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.
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
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.
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.
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
“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.
From the Wiki stub about neonicotinoids-
That certainly doesn’t sound good…
My love for honey’s like everyone’s for Raymond – Bee SER TER!
Would you like to suck my stamen – Bee SER TER!
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.
My pleasure.
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.
“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”]
And the local vice squad just looks the other way?!! :eek:
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.
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.
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
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-
You should get beeten for that.
Actually, the bees started dying off way back in 1982.
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.
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) 
Bumping the thread with this article.
I am not liking this trend at all.
Some think we are in deep .