Taiwan stung by millions of missing bees

[catgirl]

Source: Reuters


TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's bee farmers are feeling the sting of lost business and possible crop danger after millions of the honey-making, plant-pollinating insects vanished during volatile weather, media and experts said on Thursday.



Over the past two months, farmers in three parts of Taiwan have reported most of their bees gone, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported. Taiwan's TVBS television station said about 10 million bees had vanished in Taiwan.

A beekeeper on Taiwan's northeastern coast reported 6 million insects missing "for no reason," and one in the south said 80 of his 200 bee boxes had been emptied, the paper said.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/taiwan_bees_dc;_ylt=AgentO.io6WWrPZJWiNJ_d_MWM0F

---

This is a global problem. I hope this isn't leading extinction.
Scientists have speculated that cell phone usage as the cause.

[roamer65]

1. Bee rapture.

BeeJeezus has come for them.:silly:

[Javaman]

4. oh no! is this the second buzzing?

I fear of the apocobeelypse.

All kidding aside, this is some serious shit. I had been wanting to raise bees for a while now and was just getting into it when all this started going down.

Imagine if you will that society crumbles because of the loss of the bee.

Like the say, "it's the little things that get you".

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. It's very odd.

I don't find any, I mean none in my backyard. (The one I reported to have found a few weeks back was just a fat yellow jacket.) Yet, a few miles from my home, there are literally tons of bees around certain plants at the Nursery.

And the fact that there are no bees in my backyard is not cellularly related because we're only now getting cellphones zones installed in the area and this has been going on for over a decade.

[Kikosexy2]

12. So that's ...

where our bees have migrated to...they left the U.S. for sunnier shores...

[mikelgb]

14. .

:rofl:

[Exultant Democracy]

38. Where have all the flowers gone?

[Canuckistanian]

2. This wasn't caused by cell phones

This is happening far too quickly. Cell phones have been around for a decade in popular use.

The disappearing bees only started happening in late 2006.

[RaleighNCDUer]

9. The bee collapse has been going on for years -

only up to a couple years ago it was all being attributed to mites. It is true that the rate of collapse has accelerated in the past two years, but it is more than a recent phenomenon.

It could be a combination of factors - cell towers + mites + GM crops + global warming, and one of which they could endure, but the combination is insurmountable.

Or not.

We just don't know.

[Canuckistanian]

29. Whatever the cause, we'd better find a solution - fast

There's not much time left if they keep disappearing at this rate.

[rcdean]

40. Thanks for that info. But still something must have changed recently.

I suppose it's possible that a cumulative effect led to some threshold being surpassed. But that still would not explain the huge % of the bee pop. being hit all of a sudden.

Sure hope somebody smart is working on this.

[trogdor]

28. Thank you.

We have been infesting the air with various types of EM radiation (such as radio waves) for the past century. The widespread prevalence of this man-made radiation has long made it necessary for government organizations such as the FCC to assign frequencies and enforce all sorts of regulations aimed at keeping radio/TV people from stepping all over each other. In addition to all that, we've strung electric transmission wires in a great web from coast to coast and around the world, and those emit EM waves as well, and have been doing so as long as we've had AC power. The entire planet literally throbs and hums with EM radiation of every conceivable wavelength.

People have blamed all sorts of things on cell phones because they hate the damn things (I hate 'em myself for all sorts of reasons), not because they have any actual scientific evidence that they cause anything other than road rage. If I were a scientist looking for a cause of this empty hive problem, cell phones would be the last place I'd look.

[Thor_MN]

34. The only things that can be positively linked to cell phones are

Car accidents due to distracted driving and people overtly displaying that they are thoughtless, selfish jackasses due to use in public places.

[PaulaFarrell]

36. That's just not an accurate statement

The number of cell phone use has increased from 34 miliion 10 years ago to 203 million today in the US alone. Stands to reason the number of masts and MSCs have increased on the same scale. It's just inaccurate to imply that because the technology existed 10 years ago the saturation level was the same - I would guess that cities had the best coverage and some rural areas viirtually none 10 years ago. Also the technology has changed over the last decade - now there's GSM, 3G and Tetra. I'm not saying cell phones are the cause of the bee decline, just that you can't rule it out in such a blanket way based on the fact the technology has been around a while. 10-20 years is nothing. How long did it take to figure out X-rays caused cancer?

