# We don't have to worry about bees dying off, do we? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 15, 2007, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215 "2007-04-15T15:49:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2007, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/21 "2007-04-16T22:48:28Z")
[QUOTE=elucidator] Problem seems not to be dying bee, _per se_. The bee colonies are not surrounded by cast off dead workers, it seems that they fly away and don’t come back. First guess would be something is messing with thier navigational apparatus. [/QUOTE] That’s not exactly true. Some hives have lots of dead bees and some are vacated. My first impression was maybe a connection with roundup and genetically engineered soybeans but the same event is taking place in England without the same connection. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2007, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/22 "2007-04-17T00:08:19Z")
This is bee country around here, and I used to keep up a couple of hives for fun and taxes. Wrote about it, too: [http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue11/scylla.html](http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue11/scylla.html) More importantly, I did learn about it and am friends with a “Master Apiarist.” So, a couple of things: We’ve been transporting bees on trucks for pollinization purposes since we had trucks. It’s not a new practice. CCD is almost certainly caused by a certain set of inseciticides that are seeing much greater use. There are some new synthetic type nicotine based insecticides which are considered to be pretty environmentally sound and they’ve been getting used more and more. They were first developed as a way to deal with termites. The termites lose their memory and forget the way home and the colony disintegrates. They use this stuff more now, and it concentrates in the plants. It doesn’t affect the adult bees, but they collect pollen and feed it to their larvae. It does affect the larvae. Typically a young bee will take explatory and orientation flights. Bees from larvae that were fed the pollen from plants with these nicotine derived pesticides in them get lost and don’t come back. During winter the adult bees die off. All the young bees fly off during their orientation flights (they do fly in winter given a warm enough day) and come Spring the colony is deserted. It’s no great mystery. Apiarists that are staying in the business are generally unwilling to transport their hives to crops so treated. It’s still hard to protect against because bees will fly quite a distance. They may collect pollen that doesn’t get fed for many months. This is why the collapse usually occurs in the winter when the bees tap into stored pollen supplies. The media is making this out to be some big mystery, but it’s not. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Kumquat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gary\_Kumquat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Kumquat)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2007, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/23 "2007-04-17T15:18:59Z")
That was very interesting Scylla, thanks. Do you have any cites or links with more information on this? It’d be very useful for me. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Kumquat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gary\_Kumquat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Kumquat)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2007, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/24 "2007-04-17T15:36:00Z")
Some interesting reading at the American Beekeeping Federations website. I think it’s premature to say the mystery has been solved yet, but certainly they flag Scylla’s theory as one of the possibles (Warning - it’s a PDF): [http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/CCDPpt/CoxFosterTestimonyFinal.pdf](http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/CCDPpt/CoxFosterTestimonyFinal.pdf) “Of particular concern are pesticides being widely used to control insect pests in agriculture, urban environments, and animal systems. Among these are the neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that have been extensively adopted for pest management. This class of pesticides is recognized as having extremely low toxicity in humans and other vertebrates and as highly effective in controlling insect pests; however, these chemicals are known to be highly toxic to honey bees and other pollinators. Some research has suggested that these systemic pesticides can translocate or move through plants to become localized in pollen and nectar at concentrations that may affect bees. Research is warranted to address the effects on the bees and other pollinators of these compounds at the concentrations found in pollen and honey made from nectar collected by the bees.” However, they do highlight a number of other possibilities, for instance: “Of special concern, we have found species like Aspergillus and Mucor among the fungi in CCD colonies. These fungi were previously reported to be bee pathogens in the 1930’s and are associated with toxin production; however, since that time, these fungi have been rarely of concern in bee colonies. Determining the role of these fungi in CCD is important not only in terms of solving the mystery of CCD but also in determining how these fungi are related to fungal species that infect vertebrates, including humans.” So, all in all I’d say the jury is still out. ---
