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Post by Watchman on Apr 10, 2007 10:59:02 GMT -5
Ecological Apocalypse: Why Are All The Bees Dying? GM, toxic chemicals, chemtrails destroying eco-system, threatening very survival of humanity
Prison Planet | April 10, 2007 Paul Joseph Watson
The alarming decline in bee populations across the United States and Europe represents a potential ecological apocalypse, an environmental catastrophe that could collapse the food chain and wipe out humanity. Who and what is behind this flagrant abuse of the eco-system?
Many people don't realize the vital role bees play in maintaining a balanced eco-system. According to experts, if bees were to become extinct then humanity would perish after just four years.
"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.
Others would say four years is alarmist and that man would find other food sources, but the fact remains that the disappearance of bees is potentially devastating to agriculture and most plant life.
Reports that bee populations are declining at rates of up to 80% in areas of the U.S. and Europe should set alarm bells ringing and demand immediate action on behalf of environmental organizations. Experts are calling the worrying trend "colony collapse disorder" or CCD.
"Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent," reports AFP .
"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.
The article states that U.S. bee colonies have been dropping since 1980 and the number of beekeepers have halved.
Scientists are thus far stumped as to what is causing the decline, ruling out parasites but leaning towards some kind of new toxin or chemical used in agriculture as being responsible. "Experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor," reports Germany's Spiegal Online .
Bee populations throughout Germany have simultaneously dropped 25% and up to 80% in some areas. Poland, Switzerland and Spain are reporting similar declines. Studies have shown that bees are not dying in the hive, something is causing them to lose their sense of orientation so that they cannot return to the hive. Depleted hives are not being raided for their honey by other insects, which normally happens when bees naturally die in the winter, clearly suggesting some kind of poisonous toxin is driving them away.
"In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed."
A study at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004 showed that toxins from a genetically modified maize variant designed to repel insects, when combined with a parasite, resulted in a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" than normal.
"According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."
Kaatz was desperate to continue his studies but funding was cut off.
While we are lectured by government to change our lifestyle and cough up more taxes for the supposed peril of man-made global warming, an environmental catastrophe that could eliminate the human race in the figurative blink of an eye is looming.
Why are major environmental groups and lobbyists ignoring this mammoth threat to our very existence? Where is Greenpeace?
The hyperbole surrounding man-made global warming is swallowing up all the attention while real dangers like the rapid die-off of bee populations and its link to GM food is largely shunned by governments and activist foundations.
Is it a stretch to hypothesize that government mandated spraying of crops with deadly chemicals as well as toxic substances contained in chemtrails could be part of a deliberate program to eliminate the bee population? Or is this just another example of big business flagrantly abusing the eco-system in order to drive up profits?
The elite have publicly stated their desire to significantly reduce world population on numerous occasions. Just yesterday we featured a story about a British Government Ministry of Defence report that postulated on the future use of bio-weapons to thin the human population in under 30 years.
Making bees all but extinct would be a swift and plausibly deniable method of enacting global population reduction long dreamed of by the maniacal sociopaths that control the world.
Either way, this issue represents an overwhelming threat to the food chain and an environmental crime of the highest order, for which the perpetrators need to be brought up on charges of accessories to genocide, should a deliberate effort to endanger the food chain be proven, and the chemicals responsible immediately banned.
Please circulate this article to environmental groups and demand they investigate who and what is killing our bees!
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Post by Watchman on Apr 10, 2007 10:59:34 GMT -5
Mysterious disappearance of US bees creating a buzz
AFP | April 8, 2007 Jean-Louis Santini
US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.
Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent.
According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.
"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.
It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.
There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s.
And the number of beekeepers has halved.
The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.
Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.
"The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California," Brandi said.
California's almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.
The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.
The usual suspects to which bees are known to be vulnerable such as the varroa mite, an external parasite which attacks honey bees and which can wipe out a hive, appear not to be the main cause.
"CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill," entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told the Congress committee.
In cases of colony collapse disorder, flourishing hives are suddenly depopulated leaving few, if any, surviving bees behind.
