Whatever the proximate cause, it increasingly appears that the bees are succumbing to a long-ignored underlying condition—inbreeding. Decades of agricultural and breeding practices meant to maximize pollinating efficiency have limited honeybees’ genetic diversity at a time when they need it the most. Addressing CCD may therefore require more than a simple fix. “We need to have a diverse set of genetic raw material so we can find bees resistant to disease,” says Steve Sheppard, an entomologist at Washington State University. “Genetic diversity is an important part of the solution.”
The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today’s honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. “We’ve looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what,” says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. “They can’t be pushed and pushed.”
In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an explosion of natural diversity. While most bees preferred a specific type of plant, honeybees were equal-opportunity pollinators—“pollen pigs,” beekeepers called them. The most socially complex of the bees, they thrived in colonies led by the egg-laying queen, who ensured the genetic fitness of her progeny by breeding with multiple male drones from other colonies.
All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.
And lately those threats have been profound. During the 1980s, tracheal mites and then varroa mites arrived in North America, decimating honeybee populations. One entomologist studying the mite invasion was Michael Burgett of Oregon State University, who spent much of his career searching for pesticides that would kill the mites but not the bees. In 1995 he published the results of a 10-year bee survey. The average annual honeybee loss, attributed to both mites and chemicals, was about 23 percent.
The stresses endured by honeybees became clear to Sam Comfort earlier in this decade when he was working for a Montana pollination outfit called Arlee Apiaries. Every February at the start of pollinating season, Comfort and fellow contract workers used forklifts to move 12-foot-tall towers of wooden hives onto flatbed trucks. “Five hundred hives to a truck, all of them covered by a giant net,” he says. With the loads jammed in tight, drivers set out for the almond groves of California, where the bees’ whirlwind pollination tour began.
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- groups:
- News, Green, Earth and Science, Sustainable Agriculture, 4 more
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- tags:
- Bees, industrial agriculture, CCD, envionment + add
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- recommended by:
- ras_menelik
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- JanforGore
- added this
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And I still believe it is not possible for bees to pollinate GMOs. What are the results of trying to pollinate bacteria? I can bet Monsanto never tested what effect these GMOs would have on other species that would land on them or eat them.
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you're probably right.
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pesticide poisoning in hives is huge as well... The amount of toxins that are brought back on a bee simply because the flowers they are pollinating are covered in them.
That has to be healthy...
Anyone interested in this issue, which you should be its a big eco problem, should check out the 2009 SXSW film
The Last Beekeeper
Trailer- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJx4SYw78As
***for all comcast customers, this is also On Demand!
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- frankallie
- 1 month ago
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Go watch The Last Bee Keeper. It was really informative and very crazy! Stuff they do not tell you on the six O'clock news.
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So you're saying humans will have to look beyond our own immediate needs as we handle and manipulate (or decimate) the other species of the world? Great - total retraining.
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monsanto,monsanto,monsanto killed the bees. they needed total genetic controll . no grapes and no figs on my trees. gota go to the wal-marts n get em
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I've seen the film and I'd generally agree with the source of the disappearance of any of our fast depleting species being man-made pollution. However, I am very much confused by the March 5, 2009 article in the Economist detailing a "glut in California bee population" (after the movie was made) and directing the source of the perceived drop in bee colonies due to lack of needed nutrients which should have been supplied by the bee-keepers.
Some quote below:
"alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery. Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut.
(California's) crop is so large and intensively grown these days that it has greatly surpassed the region’s inherent ability to supply pollinators. Now, they have to import migrant apian labour.
Joe Traynor, the pollination broker who founded Scientific AG, says that in the 1960s there were 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares) of groves. Today it is 700,000 acres and the industry claims it supplies 80% of the world’s almonds. In order to meet this pollination demand, more than a third of America’s beehives must be moved to California for the season. Such changes to the industry have been reflected in the prices for bee hives. In 1995 growers could rent a hive for $35. Today, says Mr Traynor, a strong colony would cost $150-200.
It is hard to pin down what has been causing honeybees to vanish. “People want it to be genetically modified crops, pollution, mobile-phone masts and pesticides,” says Dr Ratnieks, and it is “almost certainly none of those”. But he adds that such large losses to a population are not unusual in epidemics.
