"This is certainly the worst die-off that I’ve seen in my experience working with honey bees. It may be the worst die-off that has ever occurred with honey bees since they’ve been introduced into the United States since the 1620s."
- Maryann Frazier, Honey Bee Specialist, Penn State
February 23, 2007 Pennsylvania - Most people don’t realize that honey bees pollinate about one-third of our food supply around the world]/b]
Complete articleThe past year in America, at least 22 states have reported honey bee disappearances. Government and science authorities are calling it "Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)." Beekeepers have reported losses ranging from 60% to 100% of their bee colonies. As winter changes to spring and beekeepers in the colder Northeast can open their hives again, it's expected there will be many more empty hives.
Strangely, honey bees have also been disappearing in huge numbers in Spain and Poland. Adding to the European mystery is that Spain has very large commercial beekeeper operations with at least 3 million colonies of honey bees, similar to the United States. But Poland’s 400,000 hives are largely raised on individual farms where smaller bee colonies are separated from each other. If the answer were disease, you would not expect Poland’s separated hives to be plagued by large numbers of honey bee disappearances as in Spain and the United States.
more hereAs bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks
The mysterious disappearance of millions of bees is fueling fears of an agricultural disaster, writes Fortune's David Stipp.
FORTUNE Magazine
By David Stipp, Fortune
August 28 2007: 2:55 PM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- It's a sweet time for honeybees in the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the ones humming around Dennis vanEngelsdorp seem too preoccupied by the blooming knapweed nearby to sting him as he carefully lifts the top off their hive. VanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania's state apiarist, spots signs of plenty within: honeycomb stocked with yellow pollen, neat rows of wax hexagons housing larval bees, and a fertile queen churning out eggs.
But something has gone terribly wrong in this little utopia in a box. "There should be a lot more workers than there are," he says. "This colony is in trouble."
That pattern -- worker bees playing Amelia Earhart -- has become dismayingly familiar to the nation's beekeepers over the past year, as well as to growers whose crops are pollinated by honeybees. A third of our food, from apples to zucchinis, begins with floral sex acts abetted by honeybees trucked around the country on 18-wheelers.
The mysterious deaths of the honeybees
We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination.
But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too.
And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)
In late June, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns starkly warned that "if left unchecked, CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses."
$9.3 billion worth of endangered crops
Late last year vanEngelsdorp, a strapping, 37-year-old Netherlands native with a thatch of blond hair and a close-cropped goatee, helped organize a group of bee experts to identify the killer. In recent months he's acted as the team's gumshoe, driving thousands of miles to collect bees and honeycomb samples from CCD-afflicted hives to analyze for clues.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania State University entomologist Diana Cox-Foster has scoured bees from collapsed colonies for signs of disease-causing microbes. She's shown that the insects are chock-full of them, as if their immune systems are suppressed.
Now the entomologists, aided by Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University scientist known for cracking the case of the West Nile virus (he identified the mosquito-transmitted killer of birds and sometimes people), are closing in on possible culprits and reportedly have submitted a study identifying a virus associated with CCD to a scientific journal. The bug may have been introduced into the U.S. via imported bees or bee-related products, say researchers familiar with the study.
"If I were a betting man," says Dewey Caron, a University of Delaware entomologist who co-authored a recent report on CCD's toll, "I'd bet it's a virus that's fairly new or one that's mutated to become more virulent." Other pathogens, such as fungi, may have combined forces with the virus, he adds.
But merely showing that germs selectively turn up in cases of CCD, he cautions, won't necessarily nail the culprit, for it will leave a key question unanswered: Are such microbes the main killers, or has something else stomped bees' immune systems, making them vulnerable to the infections?
After all, the first report on AIDS focused on a strange outbreak of rare fungal pneumonia, "opportunistic" infections whose root cause was later identified as HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.
A fight about fish farms
Fortunately, a bee apocalypse seems unlikely at this point. Beekeepers have recovered from CCD-like hits in the past -- major bee die-offs seem to occur about once a decade. Most beekeepers recently contacted by Fortune say hives generally appear normal of late.