[rurallib]

3. The strange part is - where are the bodies?

From all the things I have read about colony collapse you would expect to see little bodies all over the place, but no. Disappeared is the word used in all the stories.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. I think scavengers would get them pretty fast

Anything from ants to birds would see the bee corpse pretty quick and chow down, especially since most worker bees carry pollen, which attracts certain animals.

A new species of mite has been discovered in some colonies in Hawaii. It still hasn't been confirmed as the cause of CCD (Colony Collapse Disease), however.

--p!

[mikelgb]

16. A year or two ago....

I walked out on to my covered patio and there were about 15 - 20 bees buzzing around up in the sky light. I am allergic to bees so I stayed inside most of the day. The next day I went out and they were all dead all over my patio and looked to be about 30 bee caracases. I attributed it to the heat and sun from them being 'trapped' in the sky light.


I dunno.

[Kagemusha]

5. I was just reading that mites seem to be involved.

If that's the case, it would be understandable.. but it doesn't make good copy compared to the cell phone speculation. But just biologically speaking, I can totally understand a mite infestation making worker bees unable to find their proper way.

[Doremus]

7. It's more than mites.

The stragglers left at empty hives have been riddled with several different viruses as well as mites.

I also read something recently about a beekeeper who was spraying his hives for fungus, as he does every year, and noticed that there was very little of it as compared to prior years.

Strange stuff.

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. Fungus increase = global warming. nt

[Javaman]

19. Plus the various scavenger insects are also avoiding the abandoned hives. nt

[Tempest]

8. It's a real problem in California's interior valley as well

For the first time, almond producers had to ship bees in from all over the world to have their trees pollinated this year.

Local stocks of bees completely collapsed over the winter.

[The Stranger]

11. Something about this bee collapse has me very, very worried.

And I can't quite put it into words.

[Javaman]

20. It has the same kind of feeling as

the mutated frogs that have been found in recent years.

Frogs are sort of a bell weather for the environment. Once they have problems it's a sign of bigger things to come.

I feel the same way about the honeybees.

Something so small, yet to vitally important to the earth and it's inhabitants are vanishing.

sort of like the opening scene to a sci-fi horror disaster movie. Like in "close encounters" when they find the fighter planes from 1945 or from "the day after tomorrow" when the ice sheets crack open.

Gives one a case of the heebies.

[Gregorian]

22. I'm very worried also. We are dependent upon them.

Canaries in our coal mine called "earth".


Billions of people can't light petroleum fires and expect not consequences. And that's just what we're doing. Fires. Fumes. CO2. Roads that disrupt normal animal and insect migration. On and on.

I've seen this coming. Although that is jumping to the conclusion that this is a meaningful phenomenon. I'm a conservative when it comes to taking risks. I'll assume it's a meaningful phenomenon.

Stupid humans.

[modrepub]

15. another Backyard Report

This was in my morning paper. Noticed the same thing. Remember being a kid and getting stug at least once a summer when I was running around without shoes. Guess we'll have to use butterflys.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20070426_No_bees__Not_just_strange__but_scary.html

[lovuian]

17. Bees disappearing all over the world its looming extinction

and they are the pollinators and we are in deep trouble

[nashville_brook]

18. the Senate Agrigcultural Committee discussed this Tuesday -- could devastate crops

http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=12512

Mark Brady, president of the American Honey Producers Association Inc., told the committee that "honey bees pollinate more than 90 food, fiber and seed crops. In particular, the fruits, vegetables and nuts that are cornerstones of a balanced and healthy diet are especially dependent on continued access to honey bee pollination."

Brady went on: "The importance of this pollination to contemporary agriculture cannot be understated. The value of pollinated crops is vastly greater than the total value of honey and wax produced by honey bees. The scale of commercial pollination is also vast. Each year more than 140 billion honey bees representing 2 million colonies are employed by U.S. beekeepers across and around the country to pollinate a wide range of important crops."

He asked Congress to "work closely with beekeepers, agricultural producers, researchers and others on an urgent basis to find the causes of CCD and to develop effective measures to address this new and serious threat."

The strange malady became apparent when beekeepers realized that worker bees were vanishing from their hives. The queen bees and the younger bees were all in place, but the ones that do the work for the highly structured society had disappeared and their bodies were nowhere to be found. "This is what makes the phenomenon so hard. There are no actual dead bees to study," said May Berenbaum, head of the entomology department at the University of Illinois.

