. It's wrong on two counts. First, Einstein probably never said it, according to Alice Calaprice, author of "The Quotable Einstein" and five other books on the physicist. "I've never come across it in anything Einstein has written," Calaprice said. "it could be that someone had made it up and put Einstein's name on it." Second, it's incorrect scientifically, Pettis said. There would be food left for humans because some food is wind-pollinated. For his part, Pettis jokes that the bees are out creating crop circles "and it's working them to death."

[TTHQ Staff]

Received this email from a friend who sells her wares at a local Farmer's MArket yesterday afternoon. She seems to have an idea about the bee situation and some helpful hints for anyone who is gardening/farming.et cetera.

I thought I'd share.

People have been asking about bees, and the news this Spring about "Colony collapse disorder" was pretty scary.

There is no doubt that pollinators of all kinds are essential to the food supply we're accustomed to. Among these are honeybees of course; bumblebees, probably the single most important pollinator for peppers and eggplant; and numerous species of small wild bees. One of my favorite "garden moments" of a morning is to spot a brilliant Virescent Metallic bee, which looks like green-gold enamel, inside a sunlit, blazing yellow squash blossom.

Squash blossoms and baby squash have been so popular the last few years that this year I doubled the ground devoted to squash. Besides the extra work of picking twice a day to keep the fruits at baby size, this complicates the crop rotation scheme to the level of rocket science. Market management has been exhorting us to put in a longer sales day. Well, the baby squash has still been selling out by 11, prompting me to wonder how much I'd have to grow to stay past 2 pm.

When the 260 squash plants began blooming early last month, it was a great concern to note very few bees of any kind among the blossoms. SB's provide copious nectar and pollen, and most Springs the bees are all but hanging around waiting for the blooms to open. It started to look as if the already expensive and time-consuming investment in the squash plot might require hand pollination - back-breaking and tedious labor with a camel's hair brush.

Happy news: 5 weeks into production, in the morning when pollinators are active, the "buzz" from the squash plants is audible across the road. There are as many as 4 honeybees in one blossom. (I know because I'm standing there waiting for them to finish before picking the squash.) It's not only reassuring for the harvest, but also satisfying to know that the plants are providing sustenance to so many bees of all kinds.

You customers have been cheerful and agreeable this year about the price increases brought on by our energy expenses. You deserve to share this satisfaction.

For agriculture in general, the news right now is less alarming than initially feared. Yes, there have been major hive losses, and the causes are still being sought.

(I have - surprise! - my own theory about the loss of hives in the West Coast pollination industry: that the bees are swarming to get away from the rat race of being trucked thousands of miles a season. Bees locate nectar supplies and guide fellow harvesters to them by orienting on the sun. Shifting them by several hundred miles in one day, there's no way their navigation systems can keep compensating. Not to mention that it just seems an unnatural way of life for creatures with a strong sense of place.)

(A stockherder friend observes that if pigs and cattle could fly, it would mean the end of all confined-animal feeding operations.)

Back to the future of agriculture. It's been pointed out that there was wide scale farming on this continent before introduction of the European honeybee. The wild bees noted above are native, and while they don't produce honey, will expand into pollination niches if honeybees decline. (Compare the effect on the deer population of the transition from woodland to cropland and suburbs. Deer are a meadow species, and hayfields and lawns are just one huge meadow. ) Most grains are wind-pollinated, and many other important food crops are descendants of native species which supported their own pollinator species before the honeybee was introduced.

And maybe there's some just irony in seeing agribusiness examine the effects of pesticides and monoculture for the sake of bees, after 4 decades of poo-pooing our concerns about human health!

Well, they'll either get it or they won't. Meanwhile, here's what all of us can do.

1. The obvious one: minimize the use of pesticides. I could use Rotenone on the squash bugs and cucumber beetles which could devastate a stand of squash. But "organic" is not a synonym for "harmless," and even organic pesticides kill pollinators as well as pests. So, rocket-science crop rotation, and more back-breaking labor: finding and destroying egg clusters on the undersides of squash leaves.

2. Suppport US beekeepers: insist on US honey and be willing to pay for it. Very important: "USDA Grade A" on a label does not mean the honey originated in the US, only that it meets US standards. One of the biggest exporters of honey to the US is China, and it will be no surprise to hear that honey of Chinese origin has been found to be "stretched" with corn syrup. Ick.

(For some information about country-of-origin labelling, see:
http://www.nytimes.c...s...amp;_r=1 )

3. Quit worrying so much about weeds. While concern about honeybees may frighten agribusiness into decreasing their use of insecticides, less attention is being paid to the role of native plants in supporting pollinators. One copious Spring weed, deadnettle, is a critical forage plant for awakening beehives, blooming before fruit trees or most garden plants. We consider it "cover crop," and don't weed it up until a plot is needed for planting. It makes excellent compost, and also hosts larvae of the useful native Ladybird beetle.

Another nuisance weed, milkweed vine, provides abundant nectar and also forage for Monarch larvae. I could go on, and if this Fall's Weed Walk planning works out, there will be a special focus on plants that are beneficial to bees.

4. If you have lawn service, get rid of it and sow white clover seed among the grass. It stays 3 inches high, an attractive green even in dry weather, provides soil nitrogen to keep the grass green, and helps to smother weeds. (There was an objection that children couldn't go barefoot if there were bees in the lawn. Well, you want your children going barefoot on Roundup? )

5. (If you cling to belief in political solutions) Instead of demanding more "inspection and regulation of food imports", start asking your representatives why, when US farmers can't sell corn for the cost of growing it, we should be importing hog feed from China anyway? Or honey, or pharmaceuticals or anything else?

Sorry that took so long. We had an elderly neighbor who was fond of saying, "Ain't no short answers." Thank you for your patience. Short answers are what got us a lot of these problems.

See you soon!
Nan