When Charles Kuralt (remember him?) was still hosting CBS Sunday Morning I recall, as a youngster, being devastated by his report that wintering Monarch Butteflies had been decimated by an unseasonably cold Central American winter and the calamities that would be visited on midwestern crop yields.
I’m sorry that some bees are dying off but I think we could focus our “we’re all going to die!!!” energies elsewhere.
Groman wrote:
“So, the way I understand it, the thing actually dying in this situation is the hive, as a collective. The bees themselves are missing, presumed dead. Of course bees that are missing are most likely dead, but it seems that from a scientific point of view they’re still mostly unaccounted for, rather than known dead . However unlikely it might be, could it be some sort of a bizarre swarming behavior rather than mass death?”
Honey bees cannot survive away from the hive, and they are most definitely NOT swarming; swarming involves a large number of workers all at once taking off along with the queen, and leaving a new queen and most of the workers behind. In CCD, there is no mass exodus - just lots of individual workers never coming back, until the hive is almost completely empty. The presumption that they are dead is a pretty safe one.
“Do bees ever join other existing colonies (to the best of my knowledge the answer is no, but I’m not an expert)?”
It can happen, though rarely, assuming (1) the two colonies are REALLY physically close to one another, and (2) the bees in those colonies are very closely-related, and therefore have similar chemical profiles; honey bees are incredibly sensitive to those compounds that constitute the “body odor” of another bee (though not all these compounds are volatile), and they do not take kindly to strangers.
To address some of the other comments from other people, and some of the division in the scientific community:
Regarding whether this is a very recent phenomenon or a very old one, that is a significant difference in opinion; and my own OPINION is that there is not enough evidence to suggest that colony collapse is NOT the same thing we have seen for decades. I find it telling that many of the people promoting theories like pesticides, or GM crops, are those with political axes to grind, or personal assets (including research funding) at stake. There are relatively few comments from people in the scientific community who are genuinely neutral third-party observers, and that does tend to make it hard to tell who is saying what, and WHY. No, it would not surprise me if systemic pesticides were playing a role here, but it WOULD surprise me if that’s all there was to it, and I don’t honestly believe that even if we banned every systemic pesticide tomorrow, that we would never see CCD again - because from what I can see, CCD existed before these pesticides were ever invented. We just didn’t call it CCD then, and it didn’t affect as many beekeepers as it did this past year.
Finally, regarding the concept of “stress” and what it might mean - specifically, the question as to why or how different sources of stress might lead to similar symptoms. It is crucial to understand that science advances primarily through hypotheses that can be tested via controlled experiments; stress on honey bee colonies is not the sort of hypothesis that lends itself to testing. If only it were that simple, there might not be any mystery at all here to unravel. However, the basic phenomenon underlying CCD - workers leaving and not coming back - is itself such a simple thing, based on so few neurons in a bee’s brain, that it is not hard to imagine that there are many ways to interfere with this process. In principle, it really shouldn’t take much to addle a bee’s wits (if addling is what is involved), or perhaps whatever internal signal a bee’s brain receives that tells it “You know, it’s time to go off and die now!” can be triggered by a number of different things. That’s not the kind of thing we are ever likely to be able to pin down using the scientific method in the usual sense. People expect science to give definitive answers, but not all of science can live up to those standards. Unlike physics, biology involves a LOT of irreproducible phenomena, and incredible amounts of noise and chaos in every system - there’s a lot of biology that still involves pure speculation, if only because so much of biology is so incredibly low-budget and low-tech; honey bee research being in this category (which is ironic, actually, since the honey bee is the most intensively-studied insect species on the planet; no other insect’s biology has had anywhere near that level of investment in human resources to unravel).
Peace,
While several have posted quite knowledgeable replies, none have
addressed the possibility of a genetic inbreeding defect being
introduced by a commercial Queen Bee breeder.
Again referring the documentary and the article by
staff, the CCD phenomena seem to be sporadic in areas,
affecting some beekeepers more than others. It just occurred to me
that maybe the the QB supplier(s) may be a comnon link.
"My people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge.....!"
Hosea 46
================================================================
SDSTAFF DOUG,
I just wanted to say hello and I am a UCR alumni who once took Entomology 10. Wowzers was that class hard and completely new territory for me, but I sure did learn a lot!! Love the department though. I used to walk around the Entomolgy building just to look at all the displays.
If we were to rank the various ideas as to how well they would explain the patterns we’ve seen, this one would (despite the fact that some beekeepers have also suggested its relevance) not seem to hold up well. The reason(s) is because (1) if the queen was reproducing poorly, the dying colonies would have reduced brood - and this is not what we’re seeing (2) the same queen strains have been around for a long time, not just newly-introduced last year (3) the same queen suppliers send their queens to countries other than the US - and no one seems ready to actually confirm that the same phenomenon has been seen anywhere else (and, any queen supplier whose queens are demonstrably bad will not stay in business long; beekeepers compete, but they also do communicate with one another). All of the US beekeepers with >25% colony losses (i.e., greater than statistical noise) are those who have interstate mobile beekeeping operations - something rarely practiced outside the US. Coincidence?
