Infinite Unknown

Flashback:

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

- Millions of Bees Mysteriously Die in Florida (CBS Tampa, Sep. 30, 2011):

MICCO, Fla. (CBS Tampa/AP) – Florida officials are abuzz as to how millions of honey bees were killed in Brevard County.

Several beekeepers in the county have reported lost colonies this week. Charles Smith of Smith Family Honey Company told Stuart News Thursday he lost 400 beehives. He says the bees appeared to have been poisoned.

“I’ll never get completely compensated for this unless someone handed me 400 beehives,” Smith told Stuart News. “I lost the bees, the ability to make honey and the ability to sell the bees.”

Smith told Florida Today that he lost $150,000 from the incident.

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Tags: Beekeepers, Bees, Environment, Florida, Global News, U.S.

Flashback:

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

- Amid bee die-off, healthy hives thrive in cities (AP, July 29, 2011):

CHICAGO (AP) — Among the wildflowers and native grasses in the garden atop Chicago’s City Hall stand two beehives where more than 100,000 bees come and go in patterns more graceful, but just as busy, as the traffic on the street 11 stories below.

The bees are storing honey that will sustain them through the bitter winter and be sold in a gift shop just blocks away.

“Already this season, one hive has produced 200 pounds of surplus honey, which is really a huge amount of honey,” said beekeeper Michael Thompson after checking the hives one July morning. “The state average is 40 pounds of surplus honey per hive.”

The Chicago bees’ success could be due to the city’s abundant and mostly pesticide-free flowers. Many bee experts believe city bees have a leg up on country bees these days because of a longer nectar flow, with people planting flowers that bloom from spring to fall, and organic gardening practices. Not to mention the urban residents who are building hives at a brisk pace.

Beekeeping is thriving in cities across the nation, driven by young hobbyists and green entrepreneurs. Honey from city hives makes its way into swanky restaurant kitchens and behind the bar, where it’s mixed into cocktails or stars as an ingredient in honey wine.

Membership in beekeeping clubs is skewing younger and growing. The White House garden has beehives. The city of Chicago’s hives — nine in all, on rooftops and other government property — are just part of the boom.

“I’ve seen hives set up on balconies and in very, very small backyards,” said Russell Bates, a TV commercial director and co-founder of Backwards Beekeepers, a 3-year-old group that draws up to 100 mostly newcomers to its monthly meetings in Los Angeles.

The group is “backwards” because its members rely on natural, non-chemical beekeeping practices. All their hives are populated by local bees they’ve captured — or “rescued” as the group’s members like to say — from places they’re not wanted.

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Tags: Beekeepers, Bees, CCD, Environment, Global News, organic, Pesticides

Cellphone transmissions may be responsible for a mysterious, worldwide die off in bees that has mystified scientists.

Dr. Daniel Favre, a former biologist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, carefully placed a mobile phone underneath a beehive and then monitored the reaction of the workers.

According to a story in The Daily Mail, the bees were able to tell when the handsets were making and receiving calls. They responded by making the high pitched squeaks that usually signal the start of swarming.

“This study shows that the presence of an active mobile phone disturbs bees — and has a dramatic effect,” Favre told the Daily Mail.

Favre believes this to be evidence of something other scientists have suggested: Signals from mobile phones are contributing to the decline of honeybees. Favre thinks more research could help confirm the link between cell signals and “colony collapse disorder” — the sudden disappearance of entire colonies over winter — which has halved the bee population, according to some estimates.

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Tags: Beekeepers, Bees, CCD, Cell Phone, Environment, Global News, Health, Mobile Phone, Pesticides

Related info:

- U.N.: Decline of Honey Bees Now A Global Phenomenon

- Study: Pesticides Are ‘Killing Honeybee Population Worldwide’

- BBKA Betrayed Bee Keepers To Pesticide Lobby, Endorsed The Most Deadly Substances For Bees Existing On The Planet As ‘Bee-Friendly’ Or ‘Bee-Safe’ (!)

- Bumblebees in Freefall, Study Shows 96 Percent Decline

- EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees, Leaked Document Shows (!!!)

- Billons Of Bee Colonies Die Worldwide

- Heavy Honeybee Die-Off Continues; New Study Shows Pollen And Hives Laden With Pesticides

- Study: ‘High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee’

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (!!!)

Yes, organic bees survive CCD, which almost proves that a pesticide (or maybe GM plants) must be responsible for CCD.

Also living on refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in winter certainly can kill any advanced life-form.

By sealing up cells full of contaminated pollen, bees appear to be attempting to protect the rest of the hive

‘Entombed’ pollen is identified as having sunken, wax-covered cells amid ‘normal’, uncapped cells. Photograph: Journal of Invertebrate Pathology

Honeybees are taking emergency measures to protect their hives from pesticides, in an extraordinary example of the natural world adapting swiftly to our depredations, according to a prominent bee expert.

