"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.
relatedFebruary 21, 2008
Häagen-Dazs Funds Effort to Identify Why Honeybees are Disappearing Worldwide
Honeybee_2 Ice cream manufacturer Häagen-Dazs is worried about the unexplained collapse of honeybee colonies around the world. Häagen-Dazs spokesperson Katti Pien says that "almost 40 per cent of the brand's flavors are dependent on bee pollination and could be threatened by CCD". Known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), no one has yet been able to verify what is causing this “apiarian apocalypse”. Usually only queens, eggs and a few immature workers are left behind while the rest of the colony mysteriously disappears.
But it’s not just ice cream flavors at stake. Scientists and beekeepers say that bees’ colonies are disappearing from the US to Europe in one of the most bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world. Implications of the spread are alarming. Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left". But whether or not it was actually Einstein that made the prediction, the concern is real. Many of the world’s crops are largely dependant on pollination by bees. A severe bee decline could cause massive food shortages as many world crops could fail.
“Honey bees are in trouble,” says Walter Leal, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology. “One-third of our nation’s food supply depends on bee pollination, but bees are vanishing in massive numbers.”
Häagen-Dazs has given $250,000 in a research grant to university researchers in California and Pennsylvania to identify the culprit(s) behind CCD. Many possible causes have been suggested, but so far none have been verified. Last year researchers found that some bees were infected with the single-celled fungus Nosema ceranae. Other teams identified two further fungi and 12 viral infections that could be contributing to CCD. However, it is not clear if these infections are simply symptoms of a larger problem that is weakening the honeybees’ defenses, making them more susceptible to disease.
One theory for the bee disappearance is that the radiation from cell phones could possibly be interfering with bees' navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to their hives. There is some preliminary scientific evidence to back this up. German researchers have shown that bees' behavior changes near power lines. A study at Landau University has found that bees do not to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried out the study, confirmed this could be a possible cause of the beehive collapses.
Other theories involve mites, pesticides, increased solar radiation, global warming and GM crops. However, many question remain unanswered and more research is needed to conclusively determine the cause(s). To further spotlight the issue, the Haagen-Dazs brand launched a new honey bee-dedicated flavor on February 19th called Vanilla Honey Bee with the proceeds going to help fund CCD research.
(Full story at GizMag)...some fruit growers in North America are now turning to the indigenous mason bee as an orchard-pollinator. Not only are mason bees not affected by CCD, but they're better at pollinating than honeybees, you need less of them, and they have a more laidback personality, meaning less of those nasty stings.
Mason bees occur naturally in the North American woodlands, where they are also known as blue orchard or Osmia bees. Because they're fast fliers, and remain active in poor weather, they do a better job at pollination than the introduced European honeybees. Instead of living in colonies with assigned roles, each mason bee lives an independent existence, and all the females lay eggs. That said, they are very gregarious by nature, and like to live cheek-by-jowl with one another. This characteristic makes it possible to sort of domesticate them, as a great number of bees will gladly cohabitate in a relatively small beehouse.
Yes, a beehouse. Because they don't form societies, or produce wax, mason bees don't live in hives. Instead, each bee finds an already-existent tubular hole (Such as a wormhole in a tree) and moves in...
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
(TheGuardianUK)...a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
(Crooks & Liars)Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The authors, who include some of the world's leading honey-bee experts, issue a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe. Without profound changes to the way human beings manage the planet, they say, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue.