The view is bordered by an airport, an army firing range, a sewage treatment plant and Dungeness nuclear power station, but Nikki Gammans hopes that the whole field looks like one gigantic banquet of flowering plants to a short-haired bumblebee.

In 1988 a scientist from the Natural History Museum saw a short-haired bumblebee, Bombus subterraneus, sitting on a pile of shingle. The species was already rare but he had no reason to think it was a historic encounter. In fact, the bee was never seen again and was declared extinct in the UK 12 years ago.

That status should now be changing. On Monday Gammans will take a small plastic box from the fridge in her camper van, and a group of slightly puzzled Swedish short-haired queens will tumble out into the Kent sunshine. The hope is that they make a beeline for the red clover, white dead nettle, yellow flag, tufted vetches and eggs-and-bacon, all bursting into bloom after a week of May sunshine.

“We hope, we believe, this is the absolutely perfect spot for them,” Gammans said. “It has everything they like. There is no reason why they shouldn’t thrive – they’re pretty tough girls.

“This is a flagship project, a scientific first, but also a symbol that it isn’t all hopeless: we don’t have to stand by helplessly watching species and habitat being lost.”

The short-tailed bumblebee, which like other bees has a crucial role in pollinating plants, was once common in the UK, as far north as Humberside. It declined catastrophically, with many other species as, over the past 60 years, an estimated 97% of wild flower meadows vanished from the UK.

The decline has been mirrored in many parts of Europe. But in Sweden the population is actually increasing.

After a recce last year to Skåne, south Sweden, Gammans acquired the necessary permits. She enlisted her father, a retired structural engineer, to travel ahead and phone the moment he saw bumblebees emerging from hibernation in Sweden. With volunteers, she caught 100 queens there, cooled them to drowsiness in the camper van fridge, then took the ferry home to start a quarantine period at the University of London’s Royal Holloway campus , and check for any sign of insect disease.

Watching the immigrants forage for themselves will be a great relief to one volunteer.

Alan Kenworthy, a retired IT consultant, spent the last fortnight up to his knees in a nettle patch, gathering pollen to feed the captives. Most of the nettles were non-stinging – but many did cause him pain.

His task involved capturing a bumblebee, imprisoning it in a small plastic tub and letting it bash the pollen off its hind legs on to a little sponge. A morning’s work collected barely enough pollen to cover the bottom of a pot, and the captured bees have been extremely cross about their contribution to science.

More bumblebees will be released at other spots across the miles of rough pasture, water and shingle of the RSPB reserve at Dungeness, and in future years Gammans will be releasing many more on to the land of neighbouring farmers.

With Natural England, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and the charity Hymettus, which is dedicated to conserving bees, ants and wasps, Gammans has been working with farmers on Romney Marsh to build up habitats for plants, insects and birds, with broad strips of wild flowers along field edges or in awkward spots beyond the reach of modern farm machinery. Other farmers are being paid to manage grass for hay crops instead of cutting early and often for silage.

In many places, wild flowers have returned to the land spontaneously; in other places, seed was sown, or grass cut when the flowers were setting seed and spread out the same day on less fertile soil. The results have been remarkable: not just plants and insects, but birds and mammals, including hares, have increased their numbers.

“My farmers are brilliant,” Gammans said. “In some cases they haven’t formally joined agri-stewardship schemes, but they’re just doing it. It’s a return to a more traditional way, the way they remember farming was when they were children, and they’ve really gone for it.”

Gammans and her team of volunteers will be monitoring the sites all summer, hoping to find that the bumblebees, which mated last summer in Sweden, are thriving and breeding.

Recognising them, she insists, is easy: with one broad and one narrow yellow stripe, the bumblebees look as if their mothers ran out of knitting wool.

“And they do have very short hair, bless them – their poor little abdomens look quite bald.”

Source

An Illinois beekeeper with more than a decade’s worth of expertise about how to successfully raise organic, chemical-free bees is the latest victim of flagrant government tyranny. According to the Prairie Advocate, Terrence “Terry” Ingram of Apple River, Ill., owner of Apple Creek Apiaries, recently had his bees and beehives stolen from him by the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDofA), as well as more than 15 years’ worth of research proving Monsanto’s Roundup to be the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) destroyed.

It began last summer when Ingram, who teaches children about natural beekeeping, gave a sample of his honeycomb to IDofA inspector Susan Kivikko (http://www.agr.state.il.us/programs/bees/inspectors.html) at a beekeeper’s picnic. Ingram explained that his bees would not touch the comb, and asked Kivikko if it could be tested for chemical contamination.

Kivikko told him that IDofA does not test for chemicals, presumably because its policy is to actively promote them, and instead took the comb and had it tested for “foulbrood,” a disease that Ingram says is greatly overblown. When the test allegedly came back positive, Kivikko proceeded to get the ball rolling on a witch hunt that would eventually lead to the illegal seizure and destruction of Ingram’s personal property.

Not only did Kivikko, as well as her colleague Eleanor Balson and superior Steven D. Chard, break the law by trespassing Ingram’s property on numerous occasions without a warrant, but they also committed numerous crimes by stealing his hives and equipment and destroying pertinent evidence before a hearing, which Ingram believes may have ultimately been rooted in a deliberate conspiracy by the state to hide the truth about Roundup, and subsequently steal his most vibrant bees.

IDofA appears to have targeted Ingram for his research linking Roundup to CCD

Of particular interest was Ingram’s extensive research on Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, which began several years ago when hundreds of Ingram’s hives had died. He later determined that Roundup sprayings near his property were to blame, which prompted him to actively research the subject and closely monitor his hives in conjunction with this research from that point onward.

What he gathered, and subsequently taught to others, was concrete evidence that Roundup kills bees. He also used this information and his many years of experience to develop and refine ways of growing strong, chemical-free bees in spite of Roundup sprayings, a move that apparently upset IDofA, which operates primarily to serve the interests of chemical companies rather than the interests of the people.

“Is Illinois becoming a police state, where citizens do not have rights?” asked Ingram, who has been deliberately denied his rights, to the Prairie Advocate. “Knowing that Monsanto and the Department of Agriculture are in bed together, one has to wonder if Monsanto was behind the theft to ruin my research that may prove Roundup was, and is, killing honeybees.”

Be sure to read the full Prairie Advocate story about Terry Ingram, which includes a video interview, here:
http://www.pacc-news.com/5-2-12/heart_ingram5_2_12.html

Sources for this article include:

http://www.pacc-news.com/5-2-12/heart_ingram5_2_12.html

http://www.agr.state.il.us/programs/bees/inspectors.html

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/Roundup.html

Source

In the last few weeks beekeepers have reported staggering losses in Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio after their hives foraged on pesticide-treated corn fields. Indiana too, two years ago. What’s going on in the Corn Belt? (Photo: Pesticide Action Network / panna.org)

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE [genetically modified or engineered] seeds, but now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ‘em.”

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What do GE seeds have to do with neonicotinoids and bees? and 2) How can an Iowa corn farmer find himself feeling unable to farm without poisoning pollinators? In other words, where did U.S. corn cultivation go wrong?

The short answer to both questions starts with a slow motion train wreck that began in the mid-1990s: Corn integrated pest management (IPM) fell apart at the seams. Rather, it was intentionally unraveled by Bayer and Monsanto.

Honey bees caught in the cross-fire

Corn is far from the only crop treated by neonicotinoids, but it is the largest use of arable land in North America, and honey bees rely on corn as a major protein source. At least 94 percent of the 92 million acres of corn planted across the U.S. this year will have been treated with either clothianidin or thiamethoxam (another neonicotinoid).

As we head into peak corn planting season throughout the U.S. Midwest, bees will once again “get it from all sides” as they:

• · fly through clothianidin-contaminated planter dust;
• · gather clothianidin-laced corn pollen, which will then be fed to emerging larva;
• · gather water from acutely toxic, pesticide-laced guttation droplets; and/or
• · gather pollen and nectar from nearby fields where forage sources such as dandelions have taken up these persistent chemicals from soil that’s been contaminated year on year since clothianidin’s widespread introduction into corn cultivation in 2003.

GE corn & neonicotinoid seed treatments go hand-in-hand

Over the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has gone from a crop requiring little-to-no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, to a crop where the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn’t know they “needed” before the mid-2000s.

A series of marketing ploys by the pesticide industry undergird this story. It’s about time to start telling it, if for no other reason than to give lie to the oft-repeated notion that there is no alternative to farming corn in a way that poisons pollinators. We were once — not so long ago — on a very different path.

How corn farming went off the rails

In the early 1990s, we were really good at growing corn using bio-intensive integrated pest management (bio-IPM). In practice, that meant crop rotations, supporting natural predators, using biocontrol agents like ladybugs and as a last resort, using chemical controls only after pests had been scouted for and found. During this time of peak bio-IPM adoption, today’s common practice of blanketing corn acreage with “insurance” applications of various pesticides without having established the need to do so would have been unthinkable. It’s expensive to use inputs you don’t need, and was once the mark of bad farming.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, GE corn and neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) seed treatments both entered the market — the two go hand-in-hand, partly by design and partly by accident. Conditions for the marketing of both products were ripe due to a combination of factors:

• · regulatory pressures and insect resistance had pushed previous insecticide classes off the market, creating an opening for neonicotinoids to rapidly take over global marketshare;
• · patented seeds became legally defensible, and the pesticide industry gobbled up the global seed market; and
• · a variant of the corn rootworm outsmarted soy-corn rotations, driving an uptick in insecticide use around 1995-96.

Then, as if on cue, Monsanto introduced three different strains of patented, GE corn between 1997 and 2003 (RoundUp Ready, and two Bt-expressing variants aimed at controlling the European Corn Borer and corn root worm). Clothianidin entered the U.S. market under conditional registration in 2003, and in 2004 corn seed companies began marketing seeds treated with a 5X level of neonicotinoids (1.25 mg/seed vs. .25).

… and in the space of a decade, U.S. corn acreage undergoes a ten-fold increase in average insecticide use. By 2007, the average acre of corn has more than three systemic insecticides — both Bt traits and a neonicotinoid. Compare this to the early 1990s, when only an estimated 30-35 percent of all corn acreage were treated with insecticides at all.

Adding fuel to the fire, in 2008 USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Board of Directors approved reductions in crop insurance premiums for producers who plant certain Bt corn hybrids. By 2009, 40 percent of corn farmers interviewed said they did not have access to elite (high-yielding) non-Bt corn seed. It is by now common knowledge that conventional corn farmers have a very hard time finding seed that is not genetically engineered and treated with neonicotinoids.

Enter fungicides

In 2007, what’s left of corn IPM was further unraveled with the mass marketing of a new class of fungicides (strobilurins) for use on corn as yield “boosters.” Before this, fungicide use on corn was so uncommon that it didn’t appear in Crop Life’s 2002 National Pesticide Use Database. But in the last five years, the pesticide industry has aggressively and successfully marketed prophylactic applications of fungicides on corn as yield and growth enhancers, and use has grown dramatically as a result. This despite the fact that these fungicides work as marketed less than half the time. According to this meta-analysis of efficacy studies, only “48% of treatments resulted in a yield response greater than the economic break-even value of 6 bu/acre.”

Back to the bees. Neonicotinoids are known to synergize with certain fungicides to increase the toxicity of the former to honey bees up to 1,000-fold, and fungicides may be key culprits in undermining beneficial bee microbiota that do things like make beebread nutritious and support immune response against gut pathogens like Nosema. Fungicide use in corn is likewise destroying beneficial fungi in many cropping systems, and driving the emergence of resistant strains.

As with insecticides and herbicides, so too with fungicide use on corn: Corn farmers are stuck on a pesticide treadmill on high gear, with a pre-emptively pressed turbo charge button (as “insurance”). Among the many casualties are our honey bees who rely on corn’s abundant pollen supply.

Keeping us all tethered to the pesticide treadmill is expected behavior from the likes of Monsanto. But what boggles the mind is that all of this is being aided and abetted by a USDA that ties cheap crop insurance to planting patented Bt corn, and a Congress that refuses to tie subsidized crop insurance in the Farm Bill to common-sense conservation practices like bio-intensive IPM. Try explaining that with a waggle dance.

Source

Honeybees are taking emergency measures to protect their hives from pesticides, in an extraordinary example of the natural world adapting swiftly to our depredations, according to a prominent bee expert.

Scientists have found numerous examples of a new phenomenon – bees “entombing” or sealing up hive cells full of pollen to put them out of use, and protect the rest of the hive from their contents. The pollen stored in the sealed-up cells has been found to contain dramatically higher levels of pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals than the pollen stored in neighbouring cells, which is used to feed growing young bees.

“This is a novel finding, and very striking. The implication is that the bees are sensing [pesticides] and actually sealing it off. They are recognising that something is wrong with the pollen and encapsulating it,” said Jeff Pettis, an entomologist with the US Department of Agriculture. “Bees would not normally seal off pollen.”

But the bees’ last-ditch efforts to save themselves appear to be unsuccessful – the entombing behaviour is found in many hives that subsequently die off, according to Pettis. “The presence of entombing is the biggest single predictor of colony loss. It’s a defence mechanism that has failed.” These colonies were likely to already be in trouble, and their death could be attributed to a mix of factors in addition to pesticides, he added.

Bees are also sealing off pollen that contains substances used by beekeepers to control pests such as the varroa mite, another factor in the widespread decline of bee populations. These substances may also be harmful to bees, Pettis said. “Beekeepers – and I am one – need to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask what we are doing,” he said. “Certainly [the products] have effects on bees. It’s a balancing act – if you do not control the parasite, bees die. If you control the parasite, bees will live but there are side-effects. This has to be managed.”

The decline of bee populations has become an increasing concern in recent years. “Colony collapse disorder”, the name given to the unexplained death of bee colonies, is affecting hives around the world. Scientists say there are likely to be numerous reasons for the die-off, ranging from agricultural pesticides to bee pests and diseases, pollution, and intensive farming, which reduces bee habitat and replaces multiple food sources with single, less nutritious, sources. Globalisation may also be a factor, as it spreads bee diseases around the world, and some measures taken to halt the deaths – such as massing bees in huge super-hives – can actually contribute to the problem, according to a recent study by the United Nations.

The loss of pollinators could have severe effects on agriculture, scientists have warned.

Pesticides were not likely to be the biggest single cause of bee deaths, Pettis said: “Pesticide is an issue but it is not the driving issue.” Some pesticides could be improving life for bees, he noted: for many years, bees were not to be found near cotton plantations because of the many chemicals used, but in the past five years bees have begun to return because the multiple pesticides of old have been replaced with newer so-called systemic pesticides.

Studies he conducted found that bees in areas of intensive agriculture were suffering from poor nutrition compared with bees with a diverse diet, and this then compounded other problems, such as infection with the gut parasite nosema. “It is about the interaction of different factors, and we need to study these interactions more closely,” he said.

The entombing phenomenon was first noted in an obscure scientific paper from 2009, but since then scientists have been finding the behaviour more frequently, with the same results.

Bees naturally collect from plants a substance known as propolis, a sort of sticky resin with natural anti-bacterial and anti-fungal qualities. It is used by bees to line the walls of their hives, and to seal off unwanted or dangerous substances – for instance, mice that find their way into hives and die are often found covered in propolis. This is the substance bees are using to entomb the cells.

