So I’m looking around the web, a little bored, when I bump into this article detailing that millions of bees are missing without a trace. Ok, bees are incredibly important to agriculture. My family kept bees, I know that. Without bees we lose a lot of food. Ok. Fine. However I seem to be the only person who’s most concerned with where the hell are the bees? :dubious:
I am not really expecting the millions of missing bees to be living happily ever after somewhere in the wild, but several articles on the net are non-chalantly mentioning that the beekeepers are finding fully stocked, healthy nests with larvae and honey that are completely abandoned - and no bee bodies. Umm, ok. The articles seem a little sparse on juicy bee details – for example, were the queens there? The drones? They’re making it sound like they were completely abandoned. It’s not like the queen is just going to go up and swarm in the middle of winter with no young queen to take her place, is she? A lot of news sites are reporting “bee death” but from every single article I’ve gathered that the primary idea is that they’re gone first, and probably dead second. What the hell is going on here? It almost sounds like somebody pulled off the biggest bee heist in the history of bee heists, but stealing entire hives of live bees without taking the hive box itself is quite possibly the dumbest way to steal bees. All you need is a queen and a couple of drones.
Last summer there was a spot in my apartment complex that was always littered with hundreds of dead and dying honeybees for weeks, and although I found that kind of odd to see that many bees in the middle of suburbia, consistently in the same spot, if they would be there, ‘dying’ would be the state I’d expect them to be in. People don’t like bees or wasps near their children and if a hive decided to nest in some tree in an apartment complex I’d expect them to get quickly fumigated (as unfortunate as that sounds to me). Now, I’m starting to wonder. Maybe some environmental chemical is messing with the pheromones? If all bees think they’re swarming constantly because something is triggering swarming they’re all going to be wandering aimlessly in small packs until they starve and die, right?
I don’t know, in any case, this is much bigger news than most things that pass for news nowadays. Somehow nobody cares. You people like food, right?
They are happily feasting on the 300 lbs of rotting pears and apples that have fallen off my 8 humongous, old, fruit trees. We have a deal - they get to eat all the fruit they want and I get to mow the lawn without being stung.
The fruit trees are being sentenced to death this spring, though, so all of the bees will be returning to their regularly scheduled dying-at-the-hive.
Front page news in my local paper yesterday. The bees are being wiped out by a disease named “colony collapse disorder” or CCD. Here is an article from the Mid Atlantic Apiculture website, and the Wiki link.
One of the statistics quoted in my local paper is that one out of every three bites of food consumed in the US is a direct product of insect pollination.
I’m willing to say maybe the genetically modified food crops have just shown the first wide spread non intended effect, people worry about. The aliens may have switched to bee snatching. The giant multi queen hives are forming more often than people think. Cell phones or something like them are screwing with their instincts. The west half of America is about to drop off the map due to earthquakes or volcanos. This is an act of terrorism. They like to vacation in Europe. They went to Mardi Gra and haven’t recovered yet.
They are at ninja training camp, that’s where. At one o’the’clock A.M. this last Saturday night I slip out on the balcony, okay? Something crawling on my foot, okay? So I give a little kick to shake loose the ant or roach or whatever it is then…BAM. What the hell, dude, that hurts. Go back inside and there’s this stinger in the top of my foot. So I pluck it out, go back outside and there’s this bee, rolling around on the ground. So I set him on fire.
But dude, answer me this: WHAT SORT OF GODDAMNED BEE ATTACKS YOU IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, IN THE PITCH BLACK? This was not a normal bee, he should have been asleep in his hive somewhere. He was a ninja bee. The end has begun.
RE: Who would win in a fair fight: Ninja Bees or Pirate Wasps?
Clearly the fights are happening at night, as that is the ninja bee’s primary time of action. It appears the Pirate Wasps are winning. There are no bodies because the wasps make them walk the plank - dead bees tell no tales. Yarrr!
Sorry to rain on your joke parade, but this sounds very serious to me. I’m hoping that they will find out what is causing this, and figure out a fix. My vote for what is causing it is, as usual, humans and the by-products of our society.
The problem with mites eating up the bees AFAIK is pretty serious; most beekeepers, I’ve been told, ship their hives south to survive the winter.
Without bees, you not only don’t get honey, a lot of the crops we raise don’t get pollinated. Of course, I’ve also been told that the honeybee is not native to North America, and somehow the plants that were here before Europeans arrived managed to get pollinated somehow.
