Honey Bee Collapse

In the last two years (2007 and 2008) about two thirds of the world's honeybees have died and nobody knows why.

There have been several books written about it. I ordered a couple books from Amazon and here is a summary.

"Fruitless Fall" by Rowan Jacobsen

The varroa mite has been plaguing beekeepers for years, and was especially bad in the 1990's. The mite mostly by crawling into the nursery and sucking blood from the baby bees. To control it, beekeepers have been using and ever-increasing amount of poisonous pesticides. It is against the law to use the pesticides while the bees are making honey...but the industry in not regulated very carefully.

In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, many hives started going quiet. Beekeepers originally thought that the mite was back, but the usual signs (dead bees) were not there. Instead, the hives were simply empty. The bees had enough power to leave the hive and not come back. By dissecting the bees still remaining in the hive, beekepers found that the immune system of the bees had collapsed--they had a bee version of AIDS. Overall in 2007, of the 2.4 million hives in the U.S., about 800,000 had died; 30 billion bees dead with no explanation. In Europe, South America, and China, the situation was the same. During the same period, food prices increased about 37%.

Here are some theories:
--Cellphones. Wireless signals confuse the bees who then can't get home. This theory was picked up by the media but bee researchers tested the theory and found it false.
--Genetically modified crops. GM corn has had the genes of a naturally occurring soil bacteria inserted into its DNA. It now produces this bacteria in all its cells; since the bacteria is toxic to insects, it acts like a natural pesticide. Again, bee researchers tested this theory and could not find a basis for it. There were many instances of bee-collapse in non-GM crops, and many survicing hives amid GM crops.
--Varroa mite chemicals. Use of chemicals to battle the Varroa mite hurt the bees, cut the life of the Queen bee in half. Again, no direct evidence.
--Monoculture (single-crop farming). By exposing the bees to just one large crop, and moving the bees from location to location, they lose the natural diversity that should be in their environment, leading to stress and death. Again, no direct evidence.

There was no direct evidence of these theories affected the bees, but it certainly seems logical that the combination of all these could crush the bees. But the scientists have thought of that too, reasoning that since all of these factors have been around for years without CCD, then that couldn't be the reason either.

After many more tests with high tech equipment, many viruses were found but there was no single virus found in every dead hive. The only commonality among all the hives was the presence of a portfolio of disease.

The next theory is based on a pesticide group introduced about 15 years ago using Neonicotinoids, a nerve poison, which almost overnight replaced the old-school pesticides. This new group, using natural pesticide occurring in nightshade plants like tobacco, tomato, and potato plants, are nerve poisons. The human body can eliminate small amounts of these, but insects cannot, making it a perfect poison (from Monsanto's point of view).

Noenicotinoids are so prevalent now, that they form the basis of most of the pesticides sold to consumers in stores, and to farmers (aka, Imidacloprid, Advantage, Merit, Gaucho). Neonicotinoids disrupt the neural pathways of insects, inducing dementia within an hour, but have virtually no effect on humans. Independant studies done in 2001 showed that bees with moderate exposure to neonicotinoids were able to return to the hive, then leave, and never return--the exact behavior observed in a colony collapse. Bees were also fed neonicontinoids inside the hive, survived completely, then flew out of the hive and never returned, bolstering the chemical companies' contention that the poison does not "kill".



More coming...