All the bees in the world could die and it wouldn’t make a huge difference. Short term disturbances in the agricultural industry as other insects and animals take over the job. Honey producers and commercial beekeepers suffer, but that’s about it.
Also, they aren’t all going to die, so there’s no reason to worry.
For cyclical collapses? That’s in the link from his very post that you’re criticizing.
I don’t know anything about honeybees aside from these occasional news articles, and found Chief Pedant’s linking to a government agency that does research on the matter to be informative and helpful. It also wasn’t a link to an “article” it was a link to a public agency that contained links to many more pieces of information. It also says right at the beginning that there is no scientific consensus for the cause, so I find it strange you’re stating the conclusion is “pesticides” when that isn’t what the ARS is saying.
In 5 years someone will be a billionaire after inventing self-replicating mechano-bees.
Since it is from a government website there should be no issue with copying a large passage in full, but considering how badly Latro misrepresented what the Agricultural Research Service was saying I thought it important to paste in a copy of the relevant text:
a beekeeper friend of mine says everyone he knows has lost almost all their hives. But not all, and they are swapping queen bees around the country to try to hurry the process of ‘breeding’ a strain able to survive whatever it is that is the culprit.
I gave the cite in my post, at the end: http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572
I cannot determine why you think the article I referenced concludes definitively that the problem is pesticides.
From the article I cited:
*This is not the first time that beekeepers are being faced with unexplained losses. The scientific literature has several mentions of honey bee disappearances—in the 1880s, the 1920s, and the 1960s. While the descriptions sound similar to CCD, there is no way to know for sure if those problems were caused by the same agents as CCD.
There have also been unusual colony losses before. In 1903, in the Cache Valley in Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to an unknown “disappearing disease” after a “hard winter and a cold spring.” More recently, in 1995-96, Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53 percent of their colonies without a specific identifiable cause…
While a number of potential causes have been championed by a variety of researchers and interest groups, none of them have stood up to detailed scrutiny. Every time a claim is made of finding a “smoking gun,” further investigation has not been able to make the leap from a correlation to cause-and-effect. Other times, not even a scientific correlation has been demonstrated in the study claiming to have found “the cause” of CCD.
Researchers have concluded that no one factor is the cause of CCD…
In the Wired article cited in the OP, the comments by Francesco Nazzi at the end are worth a look.
But perhaps it’s more exciting to suspect incompetent politicians, unwilling to give anyone authority to act, in the back pocket of Big Industry. Unfortunately, those kinds of conspiracy thrills don’t typically lead to resolution, although they make for better movies and whatnot.
It is the bit at the end, usually where you find conclusions.
Of course the article is careful in its wording, but the conclusion shows pretty clear in their advice to the public.
They are looking at four major areas of research to explain CCD and giving recommendations most likely based on the only area that beekeepers can make any meaningful changes. That isn’t the same as them attributing CCD to pesticides.
Yes, we will just offer occupational training to mosquitos and Cornish hens so they can become pollinators.
Seriously, do you have any knowledge about how commercial pollination works and the extent to which is used by modenr agricultural industries?
Stranger
Okay, my bad, first I’ve heard of it.
Yay, someone in Udine finally weighs in.
But then Nazzi goes on to say:
So much for the obligatory dissenting view..
True, because only a handful out of some 20 kinds of neonicotinoid pesticides are being bannned and companies have already just switched to using neonicotinoid pesticides in their products, that aren’t on the list.
Another way to by-pass the ban is creating new types of NP that simply aren’t on any list yet.
Also the neonicotinoid pesticides don’t break down very easily. They remain inside plants and the soil for quite some time.
So, no the European ban is not going to yield immediate results.
:rolleyes:
I said there would be disruptions. We’ll find another way to do it, just like we found replacements for tin.
And the factual basis for this statement, other than a far-flung analogy, is…?
Stranger
Far-flung, pah. How can you so easily dismiss the clear similarities between honey bees and tin? They’re practically identical!
Question: I seem to recall being told that the honeybees we have now in the U.S. were imports from Europe and that honeybees were nonexistent in the Americas before European settlement. Does this have any truth to it?
I feel the bees have lost vigour and strength due to inbreeding.(edit to add, yes they are imported imported from europe, or were, due to high honey making capacity, nowadays, bred in labs etc…you can buy a queen through the mail with some workers for her too!! Make more honey than you can use!!!)
Perhaps selection for honey production rather than strength…?
I’ve raised a few bee hives, its not easy, and when things go bad, chemicals and medicines are tossed around to solve things, which, similar to overuse of anti-biotics, may make the problem worse.
anecdotally: This year, bees here in SoCal, seem to be “ok”…many reports of hives in homes, and swarms looking for new nest areas (a good sign) and local fruit trees outside commercial areas (my house) are BUZZING with bees.
Whatever happened to that invasion of the “dreaded” africanized bees? I had heard that they would double the honey output, but were much more difficult to work with, due to agressivness, and thats why the industry was concerned. And the potential to be stung to death also, (people and pets) which has been happening abit this year as well.
missed the edit: I was only talking about the european honey bee, there are something like 4000 native north american bee species.
Very interesting! Are the *native *N.A. bees also endangered? If the imported European honey bees died out here, could the native ones do the necessary pollination? Do the European ones produce more or better honey?
You’re really contributing to ignorance here. The cites that have been presented in this thread that capture scientific consensus indicate there is not a current known reason for CCD. There are several suspected causes, but none have a perfect correlation with colonies that undergo CCD. The scientific consensus then seems to be that it’s a complicated issue and there is no clear idea as to why it is happening at all. So the idea that there even needs to be an “obligatory dissenting view” is a false one. There isn’t a scientific consensus on what’s causing CCD. It looks like there are several areas of concern that would indicate trying some things differently than we have in the past, but it doesn’t appear there is any successful methods anyone has come up with to stop CCD.
It also appears at least possible that it’s a result of some cyclical process (perhaps there is some disease that has a cyclical pattern in honeybees for example) that could be at play indicating there may be nothing we can do about it. It could also be the result of us taking a non-native bee species and screwing up their natural reproductive process so much we may have created a less viable species from what it otherwise would have been. But either way, this isn’t like AGW versus AGW denialists. There’s no scientific consensus here and you’re presenting a false claim that there is.
I find it interesting neonicotinoid pesticides appear to have been specifically developed because they were tested as less harmful to honeybees than pesticides used in the 80s. While that may end up not being true, there is a long history of honeybees and pesticide exposure dating back many generations. Considering the imperfect correlation between neonicotinoid exposure and CCD I would not be surprised if CCD is a collection of stressors on the honeybee population causing greater than average colony die-off. [I also found it interesting the “normal/acceptable” die off range was 15%, so apparently beekeeping even in the best of times involves significant die off of colonies every year.]
From the Agricultural Research Service’s page on CCD:
It looks like the almond industry in America would basically be destroyed, and while some low level growth of other flowering products would probably be able to continue with natural pollinators it would probably be a niche industry and not the large scale agriculture we’ve created. The scale of pollination efforts means native/natural approaches simply would not be able to fill the void.
Not enough bees, eh? I think I know who can solve this problem…