The Science and Politics Behind Colony Collapse Disorder; Is the Crisis Over? 174
iONiUM writes: An article at the Globe and Mail claims that there is no longer any Honeybee crises, and that the deaths of the Honeybees previously was a one-off, or possibly non-cyclical occurrence (caused by neonics or nature — the debate is still out). The data used is that from Stats Canada which claims "the number of honeybee colonies is at a record high [in Canada]." Globally, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization says that "worldwide bee populations have rebounded to a record high." The story reports: "I have great news for honey lovers everywhere. The Canadian honeybee industry is thriving. Despite those headlines about mass die-offs and and killer pesticides, the number of honeybee colonies is at a record high. Last year, according to Statistics Canada, nearly 700,000 honeybee colonies produced $200-million worth of honey. Bee survival rates have rebounded even in Ontario, which was hard hit by unusually high winter die-offs."
Can't be true (Score:5, Interesting)
The New York Times told me that a A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend [nytimes.com] only two months ago.
So we have the Globe and Mail along with the UN and Stats Canada up against the NYT and the "Bee Informed Partnership". Meaning the old "consider the source" adage isn't really up to the challenge....
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lol sure it is http://dailycaller.com/2015/07... [dailycaller.com]
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the Daily Caller is an absolutely horrible source for anything science related.
Their default stance to anything environmental is "it aint happening", and then articles are written to back it up.
they are the epitome of predetermined science that you knuckleheads are always accusing actual scientists of.
Random data point (Score:2)
Bees are all over the place at my home (basically at the center of a small town in rural Montana.) We have quite a few planters full of flowers on our largish deck (about 1000' sq), and it is not uncommon to go out there and see a very large number of bees going about their business. They are nearly zero threat. Well, unless you sit on one. :) We try not to do that.
There are no obvious hives anywhere nearby, and they seem to come and go from all points of the compass.
Sortof-kinda related, there are local ho
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Clearly, that's not what I said.
Random data point == random data point
not
Random data point == confirmation of "there's no problem" stance
Try for comprehension next time. You'd be amazed what you can learn if you actually, you know, understand what you read.
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Daily Caller....They never saw a anti-environment position/myth they didn't like.
Linking to the Daily Caller for anything science/environmental is like referring Trump as an example of modesty.
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Daily Caller....They never saw a anti-environment position/myth they didn't like.
Linking to the Daily Caller for anything science/environmental is like referring Trump as an example of modesty.
You're am idiot. The article is about how the NYT slants news.
Re:Can't be true (Score:4, Informative)
Actually You are twice an idiot. Somebody who complains about bad environmental information when you have that as sig
About that "CO2 is good for plants" theory: NOPE. [bit.ly]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... [wiley.com]
[1] Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.
Seriously you aren't just a propagandist you're a bad one.
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Yes, please continue to oversimplify, overstate, and not read papers in their entirety.
It makes this task easier.
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
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Yes, please continue to oversimplify, overstate, and not read papers in their entirety.
It makes this task easier.
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
You got balls
Daily Caller....They never saw a anti-environment position/myth they didn't like.
Linking to the Daily Caller for anything science/environmental is like referring Trump as an example of modesty.
When referring to this link
http://dailycaller.com/2015/07... [dailycaller.com]
You didn't even read the damn title of the story
NY Times Edits Story To Tone Down Facts, Inject Bias
Keep at it prove yourself more of a zealot.
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... or the NYT's has been a shameless rag for years and some people are only just starting to realize it.
I grand the paper has a history to it. But those days are gone.
Their editorial department is filled with almost literally crazy people and most of their other departments are compromised by shotty editorial policies.
Lets put it this way... is the NYTs a paper that can charge for content?
No they're not. A lot of local newspapers are able to charge for access to their online site. And then there are a few
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Funny)
"I grand the paper..."
"..by shotty editorial policies."
Are you sure you're someone who can judge others' writing?
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Been a shameless rag for _decades_. Everybody knows it, but those who agree with the NYT _like_ propaganda.
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Here's that link from the article again...
http://www.agprofessional.com/... [agprofessional.com]
So which is it? The USDA and UN are just as unreliable as Stats Canada and the Daily caller, and the NYT is the pinnacle of non-partisan reporting, or...
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you have Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, so I think consider the source is alive and well.
She's the Alfred E. Neuman of why the bees collapsed in the first place. What, me worry?
