Where have all the bees gone?

[MrKhay]

http://environment.newscientist.com/...bees-gone.html

What's to blame for this phenomenon? Some say it's all the pesticides, while others blame cell phones, and those that really have nothing better say it's man made climate change!
Could it be caused by the HAARP project ( http://www.haarp.net/ ), or perhaps the ELF system ( http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/cnnf/natres/...ELF/index.html ), which operates in the northern woodlands of Wisconsin. Although the plug was pulled on ELF in late September of 2006, the effect on the environment may be a lasting one. It might be too soon to tell.

[CarolsCritterCare]

They are all here!!! In my walls, in my floors, in my dark dreary basement, in my ceiling and attic.

Carol

[MrKhay]

Originally Posted by CarolsCritterCare

They are all here!!! In my walls, in my floors, in my dark dreary basement, in my ceiling and attic.

Carol

Are they Honey Bees, or wasps?
Some speculation on the subject says that the cell phone towers that dot the world are giving off magnetic signals that throw off the Bee's natural navigation system, and they can't find their hive. If that's the case, there would be more "Bee Corpses" laying around. Others have said that the over use of pesticides have killed them off...but the question of the corpses still stands.

[pk]

Love the picture!

[MrKhay]

Originally Posted by pk

Love the picture!

OK...but where are all the Bees, or what happened to their corpses if they flew off and died?

[pk]

OK...but where are all the Bees, or what happened to their corpses if they flew off and died?

Well Spacebrain the best I can do for you right now is give you an answer that is not yet the answer...does that make sense? lol

Well read this article. It's the best I can come up with so far:

Where are the Dead Bees?

This was one of the more puzzling aspects to me in the recent reports of massive and sudden bee die-off: Hives weren't cluttered about with hundreds or thousands of dead bee bodies. The bees simply went missing from the abandoned hives--left, and never returned.

FULL STORY HERE: http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/20...dead-bees.html

[pk]

So it seems as if the answer still reminds a mystery.

:?

[pk]

Here is yet another interesting and informative article:

Lost colonies: Where have bees gone?

Collapses mean more than honey loss


Mike Rueden of rural Seymour keeps bees to sell the honey.


When he went to check on his 80 hives this spring he found only 15 colonies had survived. The bees apparently had succumbed to the mystery disease that is affecting bees nationwide.


It's not just Rueden's bees. Another beekeeper, Bob Bennett of Greenville said he was wiped out, too.


"I had 45 colonies last year and had only two left this spring," said Bennett. "Then the queens in those died and I bought more queens and they died in just the past two weeks."


Now a nationwide investigation, congressional panels and a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture scientific workshop are swarming around the newly named "colony collapse disorder." Says the USDA's Kevin Hackett, "With more dead and weakened colonies, the odds are building up for real problems."


"We lost 75 percent of our bees," said Rueden who now is carefully nursing 14 hives in the hopes that he can salvage enough honey to get through the season.


Beekeepers report losses of 30 to 90 percent of their honeybee hives, according to a Congressional Research Service study in March. Some report total losses.

FULL STORY IN DETAIL: http://www.postcrescent.com/apps/pbc...plate=printart

[AJE]

Does this ever break my heart! I love that excrement from our friendly yet hard working insect. :?

[MrKhay]

Lack of honey is just a small portion of the situation. Those hard working little insects are responsible for pollinating our food crops, providing us with bees wax, getting caught in soda cans, and a myriad of other tasks needed to sustain life on our planet, as we know it.
But, we all knew that!

[AJE]

Originally Posted by SpaceBrain

Lack of honey is just a small portion of the situation. Those hard working little insects are responsible for pollinating our food crops

How Do Plants Get Pollinated?
Pollination occurs in several different methods. People can transfer pollen from one flower to another, but most often plants are pollinated without any help from us human. Plants heavily rely on animals or the wind to pollinate them.

When animals such as bees, butterflies, moths, flies, and hummingbirds pollinate plants, it's always accidental. They're not trying to pollinate the plant but want to get the food; the sticky pollen or sweet nectar is made at the base of the petals. When feeding, the animals accidentally rub against the (reproductive organs) stamens and get pollen stuck all over themselves. Consequently enough they move to another flower to feed more sustenance, and some of the pollen rubs off onto this new plant's stigma.

Plants that are pollinated by animals often are brightly colored and have a strong smell to attract the animal pollinators.

Another way plants are pollinated is by the wind. The wind picks up pollen from one plant and blows it onto another.

Plants that are pollinated by wind often have long stamens and pistils. Since they do not need to attract animal pollinators, they can be dully colored, unscented, and with small or no petals since an insect needs to land on them.

