CCD - Colony Collapse Disorder - The Why & What of the Bees?

[Judee]

Let us pray that some numbnuts doesn't suggest genetically modified bees.

I just think if we could clean up this planet, much of the wildlife destruction would cease.

Nothing else to be said Sir VO!!

[Alpha]

This certainly could be having a huge effect, not only on the bees, but on all living creatures....

Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee


Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.


Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.


They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.


After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.


The queen bee in the "mobile" hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.
They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank................


Article Continues

[Alpha]

LMH's most recent report on this.....

Bee Expert Says Cell Phones Are Not Cause of Honey Bee Collapse

..................
Then TV news and other media such as U. K.'s Telegraph headlined, “Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bees.” But cell phones are not the smoking gun, say American bee experts.
The problem is that U. S. scientists, who have been studying the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) disappearance of honey bees since 2007, have never found hard evidence that microwaves from towers and cell phones are linked to the sudden collapse of honey bees. Apiary experts even looked at microwaves early on in their research. One simple fact is that cell phone towers and mobile cell phones have been around since 1956, when the first fully automatic mobile phone system called Mobile Telephone System A (MTA) was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden..........

Full Article and Update at link above.

[Judee]

UK Bee Industry Abuzz with Mite Resistant Breed

A British beekeeper says he has managed to isolate and breed a strain of bees resistant to the parasite that has been gradually wiping out populations of the vital insect worldwide.

Full Story:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67O4SN20100825

[Alpha]

Would be wonderful if they could find the cause and cure for our pollinators.

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery?

It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.



Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.



A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.



Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.............


Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal..........


Full Article

[Judee]

My personal opinion is that there are multiple things going on, and at the base of the problem is stress, caused by transporting the bees hither and thither around the country(s). Add to that, poor food for the bees. Man takes all the honey that the bees would use as a food source throughout winter months, and feeds them crap like corn syrup. And then we have the fact that commercial bees are placed in huge fields with only one source of pollen. The bees are stressed, malnourished, and develop weakened immune systems. Then along comes mites, fungus, or a virus, and the colony cannot survive as it's too weak to defend itself.

Why don't these fools ask themselves one question...? Why aren't wild bees affected? Wild bees on my property are thriving in abundance, and I can walk through the woods and find bee colonies high up in trees with honey dripping down the trunk. We have treated commercial bees very poorly, and we are reaping what we have sown. My two cents...

[Alpha]

This will make you cry and scream at the same time

The documentary film, Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Ellen Page, takes a piercing investigative look at the economic, political and ecological implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee

Directors George Langworthy and Maryam Henein present not just a story about the mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, but a platform of solutions, encouraging audiences to be the change they want to see in the world.

Let's hope there is a solution and that we find it soon....damn Monsanto!!

[Judee]

Bees facing a poisoned spring

Michael McCarthy: New kind of pesticide, widely used in UK, may be helping to kill off world's honeybees.

A new generation of pesticides is making honeybees far more susceptible to disease, even at tiny doses, and may be a clue to the mysterious colony collapse disorder that has devastated bees across the world, the US government's leading bee researcher has found. Yet the discovery has remained unpublished for nearly two years since it was made by the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory.

The release of such a finding from the American government's own bee lab would put a major question mark over the use of neonicotinoid insecticides – relatively new compounds which mimic the insect-killing properties of nicotine, and which are increasingly used on crops in the US, Britain and around the world.

Bayer, the German chemicals giant which developed the insecticides and makes most of them, insists that they are safe for bees if used properly, but they have already been widely linked to bee mortality. The US findings raise questions about the substance used in the bee lab's experiment, imidacloprid, which was Bayer's top-selling insecticide in 2009, earning the company £510m. The worry is that neonicotinoids, which are neurotoxins – that is, they attack the central nervous system – are also "systemic", meaning they are taken up into every part of the plant which is treated with them, including the pollen and nectar. This means that bees and other pollinating insects can absorb them and carry them back to their hives or nests – even if they are not the insecticide's target species.

