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"The whole world will be plagued by a strange disease and nobody will be able to find a cure; everybody will say, "I know, I know, because I am learned and smart," but nobody will know anything. People will think and think, but they will not be able to find the right cure, which will be with God's help, all around them and in themselves.
Originally posted by munkey66
reply to post by Muckster
probably because Australia has one of the worst connections around, you lose reception as soon as you leave the city.
Noted University of California, Davis honey bee specialist Eric Mussen fingered a line-up of prime suspects at his “BSI: The Case of the Disappearing Bees” public lecture, sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Mussen identified malnutrition, parasitic mites, infectious microbes and insecticide contamination as among the possible culprits. It’s a complex issue, he said, but one thing is certain: “It seems unlikely that we will find a specific, new and different reason for why bees are dying.”
Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon where bees mysteriously abandon their hives, is not a new occurrence, said Mussen, the Extension Apiculturist at UC Davis since 1976.
“Similar phenomena have been observed since 1869,” he said. “It persisted in 1963, 1964 and 1965 and was called Spring Dwindling, Fall Collapse and Autumn Collapse. Then in 1975, it was called Disappearing Disease.”
“But the disease wasn’t what was disappearing,” Mussen quipped. “The bees were.”
Massive bee die-off also occurred during the winter of 2004-05, but only those who read bee journals knew about it, Mussen told the crowd in the campus Activities Recreation Center. The latest die-off caught the attention of the national media last fall when a Pennsylvania beekeeper asked researchers at Pennsylvania State University to look at samples of his dying bees in Pennsylvania and Florida. “The local media picked up the story and the rest is history, including yours truly on the Lehrer Hour.”
Area researchers believe bee malnutrition contributes to a mysterious phenomenon that wiped out 30 percent of domestic honeybee hives.
"Something like poor nutrition will set up many things," said Gloria Degrandi-Hoffman, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson. "Just like humans, if bees are not eating well they are likely to come down with illnesses and be less resistant to diseases and stresses."
Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, saw vast numbers of adult worker bees abandon their hives and die, leaving crops unpollinated.
Out of 2.5 million hives in the United States, about 750,000 were lost by last winter, said Jeff Pettis, research leader at USDA's Agricultural Research Service Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.
"I think nutrition is one of the basic components of CCD," Degrandi-Hoffman said.
Bees are now tasked with pollinating specialized crops bereft of weeds and other plants offering a more diversified diet of pollens, she said. A third of all food consumed in the U.S. is connected to bee pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Beekeepers are challenged with maintaining the health of hives working monoculture or single crop fields. "If we went out and ate one thing, all day long, we could not do that for long," she said.