The queen bee, which is the only one in the hive allowed to reproduce, is found with just a handful of young worker bees and a reserve of food.
Curiously though no dead bees are found either inside or outside the hive.
The fact that other bees or parasites seem to shun the emptied hives raises suspicions that some kind of toxin or chemical is keeping the insects away, Cox-Foster said.
Those bees found in such devastated colonies also all seem to be infected with multiple micro-organisms, many of which are known to be behind stress-related illness in bees.
Scientists working to unravel the mysteries behind CCD believe a new pathogen may be the cause, or a new kind of chemical product which could be weakening the insects' immune systems.
The finger of suspicion is being pointed at agriculture pesticides such as the widely-used neonicotinoides, which are already known to be poisonous to bees.
France saw a huge fall in its bee population in the 1990s, blamed on the insecticide Gaucho which has now been banned in the country.
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Post by Watchman on Apr 19, 2007 19:24:13 GMT -5
Mysterious collapse of honeybee populations threatens national food supply by Christian Evans The honeybee population in the United States is currently suffering a devastating collapse. Honeybees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. Have they all been kidnapped by mad beekeepers, or is something more frightening occurring with the pollinators in our ecosystem? During the final three months of 2006, a distressing number of honeybee colonies began to diminish from the United States, and beekeepers all over the country have reported unprecedented losses. According to scientists, the domesticated honeybee population has declined by about 50% in the last 50 years. Reports of similar losses to the honeybee population have been documented before in beekeeping literature, but are widely believed to have occurred at this scale previously only at a regional level. With outbreaks recorded as far back as 1896, this is regarded as the first national honeybee epidemic in U.S. history. The phenomenon, referred to as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), is not yet well understood. Even the existence of the disorder remains in dispute. Nevertheless, what cannot be denied is that a shortage of honeybees in the continental U.S. has affected cropowners from California to the New England states. "There are shortages [like this] that pop up from time to time," said Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at Princeton University. "Whether there are more [shortages] than there were 20 years ago, one would guess yes, as there are fewer bees to go around, but it's not well documented." Subsequent investigations suggest these outbreaks of unexplained colony collapse were experienced by beekeepers for at least the last two years. Are the honeybees dying in the fields they pollinate, or do they simply become too exhausted and disoriented to find their way back home? Why honeybees are the invisible link to an abundant food supply Whatever the reason, why should we care so much? Why should it matter at all to Americans? When entire bee populations seem to disappear or die out in alarming numbers, the ramifications can be astounding. Bee pollination, which most farmers depend on, is responsible for as much as 30% of the U.S. food supply. "Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation. A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States. These include such diverse food sources as almond blossoms, pumpkins, cucumbers, raspberries, avocados, and alfalfa. Unless something is done to protect the honeybee population soon, many fruits and vegetables may disappear from the food chain. "The sudden and unexplained loss of honeybee populations is an early warning sign for coming disruptions in modern agriculture," explained Mike Adams, executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center non-profit group (www.ConsumerWellness.org). "If we continue to lose honeybees at this rate, we may find ourselves in a dire food supply emergency that will not be easily solved," Adams said. "During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States," said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in the Department of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University's College of Agricultural Sciences. "Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses. This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States," she said. Honeybees are killed by synthetic chemicals Scientists, for now, have primarily attributed the honeybee decline to diseases spread as a result of mites and other parasites as well as the spraying of crops with pesticides. It may also result from the treatment of forests, rangelands and even suburban areas to control a wide variety of pests. "There is no question that the extremely irresponsible use of synthetic chemicals in modern farming practices is significantly contributing to this devastating drop in honeybee populations," said Mike Adams. "The more chemicals we spray on the crops, the more poisoned the pollinators become. And the fact that honeybees are now simply disappearing in huge numbers is a strong indicator that a key chemical burden threshold has been crossed. We may have unwittingly unleashed an agricultural Chernobyl." In order to deal with this devastation, a newly formed CCD working group has been organized in hope of finding a solution to the dwindling honeybee population. According to the CCD mandate, the group will explore "the cause or causes of honeybee colony collapse and finding appropriate strategies to reduce colony loss in the future." Comprised of university faculty researchers, state regulatory officials, cooperative extension educators and industry representatives, the working group hopes to develop management strategies and recommendations for this epidemic. Participating organizations include the USDA/ARS, the Florida Department of Agriculture, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania State University, and Bee Alert, Inc., a technology transfer company affiliated with the University of Montana. Research involving the value of honeybees to agriculture could be beneficial to both the beekeeper and the grower. The knowledge formed from such research maximizes the likelihood of finding answers that will aid beekeepers in promoting good health for honeybees within the pollination industry. It should also keep the grower well informed about the process of pollination and the relative damage of different pesticides to honeybee