The Bees Are Vanishing

[SwampDonkey]

What I would like to know is how the public can know what is fact and what is sensational creative reporting. Like as Tom said, how can China dominate the honey market if China has no honey bees?  :

[LOGDOG]

Here's some bee pics as promised ...just wayyyy late.



These bees were part of the group that swarmed in on me on my custom sawing job that I had mentioned earlier in the post.

LOGDOG

[LOGDOG]

These bees opted to hole up in one of my cherry trees here on the farm. I was going to take the tree down and mill it for lumber but after reading the thread I decided to let it stand until they were done with it.

LOGDOG

[LOGDOG]

The cherry tree has honey bees in it. These bees below in my deer feeders are also honey bees. They're about 1/4 mile apart. There's also another nest of honey bees in a big hollow oak in between the two that I didn't get pics of for some reason. Lots of bees though. The black spot are the bees by the way.  ;)

LOGDOG

[TexasTimbers]

Shepard it makes me wonder who is giving Kimmel all this research money (I don't care how simple the "research" it always demands huge bucks) to set a cordless phone by some honeybees to see what happens. :

Donk most of what we read and hear is not 100% accurate. To varying degrees, any story especially by the media is going to be skewn from 1% to 100%.

Thanks for the pics Dog it is good to see you have plenty of bees in your region. You should alert the media that your bee population is healthy and may possibly even be increasing. Of course if you did, the headlines would read:

Swarms of Killer Bees Invade Bossier Parish Louisiana!!!!

[LOGDOG]

Now that's funny! We could sensationalize it the other direction right? I think they call it a spin.  ;)

LOGDOG

[TexasTimbers]

Tom, according to one of your local beekeepers your honey is going to become more scarce at the way things are going. I figured since you are well-connected you might know a beekeeper there (maybe even this guy) or someone who knows a beekeeper.

I haven't talked to my beekeeper in a while but put in my recent order for some honey on his machine and am waiting for his call. that promted me to do a google news search on the latest on the bee thing and the article below came up. I also ran across a Killer Bee article on how the colonies are quickly spreading across florida.

Just wondered what you are hearing if anything through scuttlebutt. Here in my part of Texas we have the Africans and the vanishing honeys. I'll give a more recent update when Mr. Bradfield (our local Bee man) calls me.

I didn't know anything about almonds, still don't know much except I like them smoked, but the California Almond growers are uneasy because the bees are like 60% responsible for their cross pollination which is mandatory to have almond production. Every year one million bees are trucked into Calif to pollinate the blooms on the Almond Trees.

Since I first made this post, alot of research has been done and some of the initial far-fetched theories have been discounted, and some of the more mundane guesses have been at least given more credence if not accepted. One thing for sure is that it is interesting to watch this unfold at least to me. And to see the Killer Bee articles sometimes mixed in with the honey bee stories, when the two are not related to each other, makes me laugh. I guess the media figures while so many people are interested in the honey bee mystery, they may as well capitalize on it. There were 17 deaths last year in the US contributed to Killer Bees. Probably 1700 died from bad cooking. :D Don't repeat that I have no idea how many people died from bad cooking.

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-article.aspx?storyid=107386

[Tom]

I know of him, but, he isn't a member of our Bee Keeper's Association.   I do know some bee keepers and have been one myself, still retaining much interst, and none that I know have a definite idea of what is going on.  I think, in the end, we will have to rely on a University study.  It's going to take someone with the time, backing and knowledge to study it Nationally, if not world-wide.

In the meantime, I haven't the quantity of bees around here that we had once.  I also haven't found a bee tree in a long time.  For years, it has been blamed on mites.  That doesn't explain an empty hive though, only the inability of a swarm to live in the wild.

[TexasTimbers]

I went for my occassional bee update to see what was up, and ran across this nauseating piece of propoganda. What kind of mentality puts together this kind of junk? And what for? I call it "propoganda" for lack of a better term, but propoganda usually means someone is disseminating one thing, to gain something other than what they espouse doesn't it? I can't see the point here or for whom it is being made.

Propoganda Under the Guise of Bee Concern

[Tom]

No worries, Texas Timbers.  It's just a training film.  The worry mongers are just trying to add to the list things that we can worry about, and, in the process trying to train our youth to worry.   You'll notice that some quasi-pornograpic photos are insinuated and some foul language blocked out.  That is part of the training program too.  It is supposed to represent the  disdain for the Establishment.  It's supposed to show that you don't have to be educated to get on the wacko bandwagon.

So, No fear. It's just more people with little education, trying to be important.

[TexasTimbers]

Ah yes. A *training* video. I should have gotten that. Wonder what they will be filming as their next project. Probably that the colors of rainbows are being changed by the effects of too many humans eating pinto beans, releasing excess methane into the atmoshpere and distorting the natural light. Soon, the rainbow will be black and white. Everyone knows before the mass comsumption of pinto beans by humans, the colors of the rainbow spectrum included chartreuse.

I better not give them any ideas.

[Radar67]

That reminds me, I need to venture down to my bee tree and see if they are still there...

[beenthere]

I just ventured past my bee tree (old shagbark hickory that was hit by lightning) and they are still there, after 4 or 5 years now. Don't know how they made it through last years winter, but stayed hunkered down I guess.

[SwampDonkey]

Grandfather used to find them along the river bank when he was young in hollow trees. That was a long time ago. He's been dead at age 87 for 13 years now.