The bees that entomb cells of pollen are the hives’ housekeepers, different from the bees that go out to collect pollen from plants. Pettis said that it seemed pollen-collecting bees could not detect high levels of pesticides, but that the pollen underwent subtle changes when stored. These changes – a lack of microbial activity compared with pollen that has fewer pesticide residues – seemed to be involved in triggering the entombing effect, he explained.

Pettis was speaking in London, where he was visiting British MPs to talk about the decline of bee populations, and meeting European bee scientists.

Source

US researchers have announced that numbers of four species of Stateside bumblebees have declined to the point of extinction, and have fingered a pathogen genus thought to be responsible for a similar collapse in honeybee populations worldwide as a contributory cause.

A team led by Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois conducted a three-year survey of eight species at 382 sites across 40 states, comparing the resulting data with 73,000 historical records.

The sobering conclusion is that “the relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96 per cent and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23–87 per cent, some within the last 20 years”.

 Speaking to Reuters [1], Cameron described bumblebees as “the most important pollinators of native plants”, which also play an crucial role in pollinating blueberries, cranberries and tomatoes.

Significantly, the team found “declining populations have significantly higher infection levels of the microsporidian pathogen Nosema bombi“. The related Nosema ceranae has been associated with Colony Collapse Disorder, which has seriously affected honeybee numbers worldwide.

In 2007, Professor Dave Goulson of the UK’s Bumblebee Conservation Trust warned [2] that Britain had already lost three of its 50 bumblee species in the last 50 years, and 10 were “severely threatened”, while two were “teetering on the edge of extinction and could be gone in five to 10 years quite easily”.

While Goulson attributed this to “pesticides and agricultural intensification”, the US research now suggests a possible link with Nosema fungi.

Whatever the ultimate cause of the bumblebee’s woes, Cameron concluded: “This is a wake-up call that bumblebee species are declining not only in Europe, not only in Asia, but also in North America.”

Cameron’s findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract here [3]).

Links

1.       http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE7023P720110103?pageNumber=1

2.       http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/17/bumblebee_crisis/

3.       http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/03/1014743108.abstract

Source

This effect has been obvious to anyone with their eyes open for some years now. The disappearance of pollinators is clearly a potentially very serious issue indeed because of the possible effects on food production.

The puzzling thing about the interview with Professor Andrew Watkinson of the University of East Anglia (Uh-O, not those people who doctored their reports for the IPCC on ‘climate change’), was that during the interview it became clear that the most obvious candidate for causing the disappearance was not going to be investigated.

That candidate is the electromagnetic (microwave) ‘noise’ associated with mobile phones. This has become an all-pervasive, if invisible, reality in our environment.

I live on a main road in Croydon. We have lavender bushes in our small front garden. Not very long ago there were always, but always, numbers of bees buzzing round these plants at this time of year. However, for the past five years or so one never sees a honey bee and only very occasionally a bumble bee in the same garden.

Just before this change occurred the roof of an old Post Office building across the road was selected as a site for mobile phone masts. There are now two or three dozen masts on this roof (the roof is high and not all masts are visible from the street or even loft rooms).

The connection between the disappearance of the bees and the mobile phone masts is a very obvious one to make…….

….so why is this not amongst the issues being directly investigated by Professor Watkinson’s initiative?

WHY?

Here is a full list of projects funded:

Sustainable pollination services for UK crops
Dr Koos Biesmeijer, University of Leeds
Modelling systems for managing bee disease: the epidemiology of European Foulbrood
Dr Giles Budge, Food and Environment Research Agency
Investigating the impact of habitat structure on queen and worker bumblebees in the field
Dr Claire Carvell, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
An investigation into the synergistic impact of sublethal exposure to industrial chemicals on the learning capacity and performance of bees
Dr Chris Connolly, University of Dundee
Linking agriculture and land use change to pollinator populations
Professor Bill Kunin, University of Leeds
Urban pollinators: their ecology and conservation
Professor Jane Memmott, University of Bristol
Impact and mitigation of emergent diseases on major UK insect pollinators
Dr Robert Paxton, Queen’s University Belfast
Unravelling the impact of the mite Varroa destructor on the interaction between the honeybee and its viruses
Dr Eugene Ryabov, University of Warwick
Can bees meet their nutritional needs in the current UK landscape?
Dr Geraldine Wright, Newcastle University

To my simple mind it simply beggars belief that this team of funded truthseekers are studiously avoiding carrying out an investigation into the prime suspect.

What can possibly be going on here? Professor Watkinson says here that, “…….A lot of the problems in the past come from the fact that ecological research has been undertaken in a vacuum, divorced from political and governance issues of a country.”

Oh, really? You mean like your ‘climate change’ investigations? How comical is that?

So, is this research being funded by ‘Vodaphone’ or what?

I’d like to help out the good Professor a little by directing him to the following fairly random collection of articles on the subject:

Electromagnetic radiation from cellphones appears to alter the behaviour of bees, her experiments suggest and add fresh evidence to observations reported by a team of German researchers seven years ago.

Changes in honeybee behaviour and biology under the influence of cellphone radiations

..and here is an archive of similar articles.

Is identifying what is killing off the bees a bit like identifying suspects in the ‘War on Terror’?

Are our learned professors allowed to point the finger at absolutely anything provided it is not the guilty party?

……just asking.
Source: http://kevboyle.blogspot.com/2010/06/sherlock-holmesor-clouseau-if-i-were.html

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed “Mary Celeste syndrome” due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. “We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies,” said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS’s bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the “irresponsible use” of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE’s director-general, warned: “Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster.”

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “The AIA survey doesn’t give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be.”

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. “Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers,” he said, adding that a solution may be years away. “Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms.”

In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain’s estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers’ Association, said: “Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none.” Results from a survey of the association’s 15,000 members are expected this month.

John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers’ Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. “There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances,” he said. “We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them.”
Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government’s National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees’ survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the “alarming” decline of honeybees.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be “ring-fenced” for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse

Nearly ninety years ago Christian visionary and teacher Rudolph Steiner predicted the approach of the current crisis in bee keeping. Steiner gave a series of lectures on bees and ants to the workers at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland in the 1920’s. Among the audience was a professional beekeeper, Mr Müller, who contributed to these lectures in the form of insights and questions. However, he disagreed vehemently and showed no understanding when Steiner explained that the modern method of breeding queens (using the larvae of worker bees, a practice that had already been in use for about fifteen years) would have long-term detrimental effects, so grave that:

“A century later all breeding of bees will cease if only artificially produced bees are used (November 10). . . . It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other again in one hundred years, Mr Müller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point”.
http://www.beesfordevelopment.org/info/info/enviro/the-need-for-organic-beek.shtml

Similarly, when University Scientists placed a DECT phone near hives, both the weight of the honeycomb and the numbers of bees returning to the hive decreased. During one experiment, no bees at all returned. (2)

The common denominator here is that both WiFi and DECT transmit microwaves, common to mobile phones, TETRA, all similar devices and their transmitters. Microwaves are made up of both electric (like static) fields and magnetic (like magnets) fields.

Bees use the Earth’s magnetic field to help them both position themselves and navigate. To do this, they have magnetic materials in their heads, thoraxes and abdomens. (3) These particular magnetic materials can be re-magnetised by a stronger magnetic field (it is one way of making magnets). Once magnetised this stronger field will remain. Subsequently, their particular directional finding mechanisms can inadvertently misdirect them.