Scientists have found numerous examples of a new phenomenon – bees “entombing” or sealing up hive cells full of pollen to put them out of use, and protect the rest of the hive from their contents. The pollen stored in the sealed-up cells has been found to contain dramatically higher levels of pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals than the pollen stored in neighbouring cells, which is used to feed growing young bees.

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Tags: Beekeepers, Bees, CCD, Environment, Health, Pesticides, Propolis

Related information:

- Study: Pesticides Are ‘Killing Honeybee Population Worldwide’

- BBKA Betrayed Bee Keepers To Pesticide Lobby, Endorsed The Most Deadly Substances For Bees Existing On The Planet As ‘Bee-Friendly’ Or ‘Bee-Safe’ (!)

- Bumblebees in Freefall, Study Shows 96 Percent Decline

- EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees, Leaked Document Shows (!)

- Billons Of Bee Colonies Die Worldwide

- Heavy Honeybee Die-Off Continues; New Study Shows Pollen And Hives Laden With Pesticides

- Study: ‘High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee’

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (!)

Yes, organic bees survive CCD, which almost proves that a pesticide (or maybe GM plants) must be responsible for CCD.

Also living on refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in winter certainly can kill any advanced life-form.

Bee colony collapse, once limited to Europe and America, is now being seen in Asia and Africa

The mysterious collapse of honey-bee colonies is becoming a global phenomenon, scientists working for the United Nations have revealed.

Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The authors, who include some of the world’s leading honey-bee experts, issue a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe. Without profound changes to the way human beings manage the planet, they say, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue.

The scientists warn that a number of factors may now be coming together to hit bee colonies around the world, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of damaging insecticides, to the worldwide spread of pests and air pollution.

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Tags: Bees, CCD, Environment, Global News, U.N.

Ottawa – A Canadian museum launched an investigation on Friday into the sudden death of 20 000 bees on display in a glass encased hive.

“All 20 000 bees died within 48 hours,” Amanda Fruci, publicist for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, told AFP.

“The cause is being investigated but we know for sure that it wasn’t colony collapse syndrome because that involves bees leaving a hive and never coming back, and in this case they all died in the hive.”

In normal times, bee communities naturally lose around five percent of their numbers.

But with the syndrome known as colony collapse disorder (CDD), a third, half – sometimes even 90% or all – of the insects can be wiped out.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bees, Environment

Related information:

- BBKA Betrayed Bee Keepers To Pesticide Lobby, Endorsed The Most Deadly Substances For Bees Existing On The Planet As ‘Bee-Friendly’ Or ‘Bee-Safe’ (!)

- Bumblebees in Freefall, Study Shows 96 Percent Decline

- EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees, Leaked Document Shows (!)

- Billons Of Bee Colonies Die Worldwide

- Heavy Honeybee Die-Off Continues; New Study Shows Pollen And Hives Laden With Pesticides

- Study: ‘High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee’

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (!)

Yes, organic bees survive CCD, which almost proves that a pesticide (or maybe GM plants) must be responsible for CCD.

Also living on refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in winter certainly can kill any advanced life-form.

Dying? Honeybees are being wiped out by new pesticides that have left them far more vulnerable to disease, the top U.S. bee expert has warned

A new generation of pesticides could be are to blame for Britain’s vanishing honeybees, a study has shown.

The chemicals, which are routinely used on farms and garden centres, attack the central systems of insects and make bee colonies more vulnerable to disease and pests, researchers say.

The claims, which appear in an unpublished study carried out at the US Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory, add to the evidence that pesticides are partly responsible for the mysterious decline of one of the world’s best loved insects.

Wildlife campaigners today called for urgent research into the links between the chemicals and the collapse of bee colonies around the world.

Scientists are baffled by Britain’s disappearing honeybees. Since the 1980s numbers have fallen by half.

The new study, led by Dr Jeffrey Pettis, one of the U.S.’s top bee experts, found that exposure to a class of pesticides called neo-nicotinoids makes bees more susceptible to infection – even at doses too low to be detected in the creature’s bodies.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bees, Environment, Global News, Pesticides

Related information:

- Bumblebees in Freefall, Study Shows 96 Percent Decline

- EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees, Leaked Document Shows (!)

- Billons Of Bee Colonies Die Worldwide

- Heavy Honeybee Die-Off Continues; New Study Shows Pollen And Hives Laden With Pesticides

- Study: ‘High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee’

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (!)

Yes, organic bees survive CCD, which almost proves that a pesticide (or maybe GM plants) must be responsible for CCD.