[kmfarm]

My wife told me that she heard a report claiming that cell phones are causing the problem. Something to do with the frequencies used and disorienting bees.

One more reason to pitch all the cell phones. Maybe just taking them away from 10-16 year olds would be enough to bring them back. And hey, maybe school grades would come up. Study instead of text message, there's an idea. Or better yet, pay attention to the road instead of the cell phone.

Mark

[MrKhay]

I went browsing the web on this topic. Our friends at The Straight Dope dot com did some research, and came up with a very informative article by one of their staff writers, who also happens to be an entomologist at UC, Riverside.

SDSTAFF Doug replies:

Not to brag, but thanks to Wikipedia I've become the #1 authority on disappearing bees. Type "colony collapse disorder" into Google and hit return – the top hit is the Wikipedia page I maintain on the subject. (In real life I'm an entomologist with the University of California at Riverside.) Here's a summary.

First and most important: There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world, and many thousands more types of pollinating insects. What you're hearing about, "colony collapse disorder," affects one species of bee – the European honey bee. That species happens to be the one global agriculture relies upon for about 30% of its pollination requirements. So while we're not talking about losing all the world's pollinators, we are talking about losing a significant fraction of them. That's the worst-case scenario, with the species wiped out completely.

Second, there's no reason at this point to think European honey bees are going to be wiped out, now or ever. The die-offs so far appear to affect some beekeepers more than others, sometimes in the same area. That's one reason scientists are so puzzled, but it strongly suggests the losses may have something to do with how individual beekeepers are managing their bees. The "significant percentage" of failing hives is still a drop in the bucket when viewed against the global population of honey bees, and there are lots of beekeepers (even in the U.S., which appears hardest hit) who have not had, and may never have, significant losses of colonies. Plenty of honey bees remain to replace the ones that have died. It's not yet time to scream that the sky is falling.

Third, it's almost impossible to get hard numbers on how many colonies have died recently, and how much of the current uproar is media hype based on guesses, estimates and anecdotal accounts from the handful of beekeepers who have had the most colony losses. If you talk to other beekeepers, most admit they have colonies die off every winter, but they don't always keep records on how many. A lot of the reports we're hearing are based on personal recollection rather than careful documentation. In other words, the scary figures you're hearing could be exaggerated.

Fourth, even the original report describing and naming the phenomenon explicitly says it's something that has been seen before (repeatedly), named before, and studied before – in all cases without coming to any conclusion about the cause. The researchers didn't like the older names for the syndrome (which usually included the word "disease," which has connotations about infectiousness that don't seem applicable here), so they renamed it colony collapse disorder. That point has largely eluded the press, with the result that most people think this is a new phenomenon, when in fact the researchers who described it note reports of similar die-offs dating back to the 1890s.

Fifth, if what we're seeing is indeed a recurrence of a century-old phenomenon, that's a pretty good argument against theories of causation involving things that haven't been around that long. Yes, it's an assumption that current and past die-offs have a common underlying cause. Some researchers don't accept that assumption – they're the ones proposing things like pesticides as possible causes, and they may yet prove to be correct, since some modern pesticides can indeed kill honey bee colonies in a manner consistent with the present symptoms. But the leading hypothesis in many researcher's minds is that colonies are dying primarily because of stress. Stress means something different to a honey bee colony than to a human, but the basic idea isn't all that alien: If a colony is infected with a fungus, or has mites, or has pesticides in its honey, or is overheated, or is undernourished, or is losing workers due to spraying, or any other such thing, then the colony is experiencing stress. Stress in turn can cause behavioral changes that exacerbate the problem and lead to worse ones like immune system failure. Colony stress has existed, in various forms and with various causes, as long as mankind has kept honey bees, so it could indeed have happened in the 1890s. Many modern developments like pesticides or mite infestations can also cause stress (in fact, many of the things theorized to be involved can cause stress, so it's possible multiple factors are contributing to the problem, not just one). Unfortunately, stress is difficult to quantify and control experimentally, so it may never be possible to prove scientifically that colony stress explains all this year's deaths.

Sixth, it's never a good idea to trust what the media are telling you. At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn't involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs. Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off – the earliest documented appearance of the "quote" is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.

The bottom line? No one is certain what's going on, but a lot of the theories can't – by themselves – explain everything we're seeing. More important, the situation hasn't yet risen to the level of a catastrophe (except, sadly, for some of the affected beekeepers). If the same thing keeps happening every winter for another decade or so, then we might really start worrying. But for now, classifying this as a "problem with potentially severe economic impact should it persist" would be a more realistic assessment.

]

So, it sounds like it's just something that happens because of bad bee keeping habits...hive stress. The hives must be kept up...maintained.


Link to The Straight Dope article

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mvanishingbees.htm