Let’s put this into some sort of perspective:

Honeybees have been shown to be sensitive to magnetic field differences of (1nT) one thousand millionth of one magnetic unit (the Tesla). (4) The Earth has both an horizontal and vertical magnetic field which the honeybee will both detect and use for positioning. Permitted magnetic field levels from transmitters are roughly 640 times greater than that of the bee’s most sensitive level; this is without considering any pulsing and accumulative effects from other nearby transmitters – e.g. mobile phones and WiFi. The Earth’s magnetic field is a static field, whereas the transmitters use an oscillating field; these fields have different properties. Imagine you are driving along a strange motorway and, instead of seeing one traffic sign, you see 640!

A problem humans living near transmitters often encounter is acoustic vibration (vibrating pipes, metallic conduits, even bed-springs), sometimes called resonance. Any constant rhythmic variation from a force (wind/electromagnetic/mechanical) can cause resonance in the atomic layout if the recipient/object is “tuned in” to that frequency.

Both the brain and the body of a honeybee can vibrate (resonate) from some of the frequencies used by the Communications Industry. Bees also “waggle-dance” to communicate within the hive; this “waggle-dance” sends vibrations used for communication throughout the honeycomb. (1)(5)

The frequency of vibrations for the honeybees’ “waggle-dance” are set at around 200-300 Hz (vibrations per second). This also is the pulsing frequency used by some mobile phone transmitters. (6) Hence, it is a viable proposition to assume that some hives near transmitters must be continually forced to vibrate, day and night, sending possible inappropriate signals.

The Varroa mite is often mentioned, along with other infestations or diseases, as a cause of the demise of bees. However, colonies of Varroa-resistant bees are also suffering. (7) As both Dr Carlo (8) and Alex Roslin (9) say:

Firstly – the problem is sudden and global, suggesting it is a global source; the coincidence here is the tripling of global microwave background radiation. Secondly – normally with a disease or virus the bees die within or near their hives, but now, in most reported cases, the bees are simply disappearing.

As one bee-keeper said on Spotlight BBC News from the Royal Cornwall County Show (6.6.08) “It is like a giant hoover just comes out of the sky and sucks them up”.

In other situations where bees have maintained their usual numbers, it is reported that their immune systems are collapsing (10) and/or their metabolic rate is suppressed. (2) This is not surprising. I believe the proof has been staring us in the face for years, but it has been overlooked.

When Universities embark upon lengthy research studies concerning microwave radiation and resulting cellular effects, they often use small mammals and/or invertebrates. The resulting data is written up and published. However, in all of the range of research I have studied, one critical conclusion has not been clearly identified: there is a direct, indisputable correlation between what is shown under experimental conditions and what is already happening within the natural environment. This is to say, if low-level microwave radiation has been found to suppress the immune system (using everyday levels) in the Laboratory, it will also suppress the immune system outside the Laboratory – in everyday living.

Exacerbating everything already mentioned is “HAARP”. Using approximately 180 transmitters spread over 30 acres, with a power rating of 3.6 million watts or more, this Alaskan super-transmitter could probably disorientate the best part of a country’s entire bee population if it were aimed in that direction, at an appropriate angle (to reflect from the ionosphere). (11) (12) “HAARP” may be the biggest transmitter in the World, but it is by no means the only super cluster of transmitters to be found. A look at any military site will show this.

Within my capacity as a scientific adviser, I receive many research papers from all over the World and I believe that what is happening to bees is also happening to other living things. I have a plethora of research on:

Butterflies, trees, plants, birds (including white stork, pigeons, sparrows and migratory birds), swamp life, frogs, bats, ants (who use the Earth’s magnetic field for direction) cattle and whales (”HAARP” can be used to communicate to submarines).

The common denominators are: all have suffered from the installation of nearby microwave transmitters (as used by the Mobile Phone Companies), and they either use the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, or they are exposed to ground-currents (or both).

It seems that this scenario follows the worldwide proliferation of the Communications Industry. I can no longer find a trouble-free country where mobile phones, WiFi, TETRA, blue-tooth, etc., are being used.

Bees use similar thinking mechanisms as humans – that is, they can memorise and organise.(13) (14) If a strong magnet is placed near a hive under construction, a strange-looking comb will be produced. (5)

The bee is this planet’s most sensitive proprioceptive animal (using Earth’s magnetism and vibration to feel, position and orientate). Clearly, if a cluster of magnetic-wave-transmitting antennae are introduced into the bees’ environment, it will try to find a more tolerable territory – possibly exhausting it’s energy and dying in the process.

Not only are we interfering with the physical properties of this planet, upon which our evolution has been based, but we are putting at risk the very foundations of our food chains and webs.

As a physicist and teacher of science, if I were asked to devise a mechanism to eliminate bees from the planet, I would suggest the deployment of communications transmitters, using pulsed (modulated) microwaves, which penetrate every part of this planet. There is absolutely nowhere the bees can go to escape such microwaves.

I believe that microwaves from the new communications systems are suppressing the immune responses of the bee, leaving them susceptible to infection, causing their magnetic orienting capability to become compromised.

There is a new law; it is called the European Habitat Directive, which states “It is illegal to harm protected species or disrupt their habitat”.

Barrie Trower
Scientific Adviser to: Radiation Research Trust (UK), H.E.S.E (International), Electrosensitivity (UK)

References

First reported in the Independent on Sunday 22.4.07
Can Electromagnetic Exposure Cause a Change in Behaviour? Studying possible non-thermal influences on honeybees. W.Harst, H Stever, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Institute of Educational Informatics. http://agbi.uni-landau.de/material_download/IAAS_2006.pdf

Definitive identification of magnetite nanoparticles in the abdomen of the honeybee Apis Mellifera. M Desail, P Gillis, Y Gassuin, Q A Pankhurst, D Hautot. Journal of Physics: Conference Series 17 (2005) 45-49. Institute of Physics Publishing. doi: 10. 1088/1742-6596 17.1.07 5th International Conference on Fine Particle Magnetism. http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1742-6596/17/1/007

E.M.F. Exposure. Animal Study – E.M.F. Radiation 08/03/05 http://members.aol.com/gotemf/emf/animals.htm

Honey Bee Senses. SETIAI 3.7.02 http://www.setai.com/archives/000063.htm/

J Nieh, J Toutz (2000); Behaviour-locked analysis reveals weak 200-300 Hz comb vibrations during honeybee waggle dance. The Journal of Experimental Biology. Vol. 203 pp 1573-1579. http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ymai/medline/record/MDLN.10769219

Decline of bees, UK and Worldwide. h.e.s.e-UK P6 18.4.07 http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/issues/nature.php?id=bees

Dr Carlo speaks: “Radiation is killing the bees, despite the Cellphone Industry’s disinformation”. 5.6.07 http://buergerwelle.de/pdf/radiation-is-killing-the-bees.htm

Are B.C.’s bee colonies the latest to die off? 16.8.07 http://www.straight.com/article-105742/are-b-c-s-bee-colonies-the-latest-to-die-off

ABC Online. The World Today – Australian bees in high demand. 7.5.07. Kim Landers http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2007/s1916354.htm

Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. Dr Nick Begich, Jeane Manning. Earthpulse Press. Anchorage. 1995.

