I agree with most environmental issues, esp. if they are liberal ones. But one that has got me vexed, is what is killing the bees.
Bees are necessary to pollinate just about everything. So it is no small matter. And in case you don’t know, in the US at least, the bees are dying off. I don’t think I need a cite. And according to the environmentalists, it is the pesticides.
Pesticides are a concern. But they have been around since time immemorial. I have a theory of my own: cross-breeding with African killer bees.
Don’t laugh. African killer bees are now loose in America (again I don’t think I need a cite–although it was a bee keeper in Mexico who accidentally let them loose, in case you want to know).
African killer bees are cross-breeding with more docile American bees. And they are used to the warmer climates of Africa. So why not?
Well the africanized bees are pretty well established here and have been for a good many years. If you go on some of the forums dedicated to bee keepers the last time I checked they weren’t having any problem. Some of them suggested it was mainly the bees that were being trucked from place to place and that a lot of the commercial bee suppliers don’t maintain high levels of quality control which is contributing to heavy losses. I just picked thi up in one conversation for whatever it is worth.
Isn’t hybridization usually a good thing? It produces healthier and stronger populations, rather than populations that die right off. I can’t see how hybridization would lead, by itself, to hive death.
At most, it might lead to higher vulnerability to some other source of hive failure…but that doesn’t give us any information as to what that source is.
The africanized hybrids are in the Americas. The colony collapse disorder affects the European honey bees both in the Americas and in their native range, Europe. Hawaii also does not have africanized bees but has reported CCD.
CCD exists where the africanized bees don’t. It seems unlikely it’s a cross breeding issue.
What is spreading is already a hybrid, not the original African species, note how everyone else calling them Africanized. (They were released in Brazil by the way.)
According to Wikipedia they “Cannot survive extended periods of forage deprivation, preventing introduction into areas with harsh winters or extremely dry late summers.” so that part of your hypothesis is reasonable, but as has already been mentioned, CCD is also a European concern, and even if it was entirely American, the spread of the Africanized bees is followed closely and it boggles the mind to think that a correlation between that spread and CCD would have been overlooked.
When it comes to resistance against pathogens, non-hybrids sometimes have an advantage because they are descendants of those who were resistant to the pathogen.
For example, if the Black Death were ever to reappear in Europe it could quite feasibly literally be the black death, because people whose ancestry is mostly European are vastly more likely to have ancestors who survived the previous black death for some genetic reason or other than people with African ancestry are.
With plants it occasionally happens that a species is very good at overwhelming the native species but not very good at coping with native pathogens, or they shrug off the pathogen but pass it to similar species around them, who then die off at remarkable rates. Some species of rhodedendron are an example of the latter in England.
Overlooking the role of insecticides is beyond silly. Ranks right up there with anti vaxers and climate change deniers, in my opinion. Ignores the obvious in favour of the unlikely, it seems to me.
Not to be a dick, but it’s a common misperception, but a misperception all the same, that plants are almost totally dependent upon bees for pollination. They are not; many plants are pollinated by honeybees, but more are pollinated either by wind or by other animals.
Actually it might be useful to have a cite, because agriculture in the US is not in any imminent danger of losing its pollinators. Most calories we consume do not depend on honey bees. For those that do, the number of bee colonies in the US has been relatively flat since before CCD hit the news. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1191
As for pesticides, does the frequency of neonic use correlate with CCD frequency? The EU banned them in 2013. Did we see less CCD in Europe last spring? Neonics are heavily used in rape cultivation, but why don’t we see a big CCD problem in Canada?
I don’t have answers to these questions. It’s obvious that you can kill bees with these chemicals, but it’s not clear when and how small amounts matter or not.
That’s folk science-- or rather, it doesn’t usually apply to species in the wild. Think of the iconic hybrid-- a mule. That doesn’t work out so well for the population, does it? There are so many ways that populations can hybridize, I can’t imagine figuring out whether it is “usually good” or “usually bad”.
What you’re think of is outbreeding (as opposed to inbreeding). But that’s not hybridization, which involves two different species (or with domestic animals, different breeds). Hybridization between breeds is generally good, but only because what you had to do to create the breed was bad and you’re undoing that badness.
There are threats to bees, and neonics may be harmful to some beneficial insects, but the supposed link between neonics and bee declines is looking dubious:
Meantime, Australia’s bees seem to be doing well despite widespread neonics use, and U.S. populations are reported to be doing better.
An short read on what may be the causes of ccd and why it is less prevalent in Canada vice the US.
TL;DR: " All in all, it seems that a broad suite of stresses is taking its toll on US honeybees. Are various combinations of stresses resulting in a set of similar symptoms across the country?
Stress in general increases human susceptibility to illness, and the same idea applies to
honeybees. Stressed, their capacity to ward of primary infections of the well-known suite of
larval and adult diseases (Morse and Nowogrodski (editors) 2000) is reduced. Moreover,
stressed, their capacity to fight secondary infections, such as of viruses associated with varroa (Kevanet al. 2006) is lessened. Stress, immunocompromization, and unusually serious
infections by common pathogens and/or otherwise and usually benign organisms, seem to have combined to produce this devastating condition, CCD. "
Rickjay, while you are correct a LOT of our food crops are dominantly pollinated by bees, and the list of what would be impacted if honeybees disappeared is pretty substantial.
How many of those could not be pollinated by some other insect? Bees make a good pollinators as a business, they come back to a hive so the beekeepers can truck them over to the next crop afterwards and he gets honey out of the deal. They are good pollinators for certain plants, as they are big/strong and can muscle their way into deep flowers. But if a farmer just released a thousand houseflies into the middle of his okra field, wouldn’t it get pollinated?
I can’t believe that wouldn’t be detected. The beekeepers who take the least honey would be rewarded with healthy hives, while the greediest would find their business failing. That’s the sort of pattern that is very readily evident to even the slightest scrutiny.
Funny you bring up okra as I was just running a simple cost-benefit analysis on that for other reasons, which lost out to “it looks cool, and I like the big fat bees that visit it.” I’ve never actually seen a honey bee in an okra flower. Just native pollinators. It’s self-pollinating, anyway.