In this very article, she's right up there with Ronald Reagan saying "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."
Do trees pollute the atmosphere? [theguardian.com]
True, but it's all part of a long-term biological equilibrium that didn't seem horrible until after industrial-scale human pollution was added to the mix as a driving factor. I don't recall Cicero damning the trees.
Here's Wente:
Once again, natural pathogens which the bees have presumably been contending with for thousands of years. I also don't recall Cicero orating on missing bees, or Shelley's ode to a collapsed colony.
If there was a forcing factor, it was probably the dang pesticide, which after all was explicitly designed to kill insects, selectively if possible, but that might be easier said that done.
Her entire piece is written in distractor mode, touching on who is cranky with whom laced with speculation about nefarious or misguided agendas, while she can't even bother herself to distinguish (possible) industrial forcing terms from established biological baselines.
Yes, indeed, consider the source.
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He's saying that the claims are wrong.
Oh, and since the number of honeybeeys is not a constant but varies, every time it drops and reaches a minimum, there will be a corresponding subsequent increase in the numbers. Not because of any rebound, but by the very definition of "a minimum" in a variable figure.
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Informative)
I had the same reaction as epine: "Margaret Wente, really? People still pay attention to her"?
If you did go to the Stats Can link that Wente provided, you should have noticed that the link only shows stats for the years 2010 to 2014, a very short period of time. Now, Statistics Canada is a very good, reputable government agency, so I didn't dismiss their stats out of hand, but still... What was going on?
Do as I did and as iONiUM should have done before posting this article here: Click on the Add/Remove Data tab, right next to the default-selected Data Table tab. You can change the range of years reported. At Step 3 - select the time frame I selected a range from 1984 to 2014. Lo and behold!: the bee population nowadays is less than half of what it was in the mid--eighties - from 20,810 in 1984 to 8,777 in 2014, the year of Wente's purported rebound...
Frackin' info-cherry-picking Margaret Wente! She's one of the reasons I stopped reading the Globe and Mail.
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damn it, I modded but I need to say that this number 8777 is the number of beekeeper not bee population. The highest was in 1986, but 2014 is close to that all-time max.
What I find interesting is the value of honey is rising exponentially (with a slight dip between 1983 and 1999)
Of interest too is that the total production per colony went from a ratio of 0.06 in 1924 to an all-time high of 0.18 in 1998. So the bees were working 3x as much as in 1924. Maybe they got tired? ;-)
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Informative)
My cousin and her C/L partner run a bee "farm" here in Ontario, over the last 4 years they lost 60% of their hives. This year they had a massive rebound in the numbers of bees, and have been hive splitting like crazy. In nearly all the hives that were wiped out it was either parasites, fungus, or a combination of the two. Their theory? Honey Bee monoculture, and that's a serious problem.
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If the cause of honey bee hive collapse is a parasite or parasitoid then the next year (presumably they're on annual cycles) should see an enormous drop. It will be interesting to see.
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily.
We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.
The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.
They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.
Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.
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Well, particularly because beekeepers are fighting actively to keep their hives alive. Hives that collapse are gone, but the hives that remain are, unsurprisingly, very well tended to. Then the hives that collapsed are replaced by getting a new queen from somewhere else and starting over.
In the wild, I could see aggressive parasites (and combinations of parasites) wiping out much greater swathes of the population, but in this case, human intervention is providing an additional buffer.
I'm still more worried
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure monoculture is the problem since honeybees weren't the only bees collapsing.
Wild bees, bumble bees, and non-social bees have also been collapsing.
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Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies ... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).
We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap gene
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Insightful)
I can think of several reasons - different sides of the press are not averse to being selective of their sources, depending on which conclusion they are pursuing, for one thing. There are strong industry interests at play here - the producers of insecticides want to find that they are not guilty, the big bee-keepers want to hear that it has nothing to do with the way they cart bees around etc. So, you cherry-pick your data.
Secondly, it is often seen, in long-running illnesses and epidemics, that there are periods of remission before it starts going the wrong way again. If bee-numbers are up this year, that may be all it is; we will know in the coming years.
I think the truth is that we are seeing a long, slow decline; we won't lose all honey bees in the world, but the industrial scale bee keeping, particularly in the US, will be severaly challenged, and will probably have to change their business model fundamentally, from carting their monocultures around with a heavy load of varroa mites, viruses etc, to being much more locally based. It has for many decades been a common practice to rely only on a very limited number of bee strains with specific properties, like high productivity, low swarming and low agression. It isn't really a surprise that we now find all bee colonies susceptible to emerging diseases, I think. And, of course, queen bees have been posted all over the globe, helping the spread of infections.