Boosted HAARP signal could “slice through ionosphere”. Electromagnetic Hazard and Therapy 2001 Vol 11 nos 2-4 P9. Simon Best. http://www.em-hazard-therapy.com/back-issue.htm

How electromagnetic exposure can influence learning processes – Modelling effects of electromagnetic exposure on learning processes. Prof. H Stever et.al Institute of Educational Informatics, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. http://www.bienenarchiv.de/forschung/2004_lernprozesse/Electromagnetic%20Exposure_Learning%20Processes.doc.pdf

Dr Gerald Goldberg: Omega News 8.5.07 “To Bee or not To Bee. http://omega.twoday.net/stories/3695900/ Author of “Would you put your head in a microwave oven?” http://omega.twoday.net/stories/1604071/

Some (Variable) Data for Scientists
i) Ferromagnetic compounds within the bees’ head, thorax and abdomen produce hysteresis loops.
ii) These magnetic crystals vary in size.
iii) Earth’s horizontal field 1.87 x 10-5 T
Earth’s vertical field 4.36 x 10-5 T
Earth’s dipole 8.1 x 1022 Am
iv) Microwaves (as defined by International Standard)
300 MHz to 300 GHz
*Wavelength = 1m to 0.001m
*Length of bee = 2cm
*Mushroom shaped brain = a few millimetres (+)
*Distance between antennae – similar
Therefore: resonance can easily occur with some microwave frequencies.
v) Transmitters may use side-lobes to increase power.
vi) Interference patterns can occur with transmitters.
vii) Bees are known to be sensitive to 1nT and varying microwave frequencies.
viii) Honeycomb is within the resonance band.
ix) Microwaves are used because they are more penetrative to building materials than radio or TV frequencies.

Source: http://inthesenewtimes.com/2009/04/14/is-colony-collapse-the-price-of-emf-progress/

“Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at Bush farms, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

We’ve been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above…
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=974

They accused the Government of failing to invest in the research needed to stem diseases and parasites which are now thought to have destroyed one in three bee colonies over the past year.

The British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) has calculated that up to two billion bees succumbed to sickness between November 2007 and April 2008, with a similar number expected to be wiped out by the end of this winter.

It wants ministers to increase the £200,000 currently spent on the research of bee health to £8 million over the next five years.

The BBKA warns that unless the money is spent a cure will never be found – leading to the ultimate extinction of Britain’s honeybees.

Tim Lovett, President of the BBKA, said: “Bees are probably one of the most economically useful creatures on earth, pollinating a third of all we eat. They provide more than 50 per cent of pollination of wild plants on which birds and mammals depend. We must identify what is killing them and that means research.

“The increased funding we are asking for is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of pounds the Government has found for bank bail outs.”

Beekeepers will bring their plea for help to Gordon Brown’s doorstep on Wednesday, when they deliver a petition of 130,000 names to Downing Street calling for immediate Government action.

The BBKA carried out a nationwide survey of how many of Britain’s 274,000 bee colonies, each one with 20,000 bees, failed to survive last winter. It found that one in three had failed to make it through to spring, with the resulting loss of at least 1.8 billion bees.

The losses have been blamed on a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease that has also severely affected bee populations in America and Europe, along with a resistant form of the parasitic Varroa mite.

But the cost of the disease is not just in lost bees. The decline in honey bees is threatening the sustainability of home grown food. Bees pollinate more than 90 per cent of the flowering crops we rely on for food, thereby contributing more than an estimated £1 billion a year to the economy. The loss of 90,000 bee colonies last winter – each of which makes a £600 contribution to the agricultural economy each year – will have cost £54 million.

“The decline in honey bee numbers could have a catastrophic effect on food production, putting pollination of fruit and vegetables at risk,” said Mr Lovett. “This will have an inevitable knock on effect in the food supply chain.”

Furthermore, the rampant spread of the Varroa mite is hitting supplies of honey, with Rowse Honey – the UK’s leading manufacturer – warning that English honey will run out by Christmas. It has pledged £100,00 to support research into bee health.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was developing a bee health strategy for finding a cure for threats such as Varroa and has spent an extra £90,000 on investigating the increase in bee colony deaths.

In a statement it said: “The fact that funding for the bee health programme has been maintained at the same level over a number of years, when other programmes have faced major cuts, is a positive signal of the importance Government attaches to this area of work.

“Demands for substantially increased funding in the current financial climate are unrealistic, particularly when there is not yet any clear strategy on what is trying to be achieved in relation to bee health policy. What is most important is that we have a clear understanding of disease threats and how to tackle them.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333567/Plea-for-more-research-cash-as-two-billion-bees-die-from-rampant-disease.html

“Nobody worried all that much about the loss of a few animal species here and there until one day the bees came to their senses and decided to quit producing an unnaturally large surplus of honey for our benefit. One by one, they went on strike and flew off to parts unknown.”

Among the various mythologies of the apocalypse, fear of insect plagues has always loomed larger than fear of species loss. But this may change, as a strange new plague is wiping out our honey bees one hive at a time. It has been named Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, by the apiculturalists and apiarists who are scrambling to understand and hopefully stop it. First reported last autumn in the U.S., the list of afflicted countries has now expanded to include several in Europe, as well as Brazil, Taiwan, and possibly Canada. (1)(24)(29)

Apparently unknown before this year, CCD is said to follow a unique pattern with several strange characteristics. Bees seem to desert their hive or forget to return home from their foraging runs. The hive population dwindles and then collapses once there are too few bees to maintain it. Typically, no dead bee carcasses lie in or around the afflicted hive, although the queen and a few attendants may remain.

The defect, whatever it is, afflicts the adult bee. Larvae continue to develop normally, even as a hive is in the midst of collapse. Stricken colonies may appear normal, as seen from the outside, but when beekeepers look inside the hive box, they find a small number of mature bees caring for a large number of younger and developing bees that remain. Normally, only the oldest bees go out foraging for nectar and pollen, while younger workers act as nurse bees caring for the larvae and cleaning the comb. A healthy hive in mid-summer has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees.

Perhaps the most ominous thing about CCD, and one of its most distinguishing characteristics, is that bees and other animals living nearby refrain from raiding the honey and pollen stored away in the dead hive. In previously observed cases of hive collapse (and it is certainly not a rare occurrence) these energy stores are quickly stolen. But with CCD the invasion of hive pests such as the wax moth and small hive beetle is noticeably delayed. (2)

Among the possible culprits behind CCD are: a fungus, a virus, a bacterium, a pesticide (or combination of pesticides), GMO crops bearing pesticide genes, erratic weather, or even cell phone radiation. “The odds are some neurotoxin is what’s causing it,” said David VanderDussen, a Canadian beekeeper who recently won an award for developing an environmentally friendly mite repellent. Then again, according to Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the top bee specialist with the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture, “We are pretty sure, but not certain, that it is a contagious disease.” Their comments notwithstanding, most scientists are unwilling to say they understand the problem beyond describing its outward appearance. Perhaps a government or UN task force would be a good idea right about now. (3)(25)

According to an FAQ published on March 9, 2007 by the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group based primarily at Penn State University, the first report of CCD was made in mid-November 2006 by Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper overwintering his 2900 hives in Florida. Only 1000 survived. Soon other migratory beekeepers reported similar heavy losses. Subsequent reports from beekeepers painted a picture of a marked increase in die-offs, which led to the present concern among bee experts. (2)

The name CCD was invented by vanEngelsdorp and his colleagues at Penn State. It reflects their somewhat medical view of the situation. The BBC suggested in a sub-headline to a story on CCD that the problem would be more aptly named the “vanishing bee syndrome.” This proposal may have merit, considering how mass opinion polls influence policy these days. (4)

News of the CCD problem hit all of the major media networks in February 2006. A widely run Associated Press story said reports of unusual colony deaths have come in from at least 22 states, and that some commercial beekeepers reported losing more than half of their bees. The same story informed that autopsies of CCD bees showed higher than normal levels of fungi, bacteria and other pathogens, as well as weakened immune systems. It appears as if the bees have got the equivalent of AIDS. (5)

An April 15, 2007 story in The Independent reported that the west coast of the U.S. may have lost 60% of its commercial bee population, with an even greater 70% loss on the east coast. The same story said that one of London’s biggest bee-keepers recently reported 23 of his 40 hives empty. But, the U.K. Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was quoted as saying, “There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK.” (6)

One must wonder where the truth lies considering the level of sensationalism prevalent in the British press. Case in point, this same story (among several others, to be fair) attributes a juicy but dubious quote to Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.” (6)(7)

Einstein, in all likelihood, never said that, but if he did, it is a justifiable exaggeration. Bees certainly are important, and it will get ugly if we lose them. “It’s not the staples,” said Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. “If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that’s what it would be like” without honeybee pollination. (8)

The beekeeping industry underpins the American agricultural industry to the tune of $US 15 billion or more. The picture is similar in many countries, especially in the West. Honey bees are used commercially to pollinate about one third of crop species in the U.S. This includes almonds, broccoli, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, and strawberries. Other insects, including other kinds of bees, may be used to pollinate some of these crops, but only bees are reliable on a commercial scale. If the bees go, we will see a change for the worse at our local supermarkets. (1)

Of course everyone is hoping for a quick solution to appear, and tantalizing reports have emerged. Recent military research at Edgewood Chemical Biological Center claims to have narrowed the likely cause of CCD to a virus, a micro-parasite or both. This work used a new technology called the Integrated Virus Detection System (IVDS), which can rapidly screen samples for pathogens.