Read Full Story:
http://trc1.emv2.com/HS?a=ENX7Cqhych...Vsje_HxHDbxlKg

[Alpha]

More on Bayer being the culprit and cause of all of this. LMH is talking about this right now on C2C....

Leaked EPA Document Says Bayer's Clothianidin Kills Honey Bees

Update U.K. House of Commons
has proposed ban on nicotine-based pesticides.

On January 25, 2011, 36 MPs in the U. K. House of Commons motioned to immediately suspend the licenses for all neonicotinoid pesticides used in Great Britain. By the end of March 2011, the process to put teeth into an actual law banning nicotine-based pesticides could be a groundbreaker in the struggle to give honey bees a chance to live in an environment freer from poisons and more balanced to support life, not death.

Early Day Motion EDM 1267: “That this House is gravely concerned by the contents of a recently leaked memo from the U.S. Environmenalt Protection Agency whose scientists warn that bees and other non-target invertebrates are at risk from a new neonicotinoid pesticide and that tests in the U.S. approval process are insufficient to detect the environmental damage caused; acknowledges that these findings reflect the conclusions of a 2009 Buglife report that identified similar inadequacies in the European approval regime with regard to neonicotinoids; notes reports that bee populations have soared in four European countries that have banned these chemicals; and therefore calls on the Government to act urgently to suspend all existing approvals for products containing neonicotinoids and fipronil pending more exhaustive tests and the development of international methodologies for properly assessing the long-term effects of systemic pesticides on invertebrate populations.”.....................


Article Continues

Write, call, do whatever you can do to get this to stop!!

[quote]
Tom Theobald and his beekeeper colleagues around the United States urge all concerned citizens to immediately email, phone, or hard mail EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to protest the EPA's unprofessional silence and disregard to America's honey beekeepers, organizations and emergency appeal to honor EPA's own internal office concern that previous registrations of clothianidin for Bayer were not based on sound science and clothianidin should be banned from from use in the United States as U.K. lawmakers are now trying to ban its use in Great Britain.


Lisa P. Jackson,
EPA Administrator
Ariel Rios Building, MC 1101A
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue N. W.
Washington, D. C. 20004

Headquarters Phone Number: 202-564-4700
General EPA Headquarters: 202-272-0167

email: jackson.lisa@epa.gov
[/quqote]

[Alpha]

If this is true, they deserve a fate worse than death

Leaked document: EPA knowingly approved bee-killing pesticide

NaturalNews) A Colorado beekeeper recently obtained a leaked document revealing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows a popular crop pesticide is killing off honey bees, but has allowed its continued approval anyway. Despite opposition from its own scientists, EPA officials first gave the a-okay to Bayer CropScience's toxic pesticide clothianidin in 1993 based on the company's own flawed safety studies. But now it has been revealed that the EPA knew all along about the dangers of clothianidin and decided to just ignore them.............

And the leaked document, which was written by the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, explains clearly that "[c]lothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (honey bees)" and that "[a]cute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis." The letter was in response to a request from Bayer to have clothianidin approval expanded for use on cotton and mustard in addition to its other approved uses.

So if clothianidin poses a significant threat against honey bees, and the EPA has known about this all along, why was it ever approved in the first place? And if Bayer's original safety studies have been shown to be contradictory to actual science, why has the EPA failed to go after Bayer for falsifying safety data? Apparently those who make the final decisions at the EPA have no actual interest in the truth and would rather cater to corporate interests at the expense of public health.........

Full Article

[Judee]

The EPA bows to a master called Bayer. The people be damned!!

[Alpha]

In 1923, Rudolf Steiner predicted that the practice of artificial queen bee-breeding would bring about the demise of the honeybee. Now, pesticides, herbicides, and genetically engineered plants exacerbate the problem, and the current bee crisis confirms Steiner's dire predictions. SIFFtv sits down with Director Taggart Siegel and Producer Jon Betz to discuss their film.



