To bee or not to bee

[Zelig]

This obviously calls for self-replicating robotic bees.

 

[warpus]

It says in the OP dammit!

Thanks. I remember reading it, but I guess I forgot everything! I tend to forget stuff about bees.

As for why a problem in the US might affect other countries, if there's less food being produced in the US, they will have to import more, which means prices worldwide rise.

Hmm maybe this will help the obesity epidemic in the U.S., then? Maybe that's what the bees are trying to do.

 

[Kerozine]

 

[mrt144]

I'm not well versed on plants, pollination, etc etc but how much of our crop base requires bee pollination? For example, is wheat mostly self pollinating? Soybeans? Potatoes?

 

[Narz]

Point 1: Bees pollinate our crops
Point 2: We're losing them at a fast rate. Population is in overall decline

Does it really matter what's causing it? This is a bad trend

It matters what's causing it if we want to try & do something about it.

I'm not well versed on plants, pollination, etc etc but how much of our crop base requires bee pollination? For example, is wheat mostly self pollinating? Soybeans? Potatoes?

According to wiki-answers wheat is wind-pollinated. Course you always have to double check wiki stuff.

 

[Dachs]

should not have taken this long to be posted

 

[mrt144]

It matters what's causing it if we want to try & do something about it.


According to wiki-answers wheat is wind-pollinated. Course you always have to double check wiki stuff.

I only ask because if this primarily affects food that is flower pollinated then this isn't going to destroy civilization given the composition of our diet.

 

[Narz]

I'm no ecologist but I'm sure a bee dieoff isn't particularly good even for crops it doesn't directly effect. Plus man cannot live on bread alone.

 

[mrt144]

I'm no ecologist but I'm sure a bee dieoff isn't particularly good even for crops it doesn't directly effect. Plus man cannot live on bread alone.

Well, try and explain how the staples of the average american diet are really bee sensitive in tertiary ways since obviously secondary and primary effects of bee disappearance don't seem obvious.

 

[Captain Carnage]

Let's bee friends

 

[innonimatu]

Don't we hear about this "The bees are gone! We are doomed!" thing every couple years?

Yes, we do. Just like we hear all kinds of other doomsday prophecies from environmentalists.

There's no evidence that bees are really needed for pollination of corps. Those alarmist numbers are pulled out of thin air. Let´s look at the article quoted in the OP:

where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

So that leaves 0,75^4 = 32% of the bees there were 4 years ago. Where is the reduction in crops which should accompany this reduction in bees?

began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

Knowing both scientists and environmentalists,. I have to wonder if this "new phenomenon" isn't just a natural, temporary, variation in the number of bees for which someone invented a clever propagandist name ("colony collapse disorder"), and which has since then been wildly exaggerated because some groups have been milking it for the attention, research grants, subsidies, or whatever.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

Are there any other sources for these numbers about the decline in bees? Who has verified them independently? If these only report managed colonies, what information do they convey about the total number of bees?

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Estimated by whom?

Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

So the american beekeepers have this "CCD" to explain their losses, and the british ones have regular diseases and difficulties to xplain similar losses... I must again wonder: what if commercial bee keepers are just losing the normal number of bees (they are difficult to control), and "CCD" is just an umbrella term for "explaining" away their losses, allowing them to complain about an imaginary catastrophe - and at some time in the future ask for subsidies!

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be "ring-fenced" for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.
WHY BEES MATTER

Anyone wants to bet that the researchers will "find evidence" of a terrible unknown and unspecified danger, requiring more money for further studies?

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

Really? How dependent, exactly? I mean, if the above was true and if indeed almost 70% of the bees in the US disappeared over the past 4 years, I'd expect production of those agricultural products mentioned above to have fallen appreciably in the US during the period 2006-2009. That is not the case, all I see mentioned here are the usual small changes due to well-known natural causes.

 

[dannyshenanigan]

heh, individually pollentating millions of flowers sounds like a pretty tedious job. However, we can't outsource it, perhaps we should bring some teenage Chinese workers here but then we'd have to pay them the Federal minimum wage... probably the best bet is to actually try to keep the bees alive

Looks like the Chinese already have to manually pollinate in Sichuan province already. I saw a program on either Nature or Nova on PBS about it. They could use everyone in their 1.3 billion population manually pollinating and they still could never come close to doing it as well as bees.