I was impressed by the reporting in this complex article on the topic:
“Buzzkill”, from the City Paper (Washington, DC edition)
The writer doesn’t simply repeat what he’s told, but checks it out with other experts, and builds a nuanced picture of the problem.
Sailboat
Doug,
What is a reasonable estimate of when we will know if CCD is a big deal or was just a popular story?
Do queen bee breeders ship all over the country? If so, wouldn’t that help spread bee diseases that might otherwise stay localized?
SOURCE: “HSI - Jenny Thompson” :<hsiresearch@healthiernews.com>
Dear Reader,
The mystery of the missing honeybees may have a simple solution. But will anyone pay attention?
Over the past few months I’ve been following a stream of daily updates about colony collapse disorder (CCD), the phenomenon in which bees abandon their hives and disappear. CCD continues to be reported throughout the U.S. and Canada - a potential disaster for food crops that require pollination.
Most of the updates I’ve seen come from newspapers that detail local incidences of CCD. And most of them read the same: a description of the overall problem followed by interviews with local beekeepers. Each of these accounts notes the various theories about what causes CCD (all speculation at this point): fungi, bacteria, pesticides, parasitic mites, weakened immune systems, and even interference from cell phone towers.
But this week I came across an entirely different CCD article. The title: “No ORGANIC Bee Losses.”
This article is described as a “widely circulated email” from Sharon Labchuk, an environmental activist and part-time beekeeper. Ms. Labchuk states that she’s on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 beekeepers - mostly American - 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.”
Ms. Labchuk goes on to quote a message from a web site maintained by beekeeper Michael Bush. Mr. Bush explains that he has no problems with varroa mites because he uses natural sized cells. Larger commercial beekeepers tend to use larger hive foundations, which result in larger cells and larger bees than those in natural hives.
Mr. Bush: “By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems.”
Ms. Labchuk’s response: “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 who should be surprised that media reports also tend to gloss over any potential connection between genetically modified (GM) crops and CCD? We’re told there’s no evidence of such a link and the subject is dropped, as if evidence would be impossible to produce. Okay - no evidence - then how about the next best thing?
In October 2000, Joe Rowland (a beekeeper and the secretary/treasurer of the Empire State Honey Producers Association) testified before the New York Assembly regarding the way GM organisms might affect honeybees. He drew his testimony from available research and his own knowledge of honeybee biology.
After noting that pollen is the honeybee’s protein source and that the gene structure of pollen is modified in GM crops, he offered this comment: “Findings indicate that none of the tested pollens kill adult bees outright, but that they may shorten their lifespan and cause some behavioral changes, particularly in a loss of their ability to learn and to smell. This may cause foraging bees to ‘forget’ where flowers or even their own hive is located.”
Note that this comment was made a full seven years before the phrase “colony collapse disorder” was coined. Those seven years may have taken a heavy toll.
I’d hate to hijack but is GM crops now some sort of a specific category of plants with specific features? I keep seeing references to GM crops as if it’s an easily distinguished group – does the “GM” label apply only to laboratory gene splicing and does not apply to selection methods of genetic modification? Does GM apply only to patented genes? Cause I’m fairly sure everything I eat is artificially genetically modified by humans – I don’t think avocados, corn or cows grow in the wild.
Well, plant an avocado seed around here, You’ll get an avocado tree. Ask anyone from India if cows grow in the wild. Corn as we know it is pretty modified, but I’m sure has some wild sports growing. With GM crops, they are trademarked and you can’t keep the seeds for the next year, you have to keep buying them otherwise, you are violating trademark.
Genetic modification, from what I understand, is actually splicing the genes. Contrast to say, dog breeding, or even older style hybridization and it is far, far different. Every apple I eat may be a clone of every other apple of that type, but that doesn’t mean we’ve meddled with the genetic structure of apple in quite the same way.
I’m not sure who benefits most from CCD paranoia. To me, it is certainly something to pay attention to, and until we really understand it, should absolutely focus on.
The sad thing is, we have so precious little genetic diversity in ALL of our crops these days, it won’t take much to wipe out particular species that we have narrowed down to just a few varieties. Apples are a good example.
I don’t why,maybe that is the reason we lost it
I don’t why,maybe which is the reason we lost it
Maybe they’re all lining up in Hollywood audition rooms for Jerry Seinfeld’s new flick?
…or not.
I was at an outdoor shopping mall the other day, they had an area cordoned off with warning signs – "Caution: Beehive!!"
I immediately thought that they should be charging admission!