Disappearing bees, and other myths and conspiracies

[urbpan]

I've been feeling some pressure to write about the great bee disappearance even though I don't really know too much about it, and the fact that the mainstream media is all over it kind of turns me off. I do feel like my role is to straighten people out about the hype, and to correct some important misconceptions. The phenomenon is spooky, because the bees that are disappearing are just disappearing. They aren't dropping dead in their hives, they are flying away and leaving the hives empty.

Anyway, important things to know: We are talking about honeybees, semidomestic insects native to Eurasia that have been kept for honey production for millennia. Not any of the other several thousand species of bees, wasps, hornets, etc. (But then again, if those disappeared, it wouldn't be as obvious, because people don't keep them in semi-captive colonies.) So if you are worried about how wild plants in North America are going to reproduce without honeybees, don't, because those wild plants will be pollinated by whatever was pollinating them for the millions of years they existed before honeybees were introduced.

The big problem (and the reason that the corporate controlled media would bother to cover a story about an insect species' decline) is that honeybees are used to pollinate commercial crops. Hives are put in to trucks and driven hundreds of miles to farms, and allowed out to pollinate fields of melons, or orchards of plums or whatever crop needs a pollinator to 'bear fruit.' These large scale beekeepers are the ones who are finding big chunks of their (flock? herd?) animal collections simply empty. They are also the ones putting their bees through the stress of a ride on a truck, they are the ones feeding their bees high fructose corn syrup to make up for the fact that many crops are poor nectar producers, and they are ones exposing their bees to crops that have been given insecticides that make all parts of the plant poisonous including the nectar and pollen.

"Why are the bees declining?" begins to sound a little coy, if not naive. (If only someone would write a groundbreaking book about the dangers of widespread insecticide use...)

If you continue to be curious about the missing bees, please read this article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=1829

Comments

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

I was at a Backyard Beekeeper meeting in Ct. recently and some scientists from the Agricultural Experiment Station at University of Connecticut (a chemist, and entomologist, and someone else) spoke. They said that while they're still seriously researching the pesticide angle (especially a relatively new class called, I think, neonicotinoids, at the moment, they are leaning toward a parasitic or viral cause. The reason that commercial bees would be more affected by whatever it is than backyard-kept bees, they think, is the same reason that TB spreads faster in slums than in rural areas: population density and stress. When they're trucked around they're exposed to many more same-species bees from other hives than they would normally be, so the opportunity to get infected is far greater.

[squid-ink.livejournal.com]

OMG I might be going to a meeting at the end of the month (in Weston on the 26th). Turns out I'm from a line of beekeepers and wanted to find out more (I'm in lower Litchfield)

I've heard that these sort of 'collapses' happen alot in the insect world.. it's just that the bees have gotten alot of press because of their commercial value and lets face it, they're cute.

[stealthww.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that hobby beekeepers don't always report hive problems they are experiencing. It's a problem we're experiencing here in Kansas right now.