populations. A detailed, up-to-date report on Colony Collapse Disorder can be found on the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium Web site at www.maarec.orgThe pesticide link to honeybee populations Pesticides, specifically neonicotinioid pesticides, including imidacloprid, clothianiden and thiamethoxam, poison the bee while it is in the process of collecting nectar and pollen. The poisoning may occur when the material is ingested, or it may be transported to the hive where it poisons other bees in the colony. According to a recent report, "Pesticides in Relation to BeeKeeping and Crop Pollination, even organic insecticides -- the chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates, and carbamates -- vary in their toxicity and are not recommended." Pesticides can also damage wild bees, but the toxicity level of a specific insecticide to honeybees and wild bees is not always the same. Even among wild bees, some materials are more toxic to one species than to another. According to the CCD report, "If bees are eating fresh or stored pollen contaminated with these chemicals at low levels, they may not cause mortality but may impact the bee's ability to learn or make memories. This could cause the colonies to dwindle and eventually die." So far a few common management factors have been found, but no common environmental agents or chemicals have been identified. There is no one substance currently being branded as the culprit. Not limited to the United States, this problem is complex and the ramifications are alarming. Such a loss to the honeybee population can occur in other countries that have highly developed agricultural infrastructures. This only begs an even deeper question for society to answer: If we are so dependent on honeybee pollination for our food supply, what happens when the bees are wiped out? Mike Adams calls our current food production situation a "food bubble" and explains that as mankind disrupts nature and destroys sustainable ecosystems, the natural backlash will impact the food supply first. "Following a century of synthetic chemical poisoning of planet Earth, the human race is in for a rather abrupt population correction. The collapse of pollinators is merely a sign of things to come. Humans will either find a way to live in balance with the planet, or they may ultimately face the same fate as the honeybees." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. Newstarget.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NewsTarget.com/terms.shtml
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Post by Watchman on Apr 24, 2007 10:46:56 GMT -5
Honey Bee Die-off Alarms Beekeepers, Crop Growers And ResearchersScience Daily — An alarming die-off of honey bees has beekeepers fighting for commercial survival and crop growers wondering Dadant & Sons Inc "During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States," says Maryann Frazier, apiculture extension associate in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. "Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses. "This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States," she says. "Because the number of managed honey bee colonies is less than half of what it was 25 years ago, states such as Pennsylvania can ill afford these heavy losses." A working group of university faculty researchers, state regulatory officials, cooperative extension educators and industry representatives is working to identify the cause or causes of Colony Collapse Disorder and to develop management strategies and recommendations for beekeepers. Participating organizations include Penn State, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agriculture departments in Pennsylvania and Florida, and Bee Alert Technology Inc., a technology transfer company affiliated with the University of Montana. "Preliminary work has identified several likely factors that could be causing or contributing to CCD," says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. "Among them are mites and associated diseases, some unknown pathogenic disease and pesticide contamination or poisoning." Initial studies of dying colonies revealed a large number of disease organisms present, with no one disease being identified as the culprit, vanEngelsdorp explains. Ongoing case studies and surveys of beekeepers experiencing CCD have found a few common management factors, but no common environmental agents or chemicals have been identified. The beekeeping industry has been quick to respond to the crisis. The National Honey Board has pledged $13,000 of emergency funding to the CCD working group. Other organizations, such as the Florida State Beekeepers Association, are working with their membership to commit additional funds. This latest loss of colonies could seriously affect the production of several important crops that rely on pollination services provided by commercial beekeepers. "For instance, the state's $45 million apple crop -- the fourth largest in the country -- is completely dependent on insects for pollination, and 90 percent of that pollination comes from honey bees," Frazier says. "So the value of honey bee pollination to apples is about $40 million." In total, honey bee pollination contributes about $55 million to the value of crops in the state. Besides apples, crops that depend at least in part on honey bee pollination include peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, cherries, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries. Frazier says to cope with a potential shortage of pollination services, growers should plan well ahead. "If growers have an existing contract or relationship with a beekeeper, they should contact that beekeeper as soon as possible to ascertain if the colonies they are counting on will be available," she advises. "If growers do not have an existing arrangement with a beekeeper but are counting on the availability of honey bees in spring, they should not delay but make contact with a beekeeper and arrange for pollination services now. "However, beekeepers overwintering in the north many not know the status of their colonies until they are able to make early spring inspections," she adds. "This should occur in late February or early March but is dependent on weather conditions. Regardless, there is little doubt that honey bees are going to be in short supply this spring and possibly into the summer." A detailed, up-to-date report on Colony Collapse Disorder can be found on the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium Web site at maarec.org. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Penn State/College Of Agricultural Sciences.