[Tom]

The survive the winter a lot better than they do a mite infestation.  It's the mites that have been responsible for the dimise of so many hives, both farmed and wild, over the last few years.  Many think that this latest problem is mite oriented, or at least a viral infection.

[smoothED]

I seen a documentary where thet think it's a new insectacide bayer is making. They baned it in france. Pear farmers in china have to polinate with paint brushes, there bees are gone.

[TexasTimbers]

Well they got more Chinese in China than they ever had bees. We ain't even got 300 million. Well, we do but we caint count the permanent visitors what ain't on the census rolls.

You couldn't get this current generation to quit their DanGed Xboxes long enough to go out and paint pears with a brush no how.

smoothED I guess you just solved the mystery of the paint brush shortage here. Them Chinese caint send anymore to us til the get done paintin the rest of their pears. Hope they wash all that stuff off of 'em good. Reckon what they dippin them brushes in to smear on the pear blossoms ???

[SwampDonkey]

smoothED I think you watched a Suzuki-ized nature program. I think both PBS or 60 minutes in the US and CBC in Canada where airing there own shows on this. But as Tom pointed out a while back, there is no shortage of bees honey in China, they have got the world market on honey pretty much cornered.  The media with Suzuki like to sensationalize almost to the point of science fiction. I saw that brushing of pear blossoms myself, makes for a good show like milking moose to make cheese. :

[smoothED]

I know everything ya see can't be fact, but there could be something to that new pestacide. Just one more thing the little guys have to put up with. :

[SwampDonkey]

Well yes, pesticides do kill bugs and bugs we don't even want killed. There isn't even an earthworm in a potato field, yet in my garden and under my raspberries they are everywhere. Bumble bees or honey bees must like potato blossoms as much as they do night shade in the forest I would assume.  ;)

[Faron]

I am seeing lots more honeybees this summer on clover and flowers.  Our farms are scattered over a ten mile stretch, and we are seeing them on all of them.  Last summer we didn't see many at all.

[SwampDonkey]

Yeah, interesting. We had a lot more last year, then this year. In August last year the hornets were so thick there were foot ball sized nests all over one of our thinning areas. Wicked.

[TexasTimbers]

Just read an article this a.m. that clarified a few things for me that I had confused. According to the article, which was not addressing any specific area of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), but was just a generalized summation of what is supposed to be the latest thoughts of South Carolina Beekepers.

I kept hearing about the mite being the cause. A virus being the cause. Insecticides being the cause. According to the article all these do have a negative impact on bees. But they are not related to CCD. They refer to that simply as "the unknown." None of them are attributing any of the aforementioned as causing CCD. The actual cause of the mystery is still generally thought to be unknown.

But to back up a bit, the mite that attacks the honey bees, causes them to become less able to breathe and they suffocate. The holes that the mites leave also allow viruses to enter the bees body, and so those that do get attacked by a virus often die from the virus before the mite causes them to suffocate. Didn't say if the mites carry a/any viruses or if the bees get the viruses elsewhere from flying around with a hole in their armor.


What I never heard before, but that the article mentions, is that urban pesticides which are sprayed by homeowners in the morning when the bees are most active are also a danger to bees. I wonder how big of a contributor it can be? This would only pertain to wild honey bees. Citified bees but wild.  Seems like a stretch to me. The article also said there is a hive beetle that attacks hives, taking up comb space,  and eats the honey that the bees store and live on through the "off season" (winter?). 

But the thing that I realized the most is, all the reasons mentioned above are now widely considered not to be related to the mysterious CCD. It sounds like bee experts are backing up on many of their earlier hypotheses. Here is a quote from the article:

Apiculture literature in recent years has stressed the threat of the unknown, whatever it is that causes entire colonies of bees to die or disappear. It was called fall dwindle before it got serious enough nationwide to garner notice and a new name, Colony Collapse Disorder. Nobody has figured out yet why or how that happens . . .

So here we have an article saying that the reason is yet unknown. I have read many other prior articles that quoted various bee experts who gave their opinions, but it all seems to be conjecture at this point to me.

In an unrelated incident in late June, a tractor-trailer hauling 12 million honey bees to the Canadian province of New Brunswick, overturned on the Trans-Canada Highway near the town of St. Leonard. New Brunswick has a shortage of honey bees and needed help getting their blueberry fields pollinated.
The bees "... threw traffic into chaos..."  and the highway was shut down "...as onlookers gathered to have a look the bizarre scene on the busy national highway...".

Police and emergency crews, agricultural experts, 7 beekeepers, paramedics and various other volunteers merged in what sounded like an all-out battle to contain the scene that could have come out of the scenes of a sci-fi movie. The article doesn't give details about the aftermath but it sounds as though they finally got most of them recaptured. However, not before a hungry journalist had to "get her story".

Police said many onlookers were stung by the agitated bees. These included a television journalist who was stung about a dozen times when she tried to catch some bee noises on her microphone.

That's the latest buzz from the bee world.

[Paul_H]

I am seeing lots more honeybees this summer on clover and flowers. 

Our lawn is buzzing with bees too but these ones look different than the honeybees I used to see.These are a little more furry like a bumble bee but they are small like a honey bee.Can anybody ID it from my pics? They wouldn't stop for me to get a better pic. :-\
They love the clover here right now and I'm not going to cut the grass

[Tom]

Probably a worker bumble bee, Pahl

I can't tell, from the picture, which it might be, but here is a link that might help to identify it.

http://www.bumblebee.org/key.htm