This is just a minor part of the more widespread problem, that originates with the industrialisation of agriculture: the tendency to have enormous estates of monocultures. The chemical industry are one of the major culprits in this, in that they have made it possible to mask problems with insect plagues and depletion of nutrition; we must, by necessity, come to a point where these things no longer are effective, and then it is likely to come crashing down. A sensible way out of this would, in my opinion, be to get away from gigantic monocultures and possibly also commercial production for global export.
Re:Can't be true (Score:5, Interesting)
Kinda, it sounds like the "fragility" issue. Exports aren't bad—you get more global diversity if you can exchange globally. We can't all grow coconuts even if coconut oil is really good food. The problem is the "efficiency" idea that each place should only do one thing, and then rely on that alone. That's kinda what people are trying to figure out when they say "local". It isn't about local, it is about more diverse systems. Same for any product. When Zambia decided to rely on copper, well what happens when copper prices plunge. It is just the "too big to fail" problem. Globally, we actually have some help in this in that, if one nation's food supply were to fail, it could buy food from elsewhere, so that is diversity and counters the too big to fail problem. It isn't about being local, it is about diverse systems which can adapt to change. Of course, big chem loves to sell to big customers and do big business with monocultures. But that big top down central planned one big scheme thinking is what has to go. That's what people are kinda trying to say when they say "local". What we need, can still be big, just more diverse, less of the "efficiency" thinking, and more of the diverse, integrating thinking, anti-fragility.
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Yes, this is a bad idea. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs only to look at Detroit for why this is a bad idea.
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> : the tendency to have enormous estates of monocultures.
It's called efficiency, I have a model. I differentiated the least squares outcome and it told me that using the same bees,in the same huts, in the same trucks, with the same food and the same anti-biotics was OPTIMAL. Same for cows and bank accounts. I am a smart guy.
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You may well be correct but long term predictions of doom are largely based on emotion rather than data. The classic case is the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager that the prices of a particular basket of goods would rise from 1980 to 1990 due to population growth. In fact the prices fell although a different selection of goods or time spans could go the other way. Similarly retrospective stock picks can of course be highly successful but are no guarantee of the future. My point is that long term predictions
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Prices will rise simply due to inflation and the intentional devaluation of currency. A reprise in one decade is probably a very misleading an self serving little data point.
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I know it can't be true, because all my environmentalist friends ensured me that colony collapse was caused by global warming and would continue to get worse. They said this was SCIENCE and called me a "denier" when I questioned it.
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We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.
When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditio
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No we have two different statistics competing. I can say that 20% of the population died this year, oh my god end of days tragedy! But I can also encourage 50% of the population to procreate this year and have a child. Yay! Population growth everything is fine no need for doom and gloom!
There are more hives. But bees are still dying in record numbers. Both can be true simultaneously. If 50% of every hive died you would have 50% less bees even if the number of hives increased slightly.
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The New York Times told me that a A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend [nytimes.com] only two months ago.
So we have the Globe and Mail along with the UN and Stats Canada up against the NYT and the "Bee Informed Partnership". Meaning the old "consider the source" adage isn't really up to the challenge....
Well, geez; if you want them to stop dying stop sticking them with a sharp spike!!! idiots!
Honey price (Score:1)
Re:Honey price (Score:5, Insightful)
If honey bees are thriving, then why is honey still so expensive?
Even if honey bees are now thriving, which may or may not be the case, honey tends to be harvested in batches that follow the year; so if there are plenty of honey bees this year, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of honey until near the end of the year. On top of that, producers and resellers have a profound interest in keeping the price high for as long as possible; which is why prices go up a lot faster than they come down.
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I hadn't realized how tasteless commercial honey had become until I sampled some at the local farmers' market. Surprise! It tasted like something! I don't think HFCS is going to taste any worse than what's in the aisles right now.
Re:Honey price (Score:5, Funny)
World honey prices, like world diamond prices, are kept artificially high by a South African monopoly. For diamonds, the monopoly company is called de Beers. For honey, the monopoly company is called de Bees.
Tip the veal, try the waitress . . .