[The Stranger]

21. The Neocons bankrupted the U.S. for war, torture, and death - money that could have saved the bees

and prevented the nation's people from starving.

Where are the screams for vengeance?

[Gregorian]

23. Two words- Crisis and Denial.

People tend to wait until they see something before they act.

People tend to not believe something until they see it.


Some things are too late once they exhibit themselves.

[Egalitarian]

24. Organically raised bees doing fine according to this

e-mail passed on to me via a sustainability group I belong to:
__________________________________________________________________

You may have heard about recent evidence that commercial honey bee hives are dying in the fields, afflicted by a strange plague recently dubbed colony collapse disorder.

The following article was distributed to an organic beekeepers email list by Sharon Labchuk, a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island.

Sharon has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making a strong showings around 5% for the fledgling Green Party. She is also the leader of the provincial wing of her party.
———————————
Colony Collapse Disorder in domestic honey bees is all the buzz lately, mostly because honey bees pollinate food crops for humans.

However, we would not be so dependent on commercial non-native factory farmed honey bees if we were not killing off native pollinators. Organic agriculture does not use chemicals or crops toxic to bees and, done properly, preserves wildlife habitat in the vicinity, recognizing the intimate relationship between cultivated fields and natural areas.

While no one is certain why honey bee colonies are collapsing, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. Most people think beekeeping is all natural but in commercial operations the bees are treated much like livestock on factory farms.

I’m on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee colony in a tree, for example, the cells bees use for egg-laying will be about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build – the natural size.

The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It’s the same factory farm mentality we’ve used to produce other livestock – bigger is better. But the bigger bees do not fare as well as natural-size bees.

Varroa mites, a relatively new problem in North America, will multiply and gradually weaken a colony of large bees so that it dies within a few years. Mites enter a cell containing larvae just before the cell is capped over with wax. While the cell is capped, the bee transforms into an adult and varroa mites breed and multiply while feeding on the larvae.

The larvae of natural bees spend less time in this capped over stage, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of varroa mites produced. In fact, very low levels of mites are tolerated by the bees and do not affect the health of the colony. Natural-size bees, unlike large bees, detect the presence of varroa mites in capped over cells and can be observed chewing off the wax cap and killing the mites. Colonies of natural-size bees are healthier in the absence mites, which are vectors for many diseases.

It’s now possible to buy small cell foundation from US suppliers, but most beekeepers in Canada have either never heard of small cell beekeeping, aren’t willing to put the effort into changing or are skeptical of the benefits. This alternative is not promoted at all by the Canadian Honey Council, an organization representing the beekeeping industry, which even tells its members on their website that, “The limitations to disease control mean that losses can be high for organic beekeepers.”

Organic beekeeping, as defined by certification agencies, allows the use of less toxic chemicals. It’s more an IPM approach to beekeeping than organic. .

Commercial beekeeping today is just another cog in the wheel of industrial agriculture – necessary because pesticides and habitat loss are killing native pollinators, and vast tracks of monoculture crops aren’t integrated into the natural landscape.

In an organic Canada, native pollinators would flourish and small diversified farms would keep their own natural bees for pollination and local honey sales.

The factory farm aspects of beekeeping, combined with an onslaught of negative environmental factors, puts enough stress on the colonies that they are more susceptible to dying out.

Some small cell beekeeping resources::

Organic Beekeeper list
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/Organicbeekeepers/

Michael Bush’s site:
http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

BeeSource:
http://www.beesource.com/pov/lusby/index.htm

________________________________________________________
And here's a link to the colony collapse disorder working group. The FAQ on ccd is particularly good info. http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/ColonyCollapseDisorderWG.html

Notice that the theory on cell phones is discredited, but also notice that they are not investigating foundation cell size either? Who's funding the research efforts I wonder? My brief research into cell foundation size found that this methodology, while not widely practised, does have supporters who make similar claims to the above e-mail.

Cheers,
Egalitarian

[catgirl]

26. Organic bee farms in Hawaii are freaking out

They did find the mites on some islands and have asked bee keepers not
to transport any bees. These mites came from....you guessed it! Asia!!
They spread quickly. They suck the blood from bees. I'll look for the article
and post.