These virus laden samples were sent to UC San Francisco, where a suspicious fungus was also discovered in them, suggesting the possibility that the fungus is either an immunosuppressive factor or the fatal pathogen that kills the bees. These “highly preliminary” findings were announced in an April 25, 2007 Los Angeles Times story with the headline, “Experts may have found what’s bugging the bees.” The story called it “the first solid evidence pointing to a potential cause,” and even noted that “there is reason to believe this fungus can be controlled by the antibiotic fumagillin.” (10) (25)

One wonders why the trade name of a pesticide made it into such a story, but the presence of pathogens in bees should come as no surprise to anyone who has been keeping up to date on bee health. Nearly all beekeepers use a variety of chemical and pesticide treatments on their hive boxes out of sheer necessity. A pantheon of mites, fungi and microbes prey on bees. These pests are predictably developing resistance to the chemical treatments we use to fight them. If the new IVDS results are conclusive and lead to a silver bullet solution, that will be wonderful, but such a simple model of CCD is unlikely to be the real key to saving our prime pollinators. (9)

It is worth noting that, while CCD has been presented to the media as a sudden new problem, these same theories about causative infections have already been presented to explain previous bee die-offs, especially those in the spring of 2005, which were attributed to the now infamous varroa mite, a.k.a. “vampire mite,” which began infecting American honey bees in 1987. (31)

About the size of a pinhead, and with eight legs, it feeds on the blood of adult bees like a tick, and even worse, it also eats the bee larvae. Varroa is the bane of beekeepers everywhere except China, where it originated, and the honey bees have local resistance. In a case of sadly ironic timing, Hawaii just reported its first case of varroa a few weeks ago. (26)

LiveScience senior writer, Robert Roy Britt wrote in a May, 2005 story about the mite: “Up to 60 percent of hives in some regions have been wiped out. Entire colonies can collapse within two weeks of being infested. North Carolina fears it is on the verge of an agricultural crisis. No state is immune.” (11)

A Science Daily story dated May 18, 2005, and sourced to Penn State, purported to explain why varroa was so bad. Entitled, “Bee Mites Suppress Bee Immunity, Open Door for Viruses and Bacteria,” it explained research into levels of ‘deformed wing virus,’ a mutagenic pathogen that is believed to persist in bee populations because it makes guard bees more aggressive. Bees of a given hive normally carry low levels of this virus, but the Penn State researchers found that virus levels shot sky high during secondary infections if, and only if, the bees also had varroa mites. It should be clear why the varroa mite is on everyone’s list of things to examine in the fight against CCD. (12)

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies. (13)

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com. Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells. (14)

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

“We’ve been pushing them too hard,” Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. “And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances.” Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above. (24)

This conclusion is not surprising, considering how the practice of beekeeping has been made ultra-efficient in a competitive world run by free market forces. Unlike many crops, honey is not given subsidy protection in the United States despite the huge importance of the bee industry to food production. The FDA has hardly moved at all to protect American producers from “honey pretenders” – products containing little or no honey that are imported and sold with misleading packaging. Rare is the beekeeper that does not need pesticide treatments and other techniques falling under the rubric of ‘factory farming.’ (15)

You might be justifiably stunned to know how little money is being thrown at this problem. A January 29, 2007 Penn State press release (just before CCD hit the big networks) stated: “The beekeeping industry has been quick to respond to the crisis. The National Honey Board has pledged $13,000 of emergency funding to the CCD working group. Other organizations, such as the Florida State Beekeepers Association, are working with their membership to commit additional funds.” A quick look at CostofWar.com will tell you that that $13,000 buys about 4 seconds of war at the going rate. Remember, these same scientists had presented the world with a similar threat level two years ago. Apparently they were ignored. (16)

Anyway, breathe easy; Congress has begun talking up the concept of getting involved. On April 26, the Senate Agriculture Committee, perhaps not trusting CNN, heard from representatives of the beekeeping industry just how important a matter this is. Committee Chairman, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the bee decline should be part of the current discussion of a new farm bill. “The U.S. honey industry is facing one of the most serious threats ever from colony collapse disorder,” he stated. “The bee losses associated with this disorder are staggering and portend equally grave consequences for the producers of crops that rely on honeybees for pollination. These crops include many specialty crops and alfalfa, so viable honey bee colonies are critically important across our entire food and agriculture sector.” (17)

Alfalfa? We should be worried because CCD threatens alfalfa and other specialty crops? He means apples and stuff we can assume, because Mark Brady, president of the American Honey Producers Association, had informed the committee that “honey bees pollinate more than 90 food, fiber and seed crops. In particular, the fruits, vegetables and nuts that are cornerstones of a balanced and healthy diet are especially dependent on continued access to honey bee pollination.” Science is always a hard sell. (17)

Even before that committee meeting, on April 16, Senator Clinton wrote a letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Mike Johanns, asking “that you provide us (a bipartisan group of senators) with an expedited report on the immediate steps that the Department is and will be taking to determine the causes of CCD, and to develop appropriate countermeasures for this serious disorder. In particular, we ask for a specific explanation of how the Department plans to utilize its existing resources and capabilities, including its four Agricultural Research Service honeybee research labs, and to work with other public and private sector enterprises in combating CCD.” These are fine questions indeed. (28)

Bees are finely tuned machines, much more robot-like than your average species. They operate pretty much like the Borg of Star Trek fame. A honey bee cannot exist as an individual, and this is why some biologists speak of them as super-organisms. They are sensitive barometers of environmental pollution, quite useful for monitoring pesticide, radionuclide, and heavy metal contamination. They respond to a vide variety of pollutants by dying or markedly changing their behavior. Honeybees’ stores of pollen and honey are ideal for measuring contamination levels. Some pesticides are exceptionally harmful to honey bees, killing individuals before they can return to the hive. (18)

Not surprisingly, the use of one or more new pesticides was, and likely remains, on the short list of likely causes of CCD. But more than pesticides could potentially be harming bees. Some scientists suspect global warming. Temperature plays an integral part in determining mass behavior of bees. To mention just one temperature response, each bee acts as a drone thermostat, helping cool or warm the hive whenever it isn’t engaged in some other routine.