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If honey bees are thriving, then why is honey still so expensive?
Because it's marketed to hipsters with more money than sense.
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The word Hipster was coined by Lenny Bruce. It does not mean what you think it means. It does mean, more or less, what the GP thinks it means. Someone desperate to be hip but failing in an almost comic way.
This isn't really an article (Score:4, Informative)
I would have a hard time calling anything written by Margaret Wente 'an article'; she writes for clicks and shock value. We'd be better off calling it an editorial.
Evolution in progress (Score:5, Interesting)
How about: certain strains of bees happen to have natural resistance against the neonicotines.
The colonies that lacked this mutation have by now all died off (the exposure is so high that it takes just a few years for this to happen), leaving only those colonies with resistance, and those are now of course expanding rapidly: in part because there is more room, in part because people are helping them grow faster as there is a commercial need for it.
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If that's true it's a very good thing. Yay, artificial selective pressure! But is it even a falsifiable hypothesis?
Re:Evolution in progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that also means other insects we like a lot less are also likely evolving resistance, which means we'll produce even nastier toxins and start wiping out bee populations again.
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Except that also means other insects we like a lot less are also likely evolving resistance, which means we'll produce even nastier toxins and start wiping out bee populations again.
The circle of life.
Re:The circle of "life"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Environmental disturbances that rearrange the deck chairs and push evolution forward are as much a part of the "circle of life" as anything else. Doesn't matter if it's a natural cause or unnatural cause.
That's just the brutal reality out there in nature.
It's nothing like your cubicle or your sub/urban cage.
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I just want to point out that there's no such thing as 'artificial' vs 'natural' selection pressure. There is simply selection pressure. This pressure can come from *anything*, whether it is chemicals in the environment (as may be in this case), other organisms that affect them in some way (a new predator forces a species to adapt in some way to survive), or even themselves (eg: The females prefer black bees with yellow stripes, rather than yellow bees with black stripes).
These pressures have *always* ex
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It could also be a simple reproduction drive boost in face of pressure.
But from the other comments, the article is biased, and only concerns Canada, which apparently was much less affected than other countries.
And then, it may simply mean what was done to try to solve the issue from the beginning just started to work, including some chemical bans, or maybe even just increased general attention to their well-being...
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Neonicotines aren't showing any sort of impact on honeybees. In continental areas where they're banned (bees travel like 3 miles; banning them in half the fucking EU means you don't have any neonicotines 10 years later).
We actually think a new parasite evolved somewhere about 2009...
This shoudn't even really be a debate (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This shoudn't even really be a debate (Score:4, Interesting)
When the "crisis" first hit the news and kept being repeated, I suggested the issue might be Ultraviolet Irradiance. Bees see in the UV range and the sun's UV levels vary fairly drastically over the sun cycle.
The 90s was an low UV irradiance period. Compare this to the world-wide hive population graphs.
http://wwwsolar.nrl.navy.mil/s... [navy.mil]
I wish I could find another UV irradiance data source besides UARS. Data seems to end in 2005.
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One wonders why you choose to use the technical term "irradiance"? It's an odd choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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One wonders why you wonder about a technical post on a technical site using a technical term?
Re:This shoudn't even really be a debate (Score:5, Informative)
An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.
Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase [econtalk.org]
Chaos Theory (Score:5, Interesting)
Chaos theory and nonlinear systems should be mandatory in high school, together with statistics. Seriously.
(Did you know that global warming has taken over from smoking as the leading cause of statistics in America?}
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Chaos theory and nonlinear systems should be mandatory in high school, together with statistics. Seriously.
Agree. And you can see how AGW was specifically framed to step around them. For example:
"weather involves chaos but climate is the long term average within boundaries... "
"uncertainty can't be an excuse to do nothing..."
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HS kids/teachers don't remotely have the math for it.
All you'd have is someone who doesn't understand arm waving at a classroom not equipped to understand. Perfect recipe for more indoctrination though.
95% of college seniors don't have the math for it.
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I'm going with it was a new pesticide... (Score:2, Offtopic)
... and they stopped using it.
So problem solved... now.
Meh.
By the way, has anyone personally ever tried to grow a lot of plants? My god the insects. I went through something like 5 different pesticides to kill these little fruit flies that were giving me a horrible problem.