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Post by Watchman on May 4, 2007 11:32:45 GMT -5
Honeybee die-off threatens food supply
AP | May 03, 2007 SETH BORENSTEIN
BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.
"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.
While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.
U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies — or about five times the normal winter losses — because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.
Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.
Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.
"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."
Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.
"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.
A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.
Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.
Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse — and we took it for granted."
"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.
Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.
USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.
The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.
A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.
The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.
However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.
Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.
First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.
Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.
What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.
University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.
Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.
Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.
Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.
"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."
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Post by Watchman on Jul 23, 2007 10:29:18 GMT -5
Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees - Scientist
Reuters | July 20, 2007 Julia Hayley
MADRID - A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.
The culprit is a microscopic parasite called nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain's honey industry.
He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries.
"We started in 2000 with the hypothesis that it was pesticides, but soon ruled it out," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
Pesticide traces were present only in a tiny proportion of samples and bee colonies were also dying in areas many miles from cultivated land, he said.
They then ruled out the varroa mite, which is easy to see and which was not present in most of the affected hives.
For a long time Higes and his colleagues thought a parasite called nosema apis, common in wet weather, was killing the bees.
"We saw the spores, but the symptoms were very different and it was happening in dry weather too."
Then he decided to sequence the parasite's DNA and discovered it was an Asian variant, nosema ceranae. Asian honeybees are less vulnerable to it, but it can kill European bees in a matter of days in laboratory conditions.
"Nosema ceranae is far more dangerous and lives in heat and cold. A hive can become infected in two months and the whole colony can collapse in six to 18 months," said Higes, whose team has published a number of papers on the subject.
"We've no doubt at all it's nosema ceranae and we think 50 percent of Spanish hives are infected," he said.
Spain, with 2.3 million hives, is home to a quarter of the European Union's bees.
His team have also identified this parasite in bees from Austria, Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe and assume it has invaded from Asia over a number of years.
Now it seems to have crossed the Atlantic and is present in Canada and Argentina, he said. The Spanish researchers have not tested samples from the United States, where bees have also gone missing.
Treatment for nosema ceranae is effective and cheap -- 1 euro (US$1.4) a hive twice a year -- but beekeepers first have to be convinced the parasite is the problem.
Another theory points a finger at mobile phone aerials, but Higes notes bees use the angle of the sun to navigate and not electromagnetic frequencies.
Other elements, such as drought or misapplied treatments, may play a part in lowering bees' resistance, but Higes is convinced the Asian parasite is the chief assassin.
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Post by Watchman on Oct 18, 2007 10:22:07 GMT -5
Plight of U.S. bumblebees worsens, crops threatened
Looking high and low, Robbin Thorp can no longer find a species of bumblebee that just five years ago was plentiful in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon. Thorp, an emeritus professor of entomology from the University of California at Davis, found one solitary worker last year along a remote mountain trail in the Siskiyou Mountains, but hasn't been able to locate any this year.