**Author:** ![Moirai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/96bed5/32.png) [@Moirai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moirai)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2007, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/25 "2007-04-17T19:03:34Z")
From the Wiki stub about neonicotinoids- > [@](#): > > Neonicotinoids have been strictly limited in France since the 1990s, when they were implicated in a mass die-off of the bee population. That certainly doesn’t sound good… ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2007, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/26 "2007-04-17T21:08:53Z")
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers] Huh. Bee-serters. [/QUOTE] My love for honey’s like everyone’s for Raymond – Bee SER TER! Would you like to suck my stamen – Bee SER TER! ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/27 "2007-04-18T00:26:53Z")
There are still plenty of bees round here – the recent warm weather has brought them out already. Last summer there were more bees in my garden than I can ever recall seeing before - we have a big wild rose bush near a bench in the sunny corner and when it was in flower it was absolutely humming with hundreds upon hundreds of bees, often two or three to a flower. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/28 "2007-04-18T01:57:13Z")
[QUOTE=Gary Kumquat] That was very interesting Scylla, thanks. [/quote] My pleasure. > [@](#): > > Do you have any cites or links with more information on this? It’d be very useful for me. My full and complete knowledge of this subject comes from hanging out two weeks ago with my former beekeeping mentor at a bar. What are you saying, “heard it from a guy in a bar” isn’t a good enough cite for you? I’m sick and tired of you Ivory Tower intellectual academia elitist types with your unreasonable standards. I’m **telling** you that it’s the Nicotine shit. If anybody questions you tell them you heard it from a guy on the intenet who heard it from a friend in a bar… ..and that should shut them up. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Kumquat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gary\_Kumquat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Kumquat)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/29 "2007-04-18T06:06:19Z")
[QUOTE=Scylla] What are you saying, “heard it from a guy in a bar” isn’t a good enough cite for you? [/QUOTE] “My pub is my cite.” Works for me. [edit to add - wish you’d said it was a barman who’d told you. “Mein host is my cite”] ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/30 "2007-04-18T06:09:54Z")
[QUOTE=Lemur866] Thing is, we have a new agricultural practice…where hives are trucked all over the country as pollinators. [/QUOTE] And the local vice squad just looks the other way?!! :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Unregistered\_Bull](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3da27b/32.png) [@Unregistered\_Bull](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unregistered_Bull)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2007, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/31 "2007-04-19T01:47:12Z")
[QUOTE=Scylla] This is bee country around here, and I used to keep up a couple of hives for fun and taxes. Wrote about it, too: [http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue11/scylla.html](http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue11/scylla.html) More importantly, I did learn about it and am friends with a “Master Apiarist.” So, a couple of things: We’ve been transporting bees on trucks for pollinization purposes since we had trucks. It’s not a new practice. CCD is almost certainly caused by a certain set of inseciticides that are seeing much greater use. There are some new synthetic type nicotine based insecticides which are considered to be pretty environmentally sound and they’ve been getting used more and more. They were first developed as a way to deal with termites. The termites lose their memory and forget the way home and the colony disintegrates. They use this stuff more now, and it concentrates in the plants. It doesn’t affect the adult bees, but they collect pollen and feed it to their larvae. It does affect the larvae. Typically a young bee will take explatory and orientation flights. Bees from larvae that were fed the pollen from plants with these nicotine derived pesticides in them get lost and don’t come back. During winter the adult bees die off. All the young bees fly off during their orientation flights (they do fly in winter given a warm enough day) and come Spring the colony is deserted. It’s no great mystery. Apiarists that are staying in the business are generally unwilling to transport their hives to crops so treated. It’s still hard to protect against because bees will fly quite a distance. They may collect pollen that doesn’t get fed for many months. This is why the collapse usually occurs in the winter when the bees tap into stored pollen supplies. The media is making this out to be some big mystery, but it’s not. [/QUOTE] Thanks for the insectide info. I read about the bee loss in an agriculture publication, but I don’t think it mentioned the nicotine based pesticide. It is an interesting link/theory. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2007, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/32 "2007-04-19T02:36:42Z")