I tried all the organic stuff. Aromatic oils... insecticidal soaps... The aromatic oils make my plants smell like a dumpster filled with cheap perfume... on fire. And the soaps do totally kill the insects that I personally nail with the
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Riiiiight... me and the anyone else that has ever had to grow anything. We're all stupid.
First, maintaining non-pest insect predators for every possible pest species is fucking difficult and very expensive.
Second, you do realize that insects will eat fucking anything right? I mean, are you claiming that garlic plants never get eaten by insects? Its fucking garlic. What about Peppers? The problem I was having was WITH pepper plants. And do you know where the insects were eating the peppers? From below. Their
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You're describing something that is done in a few university gardens with mixed results. Its not practical. And as to nature this or nature that... nature has a whole planet to absorb issues. I have just my own little plot of earth. I'm not losing my plants. And if that means your panties get in a really tight knot because I had to use some organic pesticide?...
I think I'll get over it. ;-)
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Organic pesticides are generally worse for you then good wholesome chemical pesticides.
Try and make some cigarette tea and spray it on your plants. Good wholesome nicotine is a hell of a pesticide. It is organic, but I give it a pass and use it anyhow.
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I'm using this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
derived from the flower not synthetic.
I spread a white powder all over the place and the insects all died. My plants are looking like they're saved. :)
Its supposed to be biodegradable and usable on the plants up to the day of harvest.
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Quotes don't match with gov. numbers (Score:5, Informative)
The government says the crisis worsens (http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2015/150513.htm) ... is written by Syngenta ...
And there is more numbers http://ecowatch.com/2015/05/14/honeybee-population-plummets/
While at least the second quoted article claiming all is well
And the Canada link is only listing colonies, but not if they are actually honey producers (that includes sick colonies are barely alive colonies too). Just because they increase the number of hives doesn't mean the number of active bees is larger. To the contrary it can mean that they try desperately to bring the population up by seeding more hives.
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Bingo.
This is just astroturfing for a manufacturer of pesticides.
And lets not forget that it wasn't just honeybees that were dying off.
Bees not raised by humans (wild bees, non-social bees, bumblebees, etc) were and are dying off too. Still.
Crown and Mail Lands Major Ad Campaign (Score:4, Interesting)
Monsanto has a low profile among the general public, because very little of it's business is visible at the mass market consumer level. Although other B2B vendors, such as BASF, have tried to extend their brand awareness using national broadcast media, it is very unusual to see this level of activity in print advertising.
In off the record remarks by a person not authorized to talk to the press, the possibility was raised that this would not be the last media purchase of this kind. In part, it was stated that "If Monsanto can find the right kind of media partnerships, they would very much like to extend their brand awareness in a major US market, like New York, Los Angeles, or Texas." The key, according to the source, was not just selecting a major market, but "building long term relationships with print media organizations that can help Monsanto bring it's message to a wider audience."
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Not to take away from your point that Monsanto is paying for branding via a newspaper, but the amount ($400k) is pretty miniscule. Last I checked the G&M annual revenues were over $250 million. They've written off CAD$400,000 accounts receivable without batting an eyelash. I'm not sure how much influence $400k will buy.
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Monsanto holds many patents. On pesticides.
Syngenta - Pesticide manufacturer. (Score:5, Informative)
The crisis was always over (Score:1)
Organic honeybee producers never had much of a real problem, it was really only large scale agricultural bees that had issues - it never really was at the point of crisis, like everything else these days it was just being used to scare you for someone else's gain.
Lots of government money happily funneled to useless bee research...
As an aside honey is really good for you, you should have some when you can - it's great to replace sweeteners in things like tea or cereal. It has lots of health benefits and neve
Re:The crisis was always over (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah sure. That's why there are no more wild honey bees in europe and the organic honeybee producers had lots of trouble recovering this winter. On top of the mites it was an unuasual mild winter with early up bees and not enough pollen to collect. There was a funny article cited on a speech last year which claimed that the wild population has finally stabilized and therefore all problems are over. Zero is a pretty stable population. The best you can get from a mathematicians point of view. If you don't catch a wild swarm of honeybees in europe it is estimated to be killed by mites in a few months as it needs to be treated.
Look who paid for the cited article and don't dip to deep into the health benefits of honey. Btw any saturated fluid helps with bee, wasps and moscito stings: Wet salt does the same. Nothing magic with honey.
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If (Post.AgreesWithMyPreconceptions(this.politics)) Mod('Informative');
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And shill number 3 shows up to collect his 2 cents.