For 3,000 years, farmers in China's Sichuan province pollinated their fruit trees the old-fashioned way: they let the bees do it. Flowers produce nectar that attracts bees, which inadvertently transfer sticky grains of pollen from one flower to another, fertilizing them so they bear fruit. When China rapidly expanded its pear orchards in the 1980s, it stepped up its use of pesticides, and this age-old system of pollination began to unravel. Today, during the spring, the snow-white pear blossoms blanket the hills, but there are no bees to carry the pollen. Instead, thousands of villagers climb through the trees, hand-pollinating them by dipping "pollination sticks"—brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters—into plastic bottles of pollen and then touching them to each of the billions of blossoms. continued...

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141461

 

[illram]

I for one do not welcome our lack of bee overlords. If this is a genuine phenomena we should at least know what's causing it. The numbers, particularly those in dannyshenanigan's article, do seem to show an alarming recent decline.

 

[Cutlass]

I only ask because if this primarily affects food that is flower pollinated then this isn't going to destroy civilization given the composition of our diet.

Not destroy civilization, no. But substantially reduce the availability, and therefor raise the costs, of many fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

The latest piece of straw on the camel's back

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse

Space aliens are no longer abducting humans. They are abducting bees.

 

[Narz]

Estimated by whom?

Probably some guy on an Internet forum.

 

[Annex]

Evidently 10 million dollars of research... while we spend that every five minutes killing A-rabs in the desert. :suicide:

Worth every penny

 

[Yeekim]

Uhh, we don't know? Please, show me the scientific research you knew of before asserting that it was directly attributable to human action. Tell me of the research papers that you have read which attribute it to human causes. Post all of the peer-reviewed research you have read on this subject, to support your assertion that it is human caused. Otherwise, your assertions are completely baseless.

Oh, I see, it's just your "bet". Your ignorant, baseless opinion. Great, now we can ignore it and move on!

Oh. So just because my opinion did not include citations from peer-reviewed research papers, it is suddenly "ignorant and baseless"?
Let me iterate.
You gave me four possible reasons for this disorder. I said that two of them, attributable to human action (insecticides and poor nutrition due to monocultures), exist beyond doubt and therefore, also beyond doubt, contribute to increase the impact of other two possible reasons (viruses and infections).
Therefore the cause is not a single factor, but a mix of factors, including human activity. I would have thought that anyone would be able to recognize this as plain old common sense. That's so obvious I'd even hesitate to call this "opinion".
But if you want to continue hating Narz (and by extension me?) for supposedly pressing some sort of "agenda" and continue to insist on research papers...

Spoiler :

Methods and Principal Findings
Of 61 quantified variables (including adult bee physiology, pathogen loads, and pesticide levels), no single measure emerged as a most-likely cause of CCD. Bees in CCD colonies had higher pathogen loads and were co-infected with a greater number of pathogens than control populations, suggesting either an increased exposure to pathogens or a reduced resistance of bees toward pathogens

Conclusions/Significance

This is the first comprehensive survey of CCD-affected bee populations that suggests CCD involves an interaction between pathogens and other stress factors. We present evidence that this condition is contagious or the result of exposure to a common risk factor. Potentially important areas for future hypothesis-driven research, including the possible legacy effect of mite parasitism and the role of honey bee resistance to pesticides, are highlighted.

Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive Study
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006481

Based on the available research over the past few years on the numerous possible causes of CCD,
USDA concluded in its 2007-2008 progress report (released in June 2009) that “it now seems
clear that no single factor alone is responsible for the malady.” This has led researchers to further
examine the hypothesis that CCD may be “a syndrome caused by many different factors, working
in combination or synergistically.” Currently, USDA states, researchers are focusing on three
major possibilities:
• pesticides that may be having unexpected negative effects on honey bees;
• a new parasite or pathogen that may be attacking honey bees, such as the parasite
Nosema ceranae or viruses; and
• a combination of existing stresses that may compromise the immune system of
bees and disrupt their social system, making colonies more susceptible to disease
and collapse. Stresses could include high levels of infection by the Varroa mite;
poor nutrition due to apiary overcrowding, pollination of crops with low
nutritional value, or pollen or nectar scarcity; exposure to limited or
contaminated water supplies; and migratory stress.

