Bees still suffering from colony collapse disorder
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
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WASHINGTON — The coming winter could be tough for honeybees.
In winter of 2007-2008, more than 36 percent of hives in
North America failed from such miseries as mites and the ailment called colony
collapse disorder, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania’s acting state apiarist. In the
winter of 2006, more than 31 percent of hives failed.
Bee fates in the especially stressful time of winter aren’t
easy to predict, but there was concern at a Washington, D.C.
conference of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign on October 23.
Beekeepers can cope with a certain amount of loss by
dividing the surviving colonies to create replacements. But the beekeepers
themselves may be another matter. “If they lose 30 percent again, some of them
are going out of business,” vanEngelsdorp says. The specialized skills of the
keepers who follow the crops around the country can’t be easily replaced, and
crops might end up wanting for bees to pollinate them.
Already the migrating bee suppliers have dwindled to the
point where providing hives for the almond crop in California requires half the hives in the
country. “There’s no more fat in the system,” says vanEngelsdorp.
Such bee losses “aren’t sustainable,” says Jeff Pettis, who leads
the Bee Research Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in
Beltsville, Md. “If dairy farmers were losing a third of their herds each year,
there would be many people up in arms.”
Pettis is working on a project to explain colony collapse
disorder, commercial honeybees’ latest threat. Starting in the winter of 2006,
beekeepers in North America reported that
worker bees had gone missing from hives, leaving the young brood without
nursemaids..
The mystery has disappeared from the headlines, but bees are
still disappearing. Many factors contribute to the disorder by weakening the
bees, making them susceptible to a final blow. Just what those factors are is
still under investigation.
One of the more recent
findings, from a Pennsylvania
consortium of researchers, is the observation that bees that encase some of
their pollen in wax, creating an entombed red mass, face a higher risk of colony
collapse disorder than bees that don’t.
Pettis and a research task force will release details on
warning signs and other aspects of colony collapse disorder next spring.
Found in: Life
Our brains are formed via the neutron stars of "our" worlds. It the neutron(most information densities every discovered) has enabled our adaptation in life, via our bounds to Gaea, or mother earth. It's what we do with this gift that counts, not the thought(s) that we shouldn't have received such....
I for one would love to keep my neutrons, I just say thank you to the powers at be....
Or soul is based here, we, all mankind, have been born. It's by these ties we must help the creatures of this very earth who has born us for this doing.
Can we not use all our knowledge in a collective manor to do so? We see that new worlds are being beheld as we go.
Our issue is selfishness, we are to use this knowledge to help the other parts of this very earth. In hope of a harmonious balance, of nature by nature, within nature.
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