Climate change (Score:1)
I'm all but certain that the bee deaths were conclusively linked to climate change.
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Than you need to figure out where you went wrong.
I suggest you are living in an echo chamber.
No rebound here. (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Ontario and own lands which are full of wild and domestic fruit trees, vines and canes all if which symbiotically support and rely upon wild bee populations. I can assure you that they have NOT rebounded here at ALL. This year in fact is the worst so far with the vast majority of everything remaining unpollenated and no bees, wasps or hornets to be found anywhere. Ten years ago my outbuildings had many mud and paper wasp nests every single year, it has been at least three years since I have seen even a single one.
You might label what I am saying as being purely anectodtal and dismiss it, I'm sure that Monsanto and their cronies & apologists will. On the other hand using StatsCan sales figures to measure the health and vitality of bee populations nationwide is something that I'm going to just go ahead and call moronic. What's next? A slow cycle of ice cream sales and they will claim the planet is cooling down?
Urban bees (Score:2, Interesting)
According to a Swiss urban beekeeper that was just recently on TV, her bee colonies -many dozens, settled on rooftops across the city- are struggling far less than the ones in the countryside.
She mentioned it's probably because of pesticides and agricultural monoculture in the countryside vs. urban plant diversity and little pesticides and it being ~2 degrees celsius warmer in the city.
The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research also reported one month earlier that at least the diver
Meanwhile (Score:3)
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not seen here (Score:3)
My sister is a amateur beekeeper.
All 5 of her hives died last winter. Yes, it was a tough winter, but never before did every hive die. Usually less than half would die.
Something is still wrong.
AN OPINION PIECE AS FACT? (Score:2)
Wild bees (Score:1)
This is typical Margaret Wente: uninformed pro-business status-quoism attacking anyone who might question "progress."
Honey bees aren't the big problem; the problem is wild bees. There are only three species of domesticated bees, compared to many hundreds of wild bees, most of which are important pollinators (ecologically and economically) and some of which fill unique ecological niches. Honey bee health is an important indicator for wild bee health, but honey bees aren't themselves under threat as a species
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Bee hive numbers are really nothing more than an indicator of demand for bees. If anything, more bee hives might be indicative of a problem, because more domestic bees are needed to pollinate crops when there aren't enough wild pollinators. Wild bee numbers are way down over the last few years
Hit the nail on the head.
Margaret Wente, yet again (Score:1)
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Yeah, I've read a few of her articles over the years. I think she's hoping to be the Ann Coulter of Canada before she dies - or is stung by a bee.
It's easily explained: beekeepers are doing it (Score:2)
First, Wente is the least believable so-called journalist at the G&M. I ignore her articles out of hand because she's usually so wrong that the articles are hard to read without getting angry.
But published in the Washington Post yesterday is similar information about US hives: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
The conclusion? Beekeepers are working hard to keep hives alive and keep populations up. Their livelihood is at stake here, after all.
Interestingly, I think this might serve as a long-term selectio
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The REAL issue is how populations of non-cultivated bees are doing. Bumblebees and all the other sorts of bees that we don't use to commercially produce honey or pollinate farms are also important, even if no human is directly making a dollar from the bees' work.
That there is the real issue alright. And it actually supports your statement that the rebound here is most likely due to the efforts of keepers to keep hives afloat.
Wild bees, bumble bees, etc, even just pollinators in general (including non-bees) are all crashing too, right along side the honeybees kept by humans. They talk about how the honey bees matter because they pollinate a very significant portion of our agriculture. The flip side is that the wild pollinators do the rest of the job (as well as pol
wroooong! (Score:2)
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There is a group writing troll bots and competing on reply count.
They've been on /. for a good long time, quit feeding them.
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Here is Germany 1992 to 2012, note German has suffered colony collapse disorder, but banned the Neonicotinoid pesticide in 2008 after it killed a lot of bees in an accident (which you can see in the numbers, as the sharp drop in the following years census).
1,170,000 1122000 1087000 1048600 1029200 953000 918100 900150 903230 951230 931540 968920 977885 985115 995425 954920 736589 737751 724341 733,952
Italy suffered colony collapse, so do the figures r
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The middle class has grown by about a billion people in the last 20 years. Capitalism has once again lifted up a huge swath of the world.
It has sucked for low skill, former middle class 'westerners' but has been great for the rest of the world.