Plight of the honey bee sends shivers around globe

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More bee news—this time with a bit of a more global perspective regarding coming food shortages. This is still a very huge issue and concern.

Almost a third of global farm output depends on animal pollination, largely by honey bees.

These foods provide 35 per cent of our calories, most of our minerals, vitamins, and anti-oxidants, and the foundations of gastronomy. Yet the bees are dying - or being killed - at a disturbing pace.

The crisis of ''colony collapse disorder'' has been treated as a niche concern until now, but as the United Nations index of food prices hits an all-time high in real terms (not just nominal) and grain shortages trigger revolutions in the Middle East, it is becoming urgent to know whether the plight of the honey bee risks further exhausting our already thin margin of food global security.

Source

Bees can't survive if they're being poisoned. They also can't survive on genetically modified (fake) food. And now not only are we poisoning them, we're probably genetically modifying them too. This is an old article, but rather interesting. They're not messing with just our plant foods and things like beef and fish, but insects too. How can they not think this would have an enormous impact on the chain?

* Honeybees genetically engineered so they are resistant to diseases and parasites, which have devastated the honeybee population in the last decade. Source

Other recent threads on ATS...

Who killed the honey bee?
If you like eating , you better read this

Other bee news...
From Australia: U.S. quarantine authorities place permanent ban on import of Australian bees

The Importance of Honey Bee Health

Although there has always be concerns about the possible harmful affects and residues left by these chemicals, clothianidin, manufactured and marketed by chemical giant Bayer CropScience in 2003, is considered highly toxic and now suspected as the agent responsible for the demise of honey bee hives around the world.

The company Bayers have a big role in all of this. Thet released a a pesticdie which they new was damaging the bees. what is even worse is the epa let them. There was a leak about it and this turds should be held to account..

kx

This is very sad and worrying.

When are we going to learn to just leave well enough alone. Nature knows itself much better than us and we should learn to live with it, and not try to change it...

this is a huuuge attack on all vegetables and food everywhere...because companies like monsanto are poisoning the bee population, our flora of all sorts will pay the price. vegetables and flowers, shrubs and trees all alike will start to disappear and certain species now in limbo will start to go extinct. it is truly the saddest events i can imagine today...these companies are taking control of the entire ecosystem of the Earth and wreaking havok with no regard to natural cycles and going-ons. This will be stopped, soon. If it's not stopped, there will be a point of critical mass that is crossed and the Earth will have humans to thank for millions of years of recovery.

Yes. All great points. What was newsworthy to me in this story is that it's no longer a "niche" concern and is now being linked in the mainstream to global food shortages. No longer an alarmist "conspiracy" but moving toward reality.

Maybe some good though can finally come of this and we can get rational about it and put an end to these practices and corporations who seem to have no regard for what they are doing here. For those who have been putting the pressure on for years and years now, keep it up

The Varroa mite is a major culprit behind the CCD phenomenon but it seldom gets a mention.

Beekeepers are very aware of what's going on though - it's their business at stake here.

S&F.

All is not lost...

In my neck of the woods we might be seeing a decline in the Hybrids, but the native honey bee species are on the increase, while the local university are working on what they call "The Sussex Plan" to create a hygenic bee from the native British black honey bee.



The Sussex Plan - University of Sussex

Main Aims of the Sussex Plan.
To breed and test a stock of hygienic, native British black honey bees, Apis mellifera mellifera, and to make this available to beekeepers to use in queen rearing and in hives.

So not all species of honey bee are dying off.. some species like the British Black and European dark are making not only a come back, but might also provide a solution to our problems.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


What is shocking - to think that just in the last month there have been three new GMO products unleashed,
Alfalfa, Sugar Beets (not new but now legal) and Corn genetially engineered especially for ethanol produciton!

With Vilsack "I Heart Monsanto" at the helm, and Michael Taylor it looks like we are in for one hell of a ride.

Its beyond comprehension really, I wonder what the plan is when food procution is completely endangered?

