Mise said:It says in the OP dammit!
Mise said: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.
It matters what's causing it if we want to try & do something about it.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
According to wiki-answers wheat is wind-pollinated. Course you always have to double check wiki stuff.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?
should not have taken this long to be posted
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'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.
Don't we hear about this "The bees are gone! We are doomed!" thing every couple years?
where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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
http://www.newsweek.com/id/141461For 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 filtersinto plastic bottles of pollen and then touching them to each of the billions of blossoms. continued...
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.
Space aliens are no longer abducting humans. They are abducting bees.The latest piece of straw on the camel's back
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse
Probably some guy on an Internet forum.Estimated by whom?
Evidently 10 million dollars of research... while we spend that every five minutes killing A-rabs in the desert. :suicide:
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. So just because my opinion did not include citations from peer-reviewed research papers, it is suddenly "ignorant and baseless"?Oh, I see, it's just your "bet". Your ignorant, baseless opinion. Great, now we can ignore it and move on!![]()
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
Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive StudyConclusions/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.
CRS Report for CongressBased 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.
Colony Collapse Disorder Progress ReportFindings 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
Estimated by whom?
The monetary value of honey bees as commercial pollinators in the United States is
estimated at about $15-$20 billion annually.
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.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.
Lets be clear, this is ignorant and baseless:What a surprise. It seems they all iterate my completely "ignorant and baseless opinion".
indeed.![]()
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.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.
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...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
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:the cause is not a single factor, but a mix of factors, including human activity.
Which 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.
Again, it's based on what's said in the article. However, this is 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),
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.exist beyond doubt and therefore, also beyond doubt, contribute to increase the impact of other two possible reasons (viruses and infections).