NYT: Honeybees — pollinator of our plants and provider of much of our food — are dying off in absolutely staggering numbers. A third of all everything we eat is courtesy of a honeybee. The cause? Unknown, but it’s almost certainly triggered by humans, directly or indirectly. The solution? Nobody knows.
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I read about this a couple of days ago. It really put into perspective for me the importance of honeybees, and why we will all be totally screwed if they continue to disappear.
Bee Rapture?
I’m sure it’s Karl Rove’s fault. Or was that Avian Flu? Maybe acid rain? I can’t remember.
Technically, we don’t know that they are dying — they just disappear. I’m with Ham: “Bee Rapture?”
Also, there is no evidence that it is caused by human activity (unlike global warming.) There are some very plausible human-cause explanations, but they haven’t been tested yet.
In any event, it is certainly disturbing, and we should do what it takes to make sure the honeybees can still pollinate our crops.
So long and thanks for all the…
I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist after reading the “Bee Rapture” comment.
What with nobody knowing what’s causing it, there’s no evidence that anything in particular is causing it. :) But it’s very rare that anything in nature tips so quickly — change tends to be gradual, if not over the course of millennia than at least decades. I’ll be surprised if it turns out that the cause of this is anything other than rooted in human actions, whether direct (anti-mite insecticide) or indirect (pollution causing dampened atmospheric temperature swings causing suppressed immune functionality in bees).
Oh, and “Ham Sandwich” wins the thread for “bee rapture.” :)
Sometimes diseases do spread with this kind of rapidity. But you’re right — it probably is the result of a pesticide of some sort.
I lost my colonies to the throat mite back in the mid-1980’s. Although bees eventually made a come back of sort (due to mite treatments), I suspect that this collapse is just a continuance of the original stress of the mites, and the treatment. Most people don’t understand the ability of bees to increase crop yields. My fruit tree production fell to less than half after the bees died. Similar results with tomatoes and other vegetables. We depend on these amazing little critters for our abundance of food.
A good description of this phenomenon is posted at
http://anappalachianview.blogspot.com/
Well, I’d like someone to explain the connection between throat mites and humans. Bubby pointed out that his hives made somewhat of a comeback DUE to anti-mite treatments, so this doesn’t appear to be the main culprit. Maybe the mites are proliferating due to carbon emissions, because these things just don’t happen without human interference.
They happen, no doubt, but generally not so quickly. And “interference” seems to just continue this weird image of humans as somehow separate from nature, as opposed to of it. Anti-mite treatments will prevent mites from destroying a hive, which is great, but they certainly harm the hive more than if the treatment wasn’t required in the first place. It’s certainly better than losing all of them, though.
Tom: I should clarify. My hives died, or more accurately they just disappeared, and it was several years until mite treatments were available. By then, my hobby beekeeping was over – I was advised to burn my hives. Even with the mite treatment, I never saw a robust return of beekeeping amongst my neighbors.
My introduction to beekeeping began with a tip to consume bee pollen as a treatment for pollen allergies. The immediate elimination of those allergies led to my interest in bees.
The presumption that the bee losses are due to human inteference just gets in the way of solving the problem. A wrong preconception can cause us to ignore relevant information. If we do not know what causing the problem, then we don’t know. We do not know what we do not know.
Keep in mind what the article itself suggests. This honey bee problem could be due to nothing more than the bad management of domesticated bees. If that is the problem, the sooner it is recognized the better.
Even if the problem is due to environmental poisoning, this poisoning may have little to with pesticides and the like. For example, the almost total destruction of the American Chestnut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chestnut), one of the most valuable and common trees in colonial America came about due to the introduction of a fungus from Asia. Similar honey bee losses could dwarf the problems people experienced from the loss of the American Chestnut.
Without honey bees, we are going to have to change our diets considerably. Because this could become such a serious problem, I hope our government is investigating this issue carefully. Heard any word on that?
One other thing. I gather that wild honey bees are not particularly common these days, but there must be some colonies. It would be interesting to compare the health of wild honey bee colonies with domesticated colonies.
Fortunately, I’m not a biologist, and will play no role in figuring out what the source of the problem is. :) I can assume that it’s caused by roaming packs of ninja monkeys and that won’t affect the outcome one bit.
Germany is making a bid for the presidency of the G8 right now, and they’re taking the economics of biodiversity very seriously. According to German studies, 40% of the world’s trade hinges upon biological product.
Actually, I’m surprised it’s not more. While Colony Collapse Disorder may have nothing to do with climate change, we should take a warning from it: look at what the collapse of just a single species can do.