He fears that the species -- Franklin's bumblebee -- has gone extinct before anyone could even propose it for the endangered species list. To make matters worse, two other bumblebee species -- one on the East coast, one on the West -- have gone from common to rare.
Amid the uproar over global warming and mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies, concern over the plight of the bumblebee has been confined to scientists laboring in obscurity. But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crops.
Bumblebees are responsible for pollinating an estimated 15 percent of all the crops grown in the United States, worth $3 billion. In the wild, birds and bears depend on bumblebees for berries and fruits.
There is no smoking gun yet, but a recent National Academy of Sciences report on the status of pollinators around the world blames a combination of habitat lost to housing developments and intensive agriculture, pesticides, pollution, and diseases spilling out of greenhouses using commercial bumblebee hives.
'We have been naive' ''We have been naive,'' said Neal Williams, assistant professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. "We haven't been diligent the way we need to be.'' The threat has bumblebee advocates lobbying Congress to allocate more money for research and to create incentives for farmers to leave uncultivated land for habitat. They also want farmers to grow more flowering plants that native bees feed on.
''We are smart enough to deal with this,'' said Laurie Adams, executive director of the Pollinator Partnership. "There is hope.'' Companies in Europe, Israel and Canada adapted bumblebees to commercial use in the early 1990s, and they are now standard in greenhouses raising tomatoes and peppers.
Generating a buzz Demand is growing for bumblebees as supplies of honeybees decline, said Holly Burroughs, general manager for production for the U.S. branch of Koppert Biological Systems, a Netherlands company that sells most of the commercial bumblebees in the United States.
Scientists hoping to pinpoint the cause of the nation's honeybee decline recently identified a previously unknown virus, but stress, parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain suspects.
Unlike honeybees, which came to North America with the European colonists of the 17th century, bumblebees are natives. They collect pollen and nectar, but make very little honey.
A huge problem facing scientists is how ''appallingly little we know about our pollinating resources,'' said University of Illinois entomology Prof. May Berenbaum, who headed the National Academy of Sciences report.
Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, worries that on top of pesticides and habitat loss, disease could be the last straw for many species. ''It definitely could all come crashing down,'' he said.
Source: miamiherald.com
Publication date: 10/17/2007
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Post by Watchman on May 14, 2008 11:20:30 GMT -5
Honeybee Colony Collapse to Devastate Food Companies, Result in Food Scarcity by Mike Adams (see all articles by this author)
(NaturalNews) The ongoing phenomenon of mysterious honeybee deaths is starting to raise alarm in the food industry, which depends heavily on bees to pollinate many critical crops. "Honeybee health and sustainable pollination is a major issue facing American agriculture that is threatening our food supply and endangering our natural environment," said Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State.
I tend to think that honeybees are simply "on strike." They're tired of being slave workers for the very humans who continue to destroy their habitat, pollute their air and water, and steal the labors of their hard work (honey, bee pollen and free pollination services).
Honeybees pollinate 130 different crops, which supply $15 billion worth of food and ingredients each year. One out of every three bites of food on your dinner plate was made possible by honeybee pollination.
The Emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder In late 2006, beekeepers in the United States began to notice that unusual numbers of honeybees were dying during the winter. Beekeepers reported losing between 30 and 90 percent of their bees, in contrast to the usual 20 to 25 percent.
The phenomenon, which continued through last winter, remains unexplained. Some of the potential reasons being investigated for the honeybee die-off are poor nutrition, invasive mites, diseases or toxins, air pollution, or a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, in which bees abruptly desert their hives and die (i.e. they go on strike). In general, human beings have a very poor appreciation of all the services "provided" by Mother Nature, including the removal of CO2 from the air by plants, the turning of soil by worms, and of course the free pollination of crops and orchards by honeybees and other insects.
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and a number of institutions are currently researching the causes of the die-off, the food industry is now entering the fray. International ice-cream giant Haagen-Dazs has announced a new program to fund and encourage research into the problem, with the hopes of staving off a crisis for its own business.
"Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made from the finest all-natural ingredients, and the plight of the honeybee could mean many of the ingredients used in our top flavors, like Vanilla Swiss Almond and Strawberry, would be difficult to source," said Haagen-Dazs brand manager Josh Gellert.
Nearly 40 percent of Haagen-Dazs' ice cream flavors include bee-dependent ingredients. "These are among consumers' favorite flavors," brand director Katty Pien said. "We use 100 percent all-natural ingredients like strawberries, raspberries and almonds which we get from California. The bee problem could badly hurt supply."
The "Haagen-Dazs Loves Honeybees" (HD loves HB) campaign includes the creation of a board of bee scientists to help guide research into the problem, a $150,000 grant to honeybee-related programs at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences and a $100,000 grant to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honeybee Research Facility at the University of California-Davis
"Honeybees are in trouble," said Walter Leal, professor chair of the UC-Davis Entomology Department. "One-third of our nation's food supply depends on bee pollination, but bees are vanishing in massive numbers. This gift will help us to rebuild and revitalize our honeybee program."
The Laidlaw program suffered greatly from budget cuts and faculty retirements during the 1990s, before colony collapse emerged as a problem. The Haagen-Dazs grant will go toward a postdoctoral researcher's salary and toward funding research into colony collapse disorder and sustainable pollination.
At Penn State, the grant money will help purchase equipment that will be used to analyze samples and more effectively detect and identify viruses, pesticides and other potentially harmful substances. It will also fund small student research grants.
Beyond ice cream: The coming era of food scarcity Of course, the honeybees-on-strike problem goes way beyond ice cream. We're talking about one-third of the human food supply here. If honeybees stop doing all the free work they've been doing to pollinate crops, humans are going to find themselves in very difficult situation regarding global food supplies. A global famine is not out of the question here, especially when you combine the loss of honeybee populations with the situation of rapidly deteriorating soil quality across the world's farmlands. Without usable soils and willing insect pollinators, humans will quickly find themselves chewing on their shoelaces, wishing they could bring back the "good days" when honeybees freely volunteered to work, and farm soils actually contained nutrients.
In my view, the collapse of honeybee populations is just one sign of many that humans have pushed Earth's ecosystems over the edge. We've polluted the skies, the land and the waters. We've raped the planet of its minerals, slashed and burned its rainforests, depleted its soils and devastated its wild animal population. We've dumped chemicals, radioactive waste and endless mountains of trash into the oceans and waterways. And then we balk when nature hiccups. We scratch our heads, wondering why some element in nature that we've exploited for so long suddenly stops behaving in the way we want. Why are the ocean fish populations collapsing? Why are our food crops nutritionally depleted? Why are infectious diseases now threatening to unleash a new pandemic? Why are honeybees going on strike?
The answer, of course, is because humans have turned planet Earth into a toxic world. We've poisoned the one thing in the universe that openly and unselfishly offered to give us so much for free. Yet instead of appreciating Mother Nature, we've chosen to betray her. We've turned what was once an Eden into a toxic world, and it's only a matter of time before the destabilizing, harmful practices we've adopted to feed an expanding human population come back to haunt us in a devastating way.
There is a tipping point where Mother Nature will simply refuse to cooperate, and this honeybee collapse is one sign that we may have already crossed a threshold, beyond which balance will only be achieved by a sharp decline in the human population.
Not coincidentally, the loss of food pollinators will cause precisely that. As I've said many times before on NaturalNews, eventually humans will live in balance with nature. The question is whether we will consciously create that balance as a mature species, or if we will be starved into submission by a global ecosystem that refuses to support such a large population of human beings. One thing for sure: The problem of rampant obesity is about to come to an end. A few years from now, the very idea that half the people in any nation could feed themselves into a state of extreme obesity will be considered outlandish.
The alarm bells are ringing, folks. We have reached the limit of the planet's ability to absorb our pollution and environmental devastation. I sadly predict the human species if not mature enough to make the necessary forward-thinking changes, and that it will only learn from disaster. That disaster is coming. Prepare to live in a world where food becomes desperately scarce. Prepare to see the human population collapse in almost precisely the same way the honeybee populations are collapsing.
As go the insects, so go humans.
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