QUEEN OF THE SUN: What Are the Bees Telling Us? is a profound, alternative look at the global bee crisis from Taggart Siegel, director of THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN. Taking us on a journey through the catastrophic disappearance of bees and the mysterious world of the beehive, this engaging and ultimately uplifting film weaves an unusual and dramatic story of the heartfelt struggles of beekeepers, scientists and philosophers from around the world including Michael Pollan, Gunther Hauk and Vandana Shiva. Together they reveal both the problems and the solutions in renewing a culture in balance with nature.

Industry’s war on nature: ‘What are the bees telling us?’

April 11, 2011

While industries continue to pollute the planet with their toxic chemicals, toxic waste and toxic spills, Earth’s pollinators sing a swan song that leaves no doubt as to the folly of modern civilization. Our ability to hear and appropriately respond to the crisis of declining pollinators will determine humanity’s survival.


“In 1923, Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian scientist, philosopher and social innovator, predicted that in 80 to 100 years honeybees would collapse.” Queen of the Sun
Steiner believed the industrialization of bees would lead to their demise. It looks like he was right. In the past two decades, the United States has lost 100-300 billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and beyond. But several factors above industrialized beekeeping operations contribute to this massive die-off.
Pollinators are further sickened by lack of a diverse diet from the tens of millions of monoculture acres. By ingesting genetically modified crops, pollinators also ingest GM microbes, to their detriment. By and far, though, agrochemicals contribute most to pollinator decimation. In a last ditch effort to save the hive, some bees seal off hive cells that contain inordinate amounts of pesticide. But even these hives eventually die.


Bolstering industry’s multi-factor assault on nature, the ubiquitous communications industry adds electromagnetic pollution, causing bees (and birds) to lose their ability to navigate. Taking advantage of weakened, disoriented bees, exotic pathogens like the Varroa mite, imported via globalized trade, suck the remaining life out of them. And, so, we see the collapse of the honeybee and North American bats.


Much of this we learn in Taggart Siegel’s part philosophical love story, part documentary, Queen of the Sun: What are the bees telling us? Theatrically released on March 25, the award-winning film is further supported by a newly released report from the United Nations Environment Programme, Global Bee Colony Disorders and other Threats to Insect Pollinators.


A sure way to collapse an ecosystem is to decimate a keystone species – one from which the entire localized web of life radiates. Pollinators contribute nearly ten percent to the global food economy, or about $218 billion USD (€153 billion) a year. Of the 100 or so crop species that provide 90% of the world’s food, bees pollinate 71 of them, according to UNEP’s report. Among the 20,000 known bee species worldwide, the honeybee, Apis mellifera, is most important, contributing between $33 and $82 billion annually (€22.8 to €57 billion).


So while we are witnessing the planet’s sixth extinction spasm (popularly detailed in Ed Wilson’s The Diversity of Life), it is the bee that garners our deserved attention.


“Bees are the legs of plants,” Michael Pollan explains in Queen of the Sun. They co-evolved so that the sessile organism feeds the aerial one in exchange for propagation. That mutualism supports much of life today. Without pollinators, crops will collapse. As crops collapse, myriads of species, including humans, will starve.


When pollinators go, so will flowering plants. The chain reaction collapse can easily then lead to the end of the Age of Mammals. This would be similar to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The “terrible lizards” will have outlasted us by 100 million years. Only about half of all species survived that last extinction spasm – notably alligators and crocodiles. But human survival is hardly guaranteed if 40% of our food sources vanish.


While gators and crocs can go a year or more without eating – and this survival mechanism vastly contributes to the species’ longevity – humans cannot...........


Full Article

I'll put the entire doc up as soon as I can find it...if

anyone finds it first, please go for it first.

[Alpha]

This is an interview with the producers of the documentary "The Vanishing of the Bees"