As you might expect, rising temperatures in springtime cause bees to become active. Erratic weather patterns caused by global warming could play havoc with bees’ sensitive cycles. A lot of northeastern U.S. beekeepers say a late cold snap is what did the damage to them this year. Bill Draper, a Michigan beekeeper, lost more than half of his 240 hives this spring, but it wasn’t his worst year for bee losses, and he doesn’t think CCD caused it. He thinks CCD might stem from a mix of factors from climate change to breeding practices that put more emphasis on some qualities, like resistance to mites, at the expense of other qualities, like hardiness. (32)

According to Kenneth Tignor, the state apiarist of Virginia, another possibility with CCD is that the missing bees left their hives to look for new quarters because the old hives became undesirable, perhaps from contamination of the honey. This phenomenon, known as absconding, normally occurs only in the spring or summer, when there is an adequate food supply. But if they abscond in the autumn or winter, as they did last fall in the U.S., Tignor says the bees are unlikely to survive. (19)

A bee colony is a fine-tuned system, and a lot could conceivably go wrong. This is presumably why some scientists suspect cell phone radiation is the culprit behind CCD. This theory holds that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bee navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way home. German research has shown that bees behave differently near power lines. Now, a preliminary study has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. The head researcher said the result might provide a “hint” of a possible cause. Maybe they should check to see if beekeepers suddenly started using BlackBerrys in 2004.

It should be noted that the CCD Working Group at Penn State believes cell phones are very unlikely to be causing the problem. Nor are they interested in the possibility that GMO crops are responsible. Although GMO crops can contain genes to produce pesticides, some of which may harm bees, the distribution of CCD cases does not appear to correlate with GMO crop plantings. (20)

Honey bees are not native to North America or Europe. They are thought to come from Southeast Asia, although some recent research based on genomic studies indicates that their origin is actually in Africa. (21) Regardless, they represent only seven of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. Apis mellifera, the most commonly domesticated species of honey bee, was only the third insect to have its genome mapped. These useful, and very prevalent, bees are commonly referred to as either Western honey bees or European honey bees. Although it is a non-native species, the honey bee has fit in well in America. It is the designated state insect of fifteen states, which surely reflects its usefulness.

Apis mellifera comes in a wide variety of sub-species adapted to different climates and geographies. Behavior, color and anatomy can be quite different from one sub-species to another, the infamous killer bees being a case in point. The Native Americans called the honey bee “the white man’s fly.” It was introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s, and soon escaped into the wild, spreading as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Thus, there are significant numbers of feral hives in North America, though most of the honey bees you will see are working bees.

But you may not have even seen one for a while. These days, many gardeners are discovering that they must hand pollinate garden vegetables, thanks to widespread pollinator decline. It is more than fair to say that the extreme importance of honey bees as pollinators today stems from the fact that native pollinators are in decline almost everywhere.

The pollination of the American almond crop, which occurs in February and March, is the largest managed pollination event in the world, requiring more than one third of all the managed honey bees in the United States. Massive numbers of hives are transported for this and other key pollinations, including apples and blueberries. Honey bees are not particularly efficient pollinators of blueberries, but they are used anyway. We depend on managed honey bees because we are addicted to a monoculture-based managed agricultural sector.

There has been criticism that media coverage of the CCD story, perhaps in its quest to achieve the requisite ‘balance,’ has been too rosy. Some stories note that other pollinators are more significant than honey bees for many crops. But these stories seldom go on to tell how other pollinators are facing problems too. The BBC recently reported on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which is currently enlisting the public’s help to catalogue bumblebee populations. The story noted that several of the U.K.’s 25 species are endangered, and three have gone extinct in recent years. (22)

Another recent story in The Register stated that several U.K. bumblebee species are “heading inexorably for extinction.” According to scientists, the process is caused by “pesticides and agricultural intensification” which could have a “devastating knock-on effect on agriculture.” The disappearance of wildflower species has also been implicated in the British bumblebee decline. (23)(20)

Bumblebees are, however, doing well in one region, Neath Port Talbot, which was declared the bumblebee capital of Wales in 2004 after experts found 15 different species thriving there. This is almost certainly because the local council allows roadside verges to become overgrown with “weeds” and wildflowers. (20)

Surprise — it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. The long-term solution is a return to a more natural ecological order. This interpretation needs to be conveyed when mainstream media tell the CCD story.

Of course, with all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides and transit to stress out our hardworking honey bees, they are in peril. Even if some silver bullet saves us from CCD, it is more than obvious that we need to pay more respect to bees, and to nature. This truth may be generalized to most facets of our agricultural existence; the bees are just a warning. Wherever you look, pests are getting stronger as the life forms we depend on get weaker. Adding more chemicals isn’t going to help for much longer.

Beekeepers are a busy and underpaid lot, and we should pay more heed to their services. Even now, with the vanishing bee story headlining on major networks, government players appear to have their eyes elsewhere. “There used to be a lot more regulation than there is today,” says Arizona beekeeper Victor Kaur. “People import bees and bring new diseases into the country. One might be colony collapse disorder.” (30)

“The bees are dying, and I think people are to blame,” is how Kaur puts it simply. “Bee keeping is much more labor intensive now than it was 15 years ago. It’s a dying profession,” he eulogizes. “The average age of a beekeeper is 62, and there are only a couple of thousand of us left. There are only about 2.5 million hives left. …It’s too much work.” (30)

If CCD proves to be more than a one-time seasonal fluke, the job of beekeeping just got a lot harder. Pollination can’t be outsourced, although it isn’t too difficult to imagine fields full of exploited underclass laborers pollinating crops by Q-tip. Let’s hope we never have to go there.

Perhaps a sensible reaction to the information summarized in this short article would be to write a letter to your government leaders. Insist that they immediately allocate significant funding to combat CCD using a variety of approaches. This must include ecological approaches such as wildflower renewal. Furthermore, insist that our few remaining beekeepers be given the support they deserve and desperately need at this important juncture. Humanity cannot afford to ignore this battle. It’s not science; it’s common sense.

References
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
Wikipedia
2 http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/FAQ/FAQCCD.pdf
FAQ’s Colony Collapse Disorder (PDF), Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, CCD Working Group
See also: http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/index.html
3 http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Alarm_sounded_over_US_honey_bee_die-off
Alarm sounded over US honey bee die-off
Wikinews, February 10, 2007
4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6438373.stm
Vanishing bees threaten US crops
By Matt Wells, March 11, 2007
5 http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/ap_070211_bee_disease.html
Mystery Ailment Strikes Honeybees
By Genaro C. Armas, Associated Press, February 11, 2007
6 http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece
Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross, April 15, 2007
7 http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?p=137300
Thread on dubious Einstein quote.
8 http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/04/22/vanishing.bees.reut/index.html
Vanishing honeybees mystify scientists
Reuters, April 22, 2007
9 http://www.bushfarms.com/beespests.htm
Enemies of Bees
by Michael Bush
10 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070426100117.htm
Scientists Identify Pathogens That May Be Causing Global Honey-Bee Deaths
Source: Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, April 26, 2007
11 http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050517_bee_mite.html
Bees Wiped Out by Cascade of Deadly Events
By Robert Roy Britt, May 17, 2005
12 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050517110843.htm
Bee Mites Suppress Bee Immunity, Open Door For Viruses And Bacteria
Source: Penn State, May 18, 2005
13 http://eepicheep.gnn.tv/B21650
Labchuk’s email is reproduced in comments section; authorship was confirmed by this writer
14 http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm
Bush Bees Website
15 http://agriculture.senate.gov/Hearings/
Regional Farm Bill field hearing: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, July 21, 2006
16 http://www.aginfo.psu.edu/News/07Jan/HoneyBees.htm
Honey bee die-off alarms beekeepers, crop growers and researchers
Penn State press release Jan 29, 2007
17 http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=12512
Colony collapse disorder is reducing U.S. bee population
By Zena McFadden, Medill News Service, April 26, 2007
18 http://www.apimondia.org/apiacta/articles/2003/porrini.pdf
Honey Bees and Bee Products as Monitors of the Environmental Contamination (PDF)
Porrini et al., University of Bologna,
In Apiacta, the journal of the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations
( http://www.beekeeping.com/apimondia/apiacta_us.htm )
19 http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-04-27-voa3.cfm
Taiwan Is Latest Country Stung by Vanishing Honey Bees
By Jessica Berman, VOA News, April 27, 2007
20 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_west/3747337.stm
Secret of bumblebee capital
BBC, 25 May, 2004
21 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061211220927.htm
Research Upsetting Some Notions About Honey Bees
Source: Texas A&M University – Agricultural Communications, December 29, 2006
22 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/6558973.stm
Bid to halt bumblebee decline
BBC, April 16, 2007
23 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/17/bumblebee_crisis/
UK’s bumblebees face extinction
By Lester Haines
24 http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/insects/
In Depth Insects: The plight of the honeybee
CBC News Online, Updated April 12, 2007
25 http://www.thestar.com/article/203818
Why are Niagara’s bees dying?
By Dana Flavelle, Toronto Star, April 17, 2007
26 http://tinyurl.com/2wnyjv
Bee mite found on Oahu
Apr 12, 2007 by Katherine Fisher, Hawaii Health Guide.com
27 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/
Experts may have found what’s bugging the bees
By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II, LA Times, April 26, 2007
28 http://tinyurl.com/246o9v
Senator Clinton Calls on USDA to Respond
All American Patriots, April 20, 2007
29 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/26/taiwan_bee_mystery/
Taiwan mislays millions of honeybees
By Lester Haines, The Register, April 26, 2007
30 http://tinyurl.com/39a2wk
Collapsing colonies
By Joanne C. Twaddell, The Daily Courier, April 23, 2007
31 http://tinyurl.com/343f8b
A Comparison of Russian and Italian Honey Bees (PDF)
By David R. Tarpy, NC State University, and Jeffrey Lee, Beekeeper, Mebane NC
32 http://tinyurl.com/37ax5j
Tiers bees avoid deadly disease
By Salle E. Richards, Elmira Star-Gazette, April 3, 2007
Source: http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3063/Please_Lord_not_the_bees

