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Bit scary this

7K views 77 replies 23 participants last post by  CubaMark 
#1 ·
"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]


The 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.
Complete article

http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1214&category=Environment
 
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#65 ·
Receptor size MIGHT have a play as some sort of primary focusing ( ala the way the ear works to increase sensitivity in certain bands ) but the receptor band will be biochemical in nature refined by evolutionary pressures at work.
Polarization sensitivity also has a similar role as UV. Humans need visual aids to discern either.

SC ......can I suggest let the over-active imagination relax a bit and get the physical understanding of the wonders that ARE really there straight before attempting to ascertain ones that are extremely speculative.

Energy does transform into many forms and as with earthquakes, clearly some animals react to "disturbances" or precursors long before instruments make "sense" of the same information.

Still most such secondary "music of the spheres" is chaotic and our neural systems put the resulting inputs on ignore.....as background "noise" ;)
 
#66 ·
That "over imagination" is called intuition MD. And just because you don't trust yours that doesn't mean I have to stop trusting mine.

I know you all like the scientific approach, you know... the one you call "REAL", so I did a little research on what I intuited.

1. This disappearance of bees also happened in 1915. No one figured out why.
See here"

2. In 1915, both radio and telephone started to go long distance, hence wires and a whole lot of electromagnetic energy newly being thrown around, affecting our atmosphere. See here

3. Yes investigators of the 2007 version of this phenomenon gave up on cell phone, but started focusing on cordless phones, due to the fact that "A cordless phone uses a different wavelength of electromagnetic energy than cellular phones do." See here

I really don't think I'm that far off. I just don't think it's limited to what we already know.
 
#67 ·
If the increase in use of radio communication starting early in the 20th century was the cause of the problem, it would have continued to get worse (communication using EM has increased continuously and exponentially since its invention). But it got better, and has now suddenly started getting bad again. That suggests a different cause.

The great thing about intuition is that no one remembers when they're wrong, so it seems to work.

Cheers
 
#68 ·
They changed the way they transmitted the waves within a year.

Bees adapt, after all, through evolution, their species has existed long beyond that of humans, and the great majority of animals, surviving many great disasters and changes. In fact, the bees will probably return next year.

In the meantime, I'll move on. I didn't come here for personal attacks on something you don't understand, I came here to discuss concerns about the disappearance of bees, and maybe delve a bit deeper into the possibilities as to why it's happening. This seems to be the limit of your ability to do so, so this will be my last post on this topic.

Cheers.
 
#70 ·
You mean like Australia who is currently supplying bees to the US ;)

Yes die offs have occurred elsewhere and on a wide scale and often without a complete understanding of the factors involved.

Given how critical pollinators are to food production I'm quite pleased more than "intuition" is being applied to understand the issue.
 
#71 ·
Not a smoking gun, but there's more evidence for a biological cause:

globeandmail.com: Pathogen causing bee blight?

Seems an Australian virus (which started arriving with imported colonies in 2004) may be acting in combination with parasites found in North America but not down under -- either parasites weakening the bees enough to make the virus harmful, or the virus creating an opening for the parasites.
 
#72 ·
February 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.
related
Are Bees the Next Mass-Extinction Species? | The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond
Cell Phones May Wipe Out World's Bee Population | The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond
 
#76 ·
Mason bees fly to the rescue of failing orchards



...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...
(Full story at GizMag)
 
#77 ·
Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophre



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.
...a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
(TheGuardianUK)
 
#78 ·
This story isn't going away.... :(

Bee Colony Collapse Spreading Around The World, Putting Global Food Supply At Possible Risk

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.
(Crooks & Liars)
 
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