[catgirl]

27. Here's the link re: bees in Hawaii

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/bee_parasite;_ylt=AjansZVAPE5Lwv3ew.JCgOBhr7sF

Hives are still being checked elsewhere on Oahu but it is too late to hope to eradicate or even contain the infestation, Kliks said.

"The only thing we can try and do is keep the levels of infestation in our managed colonies below what's called the threshold level ... so that we can still produce honey. But keeping it at that level will certainly require quite regular, heavy application of permitted pesticides," he said.

That may mean the end of certified organic honey production on the island.

The appearance of the mites could also hurt island crops that depend on wild bees for pollination, such as coffee, macadamia nuts and pumpkins, Kliks said.

Originally from Asia, varroa mites were first discovered in Wisconsin and Florida in 1987. By the next year, the mites were found in 12 states and have since spread throughout the continental U.S.

The pinhead-sized insects, which are spread through contact between bees, feed off the blood of honeybee adults, larvae and pupae.

[Egalitarian]

42. As I understand it...

If a beekeeper uses 4.9mm cell foundation, then the mites can be present, but their numbers are kept in check due to the more limited volume available within the cavity where the larvae grow. Evidently bees tolerate mites in certain concentrations, but there is a tipping point that is now often exceeded when using the more common 5.4mm cell foundation.

[dweller]

35. if you haven't alread cross-posted this

would you please post in the environment/energy and the rural/farm and the science forums as a stand alone thread?

i'll be glad to do it for you if you'd like w/ attribution. it would be good for more eyes to see this info and then find again after discussion, etc.

thanks
dp

[catgirl]

41. DP- Please cross post

[earth mom]

25. I haven't seen any bees in our yard this year-though dh says he has. However,

our cherry trees only had half their blossoms and one tree doesn't even have any cherries on it yet, while all the others-we have 11 total-have the beginnings of teeny tiny cherries on them which won't ripen for a couple of months. Maybe the 11th tree will catch up...don't know yet.

I am VERY VERY VERY worried and heartsick about the bees! :(

[trogdor]

30. It's a bit early in upstate NY.

Wait another couple of weeks. Our place is typically infested with all sorts of bees and wasps. Unfortunately, this includes carpenter bees, which I spend a good portion of each spring trying to kill off because they eat holes in my house. These resemble bumblebees, except the males (who roam around) have no stingers, but act like they do. The queens stay in the nest and lay eggs, usually a dozen or so. Drione powder does a number on them while in the nests, but a tennis racket is more effective when they're out and about. We usually make a sport of it.

Now, up here in central NY, we don't do as much factory farming as in other places. I bet we get the usual complement of bees going after our rhododendrons like every year.

[earth mom]

32. I'm in the pacific northwest...

and we also have wasps and big black/yellow bumblebees-don't think they are carpenter bees. When I lived in the big bad city, I used to be deathly afraid of ALL bees and wasps but made my peace with them and grew to love them when we moved up here and got our little half acre of land that is filled with all kinds of flowers and fruit. Got to love those buzzing creatures when you realize how hard they have to work. O8) We planted 9 of the cherry trees last spring and were pleasantly surprised this spring to get cherries on them at all and so I agree with you that one of the trees is more than likely a late bloomer.

What was weirdest of all though, was that there was only HALF the blooms on the bottom half of the trees...now that doesn't seem right at all to me and makes me think it's because of a scarcity of bees... :(

[Vinca]

31. We had hardly any bees in our NH garden last year.

Veggies like squash and cucumbers really suffer from lack of bees. This year I'm going to hand pollinate as soon as the blossoms come out. That's fine for a small, home garden, but what will commercial growers do? I'm really worried about this.

[thecrow]

33. Here inVA we usually have honeybees by now

but my lilacs abd wisteria are in full bloom and all I've see is a couplebumblebees and a handful of woodbees.
We have had a bit of weather though, with the northeaster last week and some cool weather today.

[Coes]

37. mobile phones

there has been a test. A hive was surrounded by cell phones. The bees did not return home.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece">link

[bdamomma]

39. this is very troubling.

could it be from cell phone usage, colony collapse, chemical use, it is really troubling.

[Psephos]

43. Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but the cause seems to be a single-celled fungus

But it was fun while it lasted to blame cell phones and the CIA and global warming and all the rest of it, wasn't it? :-)

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-sci-bees26apr26,0,7437491.story?track=mostviewed-storylevel