Also see:
Where are the bees?

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?id=6456

Are GM Crops Killing Bees?
www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6234

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6381

“I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees.

They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.”

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site, where Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

“Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites.

I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter.

If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size?

It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?”

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

We’ve been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above…
http://bushfarms.com/bees.htm

Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have.

Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 per cent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being “stuck with grains and water,” said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA’s bee and pollination program.

“This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” Hackett said. While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies — or about five times the normal winter losses – because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, North America’s honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature’s “workhorse – and we took it for granted.”

“We’ve hung our own future on a thread,” Wilson, author of the book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth told The Associated Press.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/world/story/3957484p-4569869c.html

One reason I’ve enjoyed the display is that I know these bright-yellow-flowered plants, which bloom early and continue blooming well into fall, are popular with honeybees. Given all the problems the bees have been having with insecticides, destruction of natural habitat, and the like, I’m happy to give them some help.

I remember that when I was a kid growing up in rural Connecticut, getting stung by a honeybee was almost a weekly occurrence that went along with going barefoot in the lawn. (My parents liked dandelions, too.)

Today, though, you could walk all day barefoot around my yard and never get stung. There’s not a honeybee to be seen.

I walked two miles recently around the neighborhood, past plenty of dandelions, including through a feral field full of them, and didn’t see a single bee. Not one. This is particularly strange because in the first warm days of spring, the hives are usually out in full force trying to replenish supplies after a long winter and in anticipation of a big period of egg-laying and hatching of larvae.

And it’s not just dandelions.

Behind my house is a wild cherry tree. A few days ago, it was in full bloom. Ordinarily, this would be an occasion for a true bee fiesta. The tree at this time in prior years was virtually a cloud of buzzing insects, all zipping from flower to flower.

This year, there was not a bee to be seen on the entire tree.

This is beyond strange. It’s downright scary.

When you consider that perhaps half the plants in nature depend upon pollinators like bees to reproduce, you have to wonder what a future without bees holds – not just for the animals that live on those plants, but for human beings.

And it’s not just honeybees that are missing. Honeybees, after all, are immigrants from Europe, and the Americas survived quite nicely without them before their arrival with the colonists. But the native bees – ground bees and bumblebees, for example – are gone, too. The only bees I’ve seen since the spring began are wood bees – large, clumsy-looking, bumblebee-like creatures that bore neat circular holes into the wood of the house and lay their eggs in solitary nests. Thank heavens for them, or there wouldn’t be a bee on my property.

But even several hundred wood bees can hardly compensate for the total absence of other pollinators.

What’s happening here?

There are a lot of possible culprits: climate change, ubiquitous microwave radiation, overuse of herbicides and pesticides, stress, and lowered immunity to fungal, viral, bacterial and mite infections, or perhaps a combination of all of the above.

My feeling, though, is one of dark foreboding.

When something as basic as bees vanishes from the scene as quickly as this, you know we’re in Big Trouble.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20070426_No_bees__Not_just_strange__but_scary.html

Also see:
Are GM Crops Killing Bees?

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6234

The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein’s apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing — something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers’ association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When “bee populations disappear without a trace,” says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because “most bees don’t die in the beehive.” There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.

Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that “a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar,” is killing the bees.

Politicians, until now, have shown little concern for such warnings or the woes of beekeepers. Although apiarists have been given a chance to make their case — for example in the run-up to the German cabinet’s approval of a genetic engineering policy document by Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer in February — their complaints are still largely ignored.

Even when beekeepers actually go to court, as they recently did in a joint effort with the German chapter of the organic farming organization Demeter International and other groups to oppose the use of genetically modified corn plants, they can only dream of the sort of media attention environmental organizations like Greenpeace attract with their protests at test sites.

But that could soon change. Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.

In an article in its business section in late February, the New York Times calculated the damage US agriculture would suffer if bees died out. Experts at Cornell University in upstate New York have estimated the value bees generate — by pollinating fruit and vegetable plants, almond trees and animal feed like clover — at more than $14 billion.

Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a “CCD Working Group” to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential “AIDS for the bee industry.”

One thing is certain: Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that’s left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found — neither in nor anywhere close to the hives. Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Working Group, told The Independent that researchers were “extremely alarmed,” adding that the crisis “has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry.”

It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees’ death is accompanied by a set of symptoms “which does not seem to match anything in the literature.”

In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi — a sign, experts say, that the insects’ immune system may have collapsed.

The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. “This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them,” says Cox-Foster.

Walter Haefeker, the German beekeeping official, speculates that “besides a number of other factors,” the fact that genetically modified, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the United States could be playing a role. The figure is much lower in Germany — only 0.06 percent — and most of that occurs in the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. Haefeker recently sent a researcher at the CCD Working Group some data from a bee study that he has long felt shows a possible connection between genetic engineering and diseases in bees.

The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called “Bt corn” on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a “toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations.” But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a “significantly stronger decline in the number of bees” occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.

According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have “altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry — or perhaps it was the other way around. We don’t know.”

Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period.

Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. “Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research,” says the professor, “and those who are interested don’t have the money.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,473166,00.html

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Nearly ninety years ago Christian visionary and teacher Rudolph Steiner predicted the approach of the current crisis in bee keeping. Steiner gave a series of lectures on bees and ants to the workers at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland in the 1920’s. Among the audience was a professional beekeeper, Mr Müller, who contributed to these lectures in the form of insights and questions. However, he disagreed vehemently and showed no understanding when Steiner explained that the modern method of breeding queens (using the larvae of worker bees, a practice that had already been in use for about fifteen years) would have long-term detrimental effects, so grave that:

“A century later all breeding of bees will cease if only artificially produced bees are used (November 10). . . . It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other again in one hundred years, Mr Müller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point”.
http://www.beesfordevelopment.org/info/info/enviro/the-need-for-organic-beek.shtml