Also living on refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in winter certainly can kill any advanced life-form.

The saga of the British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) and its long-term pesticide endorsements is quite extraordinary. For 10 years, the BBKA has been giving its official blessing to four insecticides as “bee-friendly” or “bee-safe” – for example, the May 2001 newsletter BBKA News referred to “the BBKA’s endorsement of Fury as a bee-safe product”, while another piece in August 2005 said “the products we endorse are bee-friendly when used properly”.

Yet the active ingredients of these products, as shown above, are among the most deadly substances for bees existing on the planet.

Most rational people, with no axe to grind one way or another about bees or pesticides or anything else, would surely find this counter-intuitive as best; at worst, simply bonkers. Good old bee-safe Fury, eh, which contains cypermethrin, the second most toxic insecticide to honey bees out of 100 tested. No wonder it has produced fury among some beekeepers. What has been going on?

The more one goes into it, the more it becomes clear that there is a very comfortable relationship – the old word used to be “cosy” – between the fairly small group of senior beekeeping figures who run the BBKA as a self-perpetuating oligarchy, and the pesticide lobby, or as they would prefer to call it, the crop protection industry.

This is something which may skew judgement. One of the claims in the open letter sent to the association by independent beekeepers is that “the BBKA appears never to have issued any public statement that is critical of any pesticides or pesticide manufacturer”. That’s a sweeping statement, but it’s certainly the case, if you leaf through BBKA News, that pesticides are not viewed as a major problem.

This matters, because in the great decline of bees we have witnessed in recent years, culminating in the mysterious colony collapse disorder, a new generation of pesticides, the neonicotinoids, may be implicated, some claim. Yet some senior British beekeepers and scientists insist the matter is down to mites like varroa, or viruses like nosema, and say pesticides have nothing to do with it.

Continue reading »

Tags: BBKA, Beekeepers, Bees, CCD, Environment, Global News, Lobbyists, Pesticides

Related information on honeybees:

- EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees, Leaked Document Shows (!)

- Billons Of Bee Colonies Die Worldwide

- Heavy Honeybee Die-Off Continues; New Study Shows Pollen And Hives Laden With Pesticides

- Study: ‘High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee’

- Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (!)

Yes, organic bees survive CCD, which almost proves that a pesticide (or maybe GM plants) must be responsible for CCD.

Also living on refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in winter certainly can kill any advanced life-form.

Disease and low genetic diversity might have caused US bumblebee decline over the past few decades, say scientists

Bumblebees are important pollinators of wild plants and crops around the world. Photograph: RSPB/PA

The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects. Scientists said the alarming decline, which could have devastating implications for the pollination of both wild and farmed plants, was likely to be a result of disease and low genetic diversity in bee populations.

Bumblebees are important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops around the world including tomatoes and berries thanks to their large body size, long tongues, and high-frequency buzzing, which helps release pollen from flowers.

Bees in general pollinate some 90% of the world’s commercial plants, including most fruits, vegetables and nuts. Coffee, soya beans and cotton are all dependent on pollination by bees to increase yields. It is the start of a food chain that also sustains wild birds and animals.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bees, Bumblebee, Environment, Global News, Science

Related information:

- British eight-year-olds publish study in top science journal (AFP)

– Kids’ bee study published in science journal (CBC News)

– Children’s bee study makes it to Royal Society journal (BBC News)

A bumblebee collecting pollen of a cherry blossom. A group of British children aged between eight and 10 had their school project on bees published by the prestigious Royal Society in a world scientific first, the society said Wednesday.

A group of British children aged between eight and 10 had their school project on bees published by the prestigious Royal Society in a world scientific first, the society said Wednesday.

The pupils from Blackawton primary school in the southwestern English county of Devon investigated how bumblebees see colours and patterns using a series of experiments in a local churchyard.

The findings by the 25 children, drawn up with a scientist who lives in the area, have been published in Biology Letters, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Royal Society.

“The field of insect colour and pattern vision is generally poorly understood and the findings reported by the school children represent a genuine advance in the field,” the Royal Society said in a statement.

The headmaster of the school, Dave Strudwick, said his pupils “devised, conducted and wrote up an experiment which resulted in genuinely novel findings, so they deserve to be published.”

The children used patterns drawn with coloured pencil to see whether the insects would go for sugar water and avoid salt water.

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before,” they concluded in the paper.

Biology Letters editor Brian Charlesworth said their paper was a “world first in high quality scientific publishing.”

The study can be read at http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/18/rsbl.2010.1056.abstract

December 22, 2010

Source: Physorg.com (Watch the 17min. video!)

Tags: Bees, Biology Letters, Bumblebee, Children, Education, Global News, Good News, Royal Society, Science, Scientists