[QUOTE=Scylla] My full and complete knowledge of this subject comes from hanging out two weeks ago with my former beekeeping mentor at a bar. [/QUOTE] It is, however, _exactly_ the same theory I’ve been told by the Sad Bee Man in PEI, a customer of mine who keeps bees, and an old Army bud who kept bees. Funny how all the people who keep bees think it’s the same thing. That seems like more than a coincidence to me. ---
**Author:** ![mawrestler\_one25](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/41988e/32.png) [@mawrestler\_one25](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mawrestler_one25)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2007, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/33 "2007-04-19T03:02:20Z")
All bee keepers think the same thing? Sounds to me like we have two bee keepers who think it’s the same thing. It is a possibility that two bee keepers thinking the same thing is a coincidence. Lets not rule out the other theories yet. The cell phone thing seems viable enough to me. It said somewhere in the article that bees would not go near their hive with a cell phone around it right? Somewhere in the Mayan calender it says, and in the year 2012 a portable communication device will destroy the world. lol ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2007, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/34 "2007-04-20T03:59:33Z")
[QUOTE=mawrestler\_one25] All bee keepers think the same thing? Sounds to me like we have two bee keepers who think it’s the same thing. It is a possibility that two bee keepers thinking the same thing is a coincidence. Lets not rule out the other theories yet. The cell phone thing seems viable enough to me. It said somewhere in the article that bees would not go near their hive with a cell phone around it right? Somewhere in the Mayan calender it says, and in the year 2012 a portable communication device will destroy the world. lol [/QUOTE] Rickjay’s post mentions three people, so that’s a total of four, not two. The nicotine pesticide thing sounds like a good theory, but if I’m reading posts here correctly, the pesticides should result in a _seasonal_ phenomenon of colony deaths. The wiki on CCD seems to indicate that the collapses are not happening seasonally, however. And the pesticide theory does not explain why CCD seems to be spreading like a disease. A study from the CCD Work Group at Penn state (again, see the wiki) has found that there is a greatly increased number of infectious agents living in the tissue of dead bees collected from CCD colonies, and has found some kind of scars on the bee’s bodies which it says are consistent with immunosupressive disorders. So we may be dealing with some kind of “BIV” virus here? The cell phone thing seems unlikely. For one thing, the study was about portable phones, like the one you probably have in your house, not cell phones. They stuck bases from these portable phones inside colonies and found that this resulted in bees refusing to enter the colonies. For another thing, cell phones have been around for a long time, and this bee thing has just started happening recently. -FrL- ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2007, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/35 "2007-04-22T15:31:44Z")
[QUOTE=Cervaise] They’ll be all right if they don’t use 802.11-bee for their devices. [/QUOTE] You should get beeten for that. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2007, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/36 "2007-04-22T15:42:01Z")
Actually, the bees started dying off way back in [1982.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Belushi) ---
**Author:** ![Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19adc/32.png) [@Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/37 "2007-04-23T02:52:55Z")
I don’t buy the cell phone theory for the simple reason the current die off started in the U.S. If portable phones really were to blame, this die off would have started in Europe, which has a much higher cell phone [penetration.](http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=17641) ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/38 "2007-04-23T13:38:39Z")
gee, how is it that nobody has yet mentioned global warming? _That_ sure would get plenty of headlines. Because people like to talk about global warming. But nobody wants to talk about giving up their cell phone. (And yes, I admit it–I dunno a darn thing 'bout bees, (except that I don’t like 'em swarming around my head) 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2007, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/39 "2007-05-03T17:04:10Z")
Bumping the thread with [this](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/honeybee_die_off) article. I am not liking this trend at all. > [@](#): > > 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. > > In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent 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. > > … > > The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it. > > A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation. > > … > > Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum. > > What the genome mapping revealed was “that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins,” Berenbaum said. > > University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2007, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-dont-have-to-worry-about-bees-dying-off-do-we/400215/40 "2007-05-03T20:54:34Z")
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