Do these mad men have a plan?


There is some great information in this thread also, just in case any one missed it.
Bee Extinction Study Kept Secret

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man," said Albert Einstein

Originally posted by Pilgrum
The Varroa mite is a major culprit behind the CCD phenomenon but it seldom gets a mention.

Vorroa aren't believed to be connected with CCD, sorry. It's more likely the cumulative build up of pesticides/insecticides, but as of yet no singular cause is known, it's still pretty much all speculation... although neo-nicotinoids are now thought to be the prime mover. [I lost 4 hives to CCD btw, and we never had verroa].

Originally posted by dr3ws
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man," said Albert Einstein

That's a misquote, no quote can be found attributed to AE on bees.

Originally posted by ~Lucidity
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/613ac3ffa711.jpg[/atsimg]
More bee news—this time with a bit of a more global perspective regarding coming food shortages. This is still a very huge issue and concern.

Almost a third of global farm output depends on animal pollination, largely by honey bees.

These foods provide 35 per cent of our calories, most of our minerals, vitamins, and anti-oxidants, and the foundations of gastronomy. Yet the bees are dying - or being killed - at a disturbing pace.

The crisis of ''colony collapse disorder'' has been treated as a niche concern until now, but as the United Nations index of food prices hits an all-time high in real terms (not just nominal) and grain shortages trigger revolutions in the Middle East, it is becoming urgent to know whether the plight of the honey bee risks further exhausting our already thin margin of food global security.

Source

Bees can't survive if they're being poisoned. They also can't survive on genetically modified (fake) food. And now not only are we poisoning them, we're probably genetically modifying them too. This is an old article, but rather interesting. They're not messing with just our plant foods and things like beef and fish, but insects too. How can they not think this would have an enormous impact on the chain?

* Honeybees genetically engineered so they are resistant to diseases and parasites, which have devastated the honeybee population in the last decade. Source

Other recent threads on ATS...

Who killed the honey bee?
If you like eating , you better read this

Other bee news...
From Australia: U.S. quarantine authorities place permanent ban on import of Australian bees

The Importance of Honey Bee Health

Although there has always be concerns about the possible harmful affects and residues left by these chemicals, clothianidin, manufactured and marketed by chemical giant Bayer CropScience in 2003, is considered highly toxic and now suspected as the agent responsible for the demise of honey bee hives around the world.

CHEMTRAILS KILLED THE BEES!
and they will kill us too , if we don't stop this poison from the sky get into our lungs!
Einstein said : the humanity will have aproximatly 4 years to live after the bees DIE OFF!
Sad but true ...
This is what the LUCIFERIAN LEADERS THAT LEAD US , ARE DOING...

reply to post by leaualorin


There is a food bubble crisis looming for sure, and bee die-off certainly wont help.

Originally posted by ~Lucidity
Bees can't survive if they're being poisoned. They also can't survive on genetically modified (fake) food. And now not only are we poisoning them, we're probably genetically modifying them too.

Nail on head OP.

We're killing them and that's a fact. Decades of insecticide spraying and pollution have weakened and reduced populations to the point that CCD is clear and obvious but I'd say it was there all along, waiting for weakness to exploit.

reply to post by Pilgrum

Yes, this is happening to some bees in some places as well; however, this was one of the first reasons used to explain the entire vanishing bee phenomenon, but it turns out it is not the only reason, as is now finally coming out.

The mite weakens the bees' immune system but a weakened immune system also makes them more susceptible to other environmental conditions as well. And the answer of the scientific community seems to be this...

Honey bees are now fighting back aggressively against Varroa mites, thanks to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) efforts to develop bees with a genetic trait that allows them to more easily find the mites and toss them out of the broodnest. www.physorg.com...

More genetic engineering?

And this...

The Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) today licensed a miticide for use by Hawaii beekeepers to control the varroa mite, which is considered one of the most serious pests of honeybees. The miticide, Mite-Away Quick Strips TM, is produced by a Canadian company and had been in use in Canada to control varroa mites. The active ingredient, formic acid, is contained on strips that are placed in beehives and is toxic to the mites. www.bigislandvideonews.com...

More pesitcides?

And so it goes....

reply to post by burntheships

Sure sounds like a plan to me most days. I wish I could find that study I read around 2003 or so that spoke about the linkage between Monsanto crop test fields and bee colony migration and decline.

Originally posted by ~Lucidity
reply to post by Pilgrum

 

The Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) today licensed a miticide for use by Hawaii beekeepers to control the varroa mite, which is considered one of the most serious pests of honeybees. The miticide, Mite-Away Quick Strips TM, is produced by a Canadian company and had been in use in Canada to control varroa mites. The active ingredient, formic acid, is contained on strips that are placed in beehives and is toxic to the mites. www.bigislandvideonews.com...

More pesitcides?

Yeah, those strips are commonly used worldwide by all beekeepers with no ill side-effects to bees. [All bee keepers use them because verrora is so prevalent].

Nicotinocides
Nicotinyl pesticides, containing clothianidin, thiametoxam and imidacloprid, used to coat plant seeds, are released into the lymph as a permanent insecticide inside the plant. But after just sucking dew from maize leaves that absorbed neonicotinoids, disoriented bees can't find their way to the apiary. Massive numbers of bees get lost and die. Copies of the film Nicotine Bees were delivered to the US Congress explaining the pesticide's connection to CCD.

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.

Neo-nicotinoids, which were introduced in the 1990s, are applied to seeds and are found in low levels throughout a growing plant - including in its pollen and nectar.

They were introduced to replace controversial organo phosphates because they appeared to be harmless to mammals and people and are used on oil seed rape, wheat, sugar bed and garden centre plants.

The U.S. research has yet to be published, but is discussed in a new documentary film The Strange Disappearance of The Bees.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

New research by Prof. Vincenzo Girolami of the University of Padova in Italy shows Neonicotinoids in maize kill bees via water droplets – within 25 minutes.


Bayer - the German chemical giant that makes many of the neo-nicotinoids used in Europe - insisted its products did not harm bees.

Thank you Lucidity for keeping the disconcerting honey bee issue in the forefront. As much as I would love to read or hear that what is killing them off are the actions of out of control corporations, the matter is much stickier than that. The New York Times, in October of 2010 published an article titled: Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two. A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Here are some more articles regarding CCD from the science journal PLoS One:

Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline

The next article advocates the link between pesticides and other agrochemicals as the culprit:

High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health

It has been and seems to remain difficult to identify the culprit in this horrifying turn of events regarding honey bees, and part of the reason it has been so difficult, as the NY Times explains:

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.

And even though correlation does not prove causation:

Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

If the culprit does indeed turn out to be the combination of a virus and fungus, this would seem to vindicate corporations...at least for the disturbing Colony Collapse Disorder...as to other high crimes and misdemeanors the corporate system has plenty to answer for.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

Great reads. We do have to consider all sides. Thank you.

I agree with this quote in the first article...

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

Even though he is referring to the virus and fungus, I think he needs to expand his reasoning to which came first—nature (the pests/viruses/fungus) or the weakened immune systems due to what we humans have introduced (pesticides and fake food). They do allude to this here...

But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

"Somehow" compromised. Mmmhmm. Somehow.

The answer, as usual, probably lies somewhere in the middle or in some combination.

They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.

And again more agents introduced.

See, it's the "solutions" they're coming up with to fix whatever it is that went wrong that are disturbing to me. Pour more pesticides on top of the problem or make more genetic modifications, this time to the insects themselves. Sounds like a recipe for more disaster to me.

And what's with their attributing this to insect "insanity?" More to learn there for sure, but they're probably simply just fleeing the source of the attack.

With all due respect... I would like to add this for your consideration....

The plot thickens..., no?

Secret life of bees now a little less secret