Still, ominous reports of worker-scarce hives like the one vanEngelsdorp recently examined suggest that whatever causes CCD is still in circulation and may well decimate hives again when bees' floral support system drops away this fall.
If that happens, "it will be a lot worse than the first time, because [commercial beekeepers] have already spent a lot of their money" replacing lost bees, says Richard Adee, head of the country's largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms of Bruce, S.D., which, despite its name, is largely a pollination business.
The losses weren't insured, he adds: Because of all the unpredictable things that can kill bees, from mites to droughts, insurers have long refused to cover them. "We'll see a lot of guys just hang it up."
So that's the thing to worry about: While CCD isn't likely to obliterate honeybees, it may wipe out enough migratory beekeepers to precipitate a pollination crisis.
When the molecular tests were performed, by entomologists at Penn State, they confirmed van Engelsdorp’s initial impression. The bees were infected with just about every bee virus known, including deformed-wing virus, sac-brood virus, and black-queen-cell virus, and also by various fungi and bacteria. In addition, genetic analysis revealed the presence of new pathogens, never before sequenced. Such was the level of infection that van Engelsdorp and other researchers concluded that the bees’ immune systems had collapsed. It was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.
Maybe they're bad liberal, gay-loving, god-hating, terrorist-supporting, homosexual bees! That's it... those bees are all in a big same-sex relationship... they're all female... LESBIAN BEES OMG!!! We need some bees with proper family values to save our crops!It was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but a common misconception is that evolution solves all problems equally well/equally rapidly. Organisms with short generation times (e.g. bacteria and viruses*) will evolve more rapidly than organisms with long generation times. However organisms with complex genomes have access to more evolutionary options (big complex genomes are more 'evolvable'). If the latter were not true, complex, multicellular organisms would not have evolved.I always laugh in the face of evolution...if animals (or BEES in this case) can take care of themselves through evolution then WHY is it that things are going extinct?? where are the new and better replacements???
No humans can hear radio waves. They're electromagnetic, not sound. Sound is the vibration of a medium (like air or water) and it is not electromagnetic. What you may be talking about is a high frequency sound generator, but then it's not radio (or any other form of electromagnetic radiation).... What it did was send off high frequency radio waves most humans can't hear. Unfortunately I have extremely good hearing and could hear the high pitch whenever i walked into the room.
Be careful what you believe on the basis of faulty understandings.So, conclusion? I believe the cell phone theory, but it's not just cell phones, it's routers, modems, and many other electronic devices used to make our lives as humans easier.
If they were using a piezo crystal for the high frequency sound it would also emit radio frequencies as well I do believe - so it COULD be the same source but two different emissions.high frequency sound generator, but then it's not radio (or any other form of electromagnetic radiation).
that explains a lotMy microwave makes noises at me all the time. It speaks and I listen.
In the 1960's a startling discovery was made quite by accident. A pair of scientists at Bell Laboratories detected background noise using a special low noise antenna. The strange thing about the noise was that it was coming from every direction and did not seem to vary in intensity much at all. If this static were from something on our world, like radio transmissions from a nearby airport control tower, it would only come from one direction, not everywhere. The scientists soon realized they had discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Physics: A disturbance, especially a random and persistent disturbance, that obscures or reduces the clarity of a signal.
Cosmic Microwave Background: A Message from the Beginning of Timeat the moment the photons were freed, some regions were contracting, heated by compression, and other, cooler regions were expanding; these motions imprinted temperature differences on the cosmic microwave background and recorded the harmonics of the sound wave
Ringing like a bell is a bit of a stretch for imagery - it's only correct in that pressure waves resonated within the "blob" that was the entire universe the way a bronze bell would have pressure waves moving through it if struck in a vacuum. ( The earth could be said to "ring" in a similar manner with earthquakes - which because of the atmosphere translates to rumbling we can perceive in the air.pressure oscillations were moving at the speed of sound through the dense hot blob. Gravity pulled in and radiation pressure pushed out, making the whole spherical mass ring like a bell; at the moment the photons were freed, some regions were contracting, heated by compression, and other, cooler regions were expanding; these motions imprinted temperature differences on the cosmic microwave background and recorded the harmonics of the sound wave.
The sound wave reveals the precise characteristics of its resonating chamber --