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It's Official: The HoneyBees are Gone [Congressional Testimony] Hotlist
by jhritz [Subscribe]
Mon Apr 23, 2007 at 03:09:39 AM PDT
Experts are gathering outside Washington, D.C. today for a two-day meeting to collectively scratch their heads about the Colony Collapse Disorder, aka 'Where have all the honeybees gone.'
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.
CNN Story
There's been a lot of speculation about this lately. Others have diaried extensively on their ideas as to the cause. I don't know the cause, so I thought I'd write a diary that addresses what we do know, what questions are being asked, what is being done, and what has been reported, so far, in Congressional testimony.
Much more here
6 comments:
Now Taiwan is reporting millions of missing Bees. I am beginning to see a pattern here. Doesn't look good either. CHeck out this rather long link.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyid=2007-04-26T104754Z_01_TP162481_RTRUKOC_0_US-TAIWAN-BEES.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
the disappearance, or Colony Collapse Disorder, is beginning to be traced to a fungus.
A single-celled parasite called Nosema Ceranae may be responsible for the demise of the bees.
There are still many variables to be explained, and there may be much more involved than the recurrence of the often fatal parasite.
It would be good to see the progress of the spread on a map, and also to see the extent of the die off.
I am still partial to the notion that these social, industrious insects have been raptured.
it would be a far more poetic ending to a very ugly story.
remember the ending of the movie Brazil?
"Natural" beehives appear less affected by the strange new plague dubbed colony collapse disorder.
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3044/Colony_Collapse_and_Honeycomb_Size
Brazil and possibly Canada have been added to the list: http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3063/Please_Lord_not_the_bees
As well as Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9070846
So you think it may be from overwork?
corporate hives?
cubicle hives?
I hope truly that whatever the cause it is not irreversible
My sense is that we wouldn’t be having this problem if we had many more small backyard beekeepers and if we didn’t use herbicide on every garden weed and pesticide on every bug.
Commercial exploitation of a natural resource always diminishes the integrity of the resource in some way shape or form. Commercial fishing has wreaked havoc on our native salmon populations; hatchery raised stock threaten native species in a myriad of ways. Commercial logging operations decimate whole ecosystems. Those ecosystems never fully recover. Second growth timber is never of the same quality and it can (and has) been argued that repeated logging and replants will result in very inferior stunted re-growth due to a degradation of soil quality in the same way that continued replanting of the same crops results in poor soil quality.
Attempts to ameliorate the effects of overuse of a natural resource via a “management” rather than an organic solution always causes additional problems.
And so it goes with the bees.
Every year I take my loppers and machete and I hack away at those blackberry bushes threatening to take over my back yard. Maybe I’ll leave them this year. It might not be too long before blackberry jam will be a thing of the past.
here is a good but longish article that sort of backs up your suspicions, Mary Ann.
Please Lord, Not the Bees
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