One explanation offered by both Dr Ratnieks and Mr Traynor is of a once-rare disease, possibly caused by the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), sweeping through colonies that have already been weakened by parasites such as Nosema ceranae, a parasitic fungus from Asia. Some have suggested that N. ceranae alone might be sufficient to cause CCD, as the fungus is believed to have been widespread since 2006, when CCD first became a problem. There is also Varroa, a parasitic mite, which has been another problem in bees for some time, and which might also transmit the IAPV. But there is almost certainly a further factor causing stress on the bees—a poor diet.
It is increasingly being recognized that managed bees need food supplements. In some places, a decline in the area of pasture land on which they can forage, the loss of weedy borders and the growth of crop monocultures mean it is hard for bees to find a wide enough range of pollen sources to obtain all their essential amino acids. In extreme cases they may not even find enough basic protein. Writing in Bee Culture this February, Mr Traynor observes that places where crops with low-protein pollens, such as blueberries and sunflowers, are grown are also places where CCD has appeared.
The suggestion is that poor nutrition has weakened the bees’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to viruses and other parasites. Feeding bees supplements, rather than relying on their ability to forage in the wild, costs time and money. Many beekeepers therefore try to avoid it. Anecdote suggests, however, that those who do fork out find their colonies are far more resistant to CCD.
This year’s Californian bee glut, then, has been caused by a mixture of rising supply meeting falling demand."
I'd add that I'd like to hear more discussion of this, and the bees on my California organic acreage are fine. -
In Texas, an infestation of crazy ants is causing hive destruction at an alarming rate. But since it isn't a nuclear power project or a highway project, it is being ignored. Soon the whole nation is going to be overrun by these pests that short circuit air conditioners and kill whole hives of bees.
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- southrabbit
- 1 month ago
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Watching the last beekeeper on planet green about California bees
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- ras_menelik
- 1 month ago
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Jan, I have a question for you. Are honeybees wild ? Ie. are they the usual small bees people see hovering on wildflowers and flowering weeds as compared to the larger yellowjackets ? The reason I ask is because there's been a hive where I live for a long time. They burrowed into the back lawn made their hive home, and burrowed a hole 2 feet further down to exit from. Every time I mowed the lawn with my old fashioned push mower, they stung me repeatedly anytime I came near them. I realy, realy hope the variety in the back yard are honeybees because if they are, there's yet hope to rebuild the apiaries. After I buy this place, I hope to get a permit to build a greenhouse so I can plant dwarf fruit trees, and let the bees in through the windows to pollinate them, and the berry canes to be
located next to them. Besides, since I don't have any alergies to their stings, I realy hope too that I can nurture them. Royal jelly is a special treat. -
Far as I know honeybees are not categorized as wild, unless they are feral. I read something a while ago about the economic benefits of wild bees as pollinators, so it might work out for you regardless. I once disturbed a hive under my lawn once when cleaning leaves and was stung as well, but they were honeybees. So perhaps there are those that are simply reacting to that stimulus rather then just being wild. I would also think wild bees would be larger, but considering that there has been an influx of African bees in my area as well, it is hard to tell.
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- JanforGore
- 30 days ago
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I'm still curious to hear if the Economist was right, or totally wrong, in their article. Anyone?
Surely someone on Current must have some direct contact with commercial growers in Central California. Two current facts seem particularly important in this issue. One, was the report last year that the contagious pathogen "Crithidia bombi" found in commercial bees, was spreading to wild bees. The second, was that this year, researchers were able to isolate the bee parasite "Nosema ceranae" affecting commercial bees, and "treat it with complete success."
As this is an important quantitative and scientific question, and not a political one, I'm hoping we can get a definitive and current assessment of the actual situation as it stands now. -
I don't have direct contact but I will state that it is possible that feeding supplements may be a cause. As the article posted states, bees have been pushed to the limit to increase pollinating capacity, so it is absolutely possible that these managed bees not free to forage and only surviving on these supplements may become sick from them. What I don't agree with in the snippet you posted from the Economist is this doctor totally dismissing GMOs as a cause. I would actually like to see his data on that.
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- JanforGore
- 29 days ago
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