CRS Report for Congress
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33938.pdf

Findings to date indicate the sub-lethal effects of two common miticides on honey bees, as well as a synergistic effect of two pesticides (where the combination of the two compounds was shown to be more toxic than either compound alone), indicating the reality of these threats to bees and need for further research. Studies have also confirmed suspected links between poor colony health and inadequate diet and long distance transportation

Colony Collapse Disorder Progress Report
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ccd_progressreport.pdf

What a surprise. It seems they all iterate my completely "ignorant and baseless opinion".

indeed.

 

[Yeekim]

Estimated by whom?

The monetary value of honey bees as commercial pollinators in the United States is
estimated at about $15-$20 billion annually.

Compiled by CRS using values reported in R. A. Morse, and N.W. Calderone, The Value of Honey Bees
as Pollinators of U.S. Crops in 2000, March 2000, Cornell University, http://www.masterbeekeeper.org/pdf/
pollination.pdf.

If it's $15bn in US alone, £24bn worldwide doesn't seem like a stretch. Not to mentione the skyrocketing of prices should productions plumment by a third.

 

[Mise]

What a surprise. It seems they all iterate my completely "ignorant and baseless opinion".

indeed.

Lets be clear, this is ignorant and baseless:

Because the factor causing CCD might have been present for last couple thousand years of beekeeping and it's just a coincidence it started to manifest itself this decade? Yeah, that sounds credible.

There is absolutely NO reason to believe that, just because the disorder is happening in recent years, it is attributable to something done by humans in recent years.

This is not ignorant and baseless:

Spoiler :

Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive Study
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006481

CRS Report for Congress
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33938.pdf

Colony Collapse Disorder Progress Report
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ccd_progressreport.pdf

However, what is ignorant and baseless is saying "CCD is caused by human activity", without first reading these, and knowing the facts beforehand. What you have done is made a guess -- in your own words, a "bet" -- that "CCD is caused by human activity", and then went off and googled some stuff that supports that ignorant and baseless guess. And please do not do the typical internet BS and tell me you are some kind of expert on bee-keeping...

This is not ignorant and baseless:

the cause is not a single factor, but a mix of factors, including human activity.

In fact, it was stated plainly in the article that the OIE said there was no single cause; basing your opinions on what an international animal health organisation says is not ignorant and baseless. However, you instead drew that conclusion from this:

Because the factor causing CCD might have been present for last couple thousand years of beekeeping and it's just a coincidence it started to manifest itself this decade? Yeah, that sounds credible.

Which is ignorant and baseless.

This is not ignorant and baseless:

You gave me four possible reasons for this disorder. I said that two of them, attributable to human action (insecticides and poor nutrition due to monocultures),

Again, it's based on what's said in the article. However, this is ignorant and baseless:

exist beyond doubt and therefore, also beyond doubt, contribute to increase the impact of other two possible reasons (viruses and infections).

It's true that, for example, insecticides exist beyond doubt. But it is completely illogical to conclude that, since insecticides exist, and they are sprayed on things that bees come into contact with, insecticides cause CCD.

It's not what you say that makes your opinions ignorant and baseless. You can arrive at the correct results from completely false logic, as you have aptly demonstrated above. There is no reason to believe that it is human caused, just because CCD happened to occur recently, rather than several hundred years ago (and who knows what the bee population was several hundred years ago anyway). And further, you've done the classic internet argument of "form a baseless opinion, google some stuff, post links that support your previously baseless opinion, claim that your original baseless opinion was actually based on these peer reviewed scientific articles that you have never read before".

Finally, I have little doubt that what was reported in the article is broadly true. However, I do not go around making ignorant and baseless statements, completely illogical arguments, and drawing false conclusions to support it. Concluding that, since the decline in bee population coincides with an increase in intensive farming methods, the two are causally related, is completely illogical and unscientific. Concluding that, since insecticides exist and bees come into contact with them, they are the cause of CCD, is completely illogical and unscientific. Forming an opinion, then running off to find evidence to support that opinion, is completely illogical and unscientific. There is no need to drag down what might otherwise be a perfectly logical, scientific debate with your ridiculous non sequiturs.