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Beekeepers using tracking devices to protect precious hives
By DAISY NGUYEN
February 22, 2022
WOODLAND, Calif. (AP) — For a few frenzied weeks, beekeepers from around the United States truck billions of honeybees to California to rent them to almond growers who need the insects to pollinate the state’s most valuable crop.
But as almond trees start to bloom, blanketing entire valleys in white and pink flowers, so begin beehive thefts that have become so prevalent that beekeepers are now turning to GPS tracking devices, surveillance cameras and other anti-theft technology to protect their precious colonies.
Hive thefts have been reported elsewhere in the country, most recently three hives containing about 60,000 bees taken from a grocery chain’s garden in central Pennsylvania. They happen at a larger scale and uniquely in California this time of year because bees are most in demand during the largest pollination event in the world.
In the past few weeks, 1,036 beehives worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were reported stolen from orchards statewide, authorities said. The largest heist involved 384 beehives that were taken from a field in Mendocino County, prompting the state beekeepers association to offer a $10,000 reward for information leading to their recovery.
“It’s hard to articulate how it feels to care for your hives all year only to have them stolen from you,” Claire Tauzer wrote on Facebook to spread the word about the reward. A day later, an anonymous tipster led authorities to recover most of the boxes and a forklift stolen from Tauzer’s family business some 55 miles (88 kilometers) away, at a rural property in Yolo County. One suspect was arrested.
Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive
My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered.
By John Knight
Some time ago I read a short story by Roald Dahl called “Royal Jelly.” It’s the tale of a father desperately searching for ways to save his malnourished infant daughter who refuses her mother’s milk. This man is an apiarist, and while looking for answers, he picks up the latest article on royal jelly—the microbial mix that honeybees feed to their larva when they want to raise a new queen. “Royal jelly… must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power,” he eventually tells his wife when she discovers that he has been secretly feeding it to their child, “for on this diet alone, the honey-bee larva increases in weight 1500 times in five days!” Soon his daughter is rapidly gaining weight and ravenous for her milk.
I became fascinated with bees after reading this story. I bought guidebooks, joined beekeeping meet-ups, watched documentaries, and, in 2016, finally sent away for a nuc of 20,000 bees. I asked a friend if she thought this was a good idea, and after a telling pause, she said, “Well, you’ll have to be okay with being that guy.” Undeterred, I installed the bees on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment and began the absurd process of learning how to keep them alive. Incredibly, they flourished, and by October I had perhaps 70,000 bees and had harvested nearly 30 pounds of honey.
Then, in the spring of 2017, disaster struck. The queen wasn’t laying fertilized eggs, and if I didn’t act quickly, the hive would be dead by the end of summer. Thus began a months-long struggle that I only later realized was really about loyalty: mine to the hive, and the hive’s to its queen.
For the first few months I had the hive, I checked on it incessantly. I had no idea what I was looking for, but felt like I had to do something—there were thousands of bees on my roof. If I wasn’t opening the hive to pull out frames and check for eggs, I was watching the bees come and go. Worker bees can fly up to 15 foraging flights a day, and seeing them return with little balls of pollen on their hind legs gave me a strange sense of accomplishment.
And I really did become that guy. I went to a beekeeping class where I met Jessica, another novice beekeeper, and found that just describing how I was lighting my smoker felt good. She knew what it was like. For months, anyone who expressed mild interest in the hive received a personal tour. Even my roommate, who was allergic to bees, found himself standing on the roof bundled in four sweaters and a mosquito net asking when he could go back inside. I had been thinking and reading about bees for so long that I was oblivious to the fact that not everyone shared my enthusiasm. It wasn’t until halfway through the summer that I started noticing how my friends remained on the far side of the roof while I, with bee suit and dish gloves, marched around pulling out frames and yammering on about drones and brood and propolis.
Every beehive is unique, so despite classes and guidebooks, the novice beekeeper inevitably engages in a lot of improvisation. If I had to clear a frame, I brushed the bees off with a feather. When I harvested honey, I used spaghetti strainers and cheesecloth. Worried that my whole approach was too haphazard, I asked Todd Hardie, a friend’s father who has an apiary that provides honey for his distillery in Vermont, to come see the hive. We went up to my roof one night in the middle of a torrential rainstorm, and, incredibly, he was impressed. As I shined a nearly-useless flashlight, he grasped the bottom board and tipped the hive back for a brief moment.
“How many brood chambers did you say you have?”
“Three.”
“And two honey supers?”
“Yes.” We were practically yelling at each other over the rain and wind.
“You’re fine. This is one of the best hives I’ve seen all year.” I felt my heart thump a little more quickly. “I’ve never seen a first-year hive do so well.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the weight.” He said a full hive needs about 60 to 80 pounds of honey to survive the winter. He thought mine probably weighed 100 pounds. It’s rare that a beekeeper can harvest anything their first year. “Whatever you’re doing,” he shouted, “they like it.”
FIGHT TO THE DEATH: Two queens bees battle to the death as worker bees look on. The winner of the fight will be accepted as the new queen. VINTAGE IMAGES (VIA ARTRES)
Shortly after Todd’s visit, my landlord sold our apartment. For weeks I had dreams about beehives wrapped in plastic bags in the back of taxis. Finally, I decided to move out, but to keep a set of keys, leave the hive where it was, and hope the new landlord wouldn’t raise a fuss. I treated for mites (a crucial beekeeping task), made sure food reserves were up, and left the hive to weather the winter.
As far as I can tell, my queen died sometime in the spring. Queens typically live for about four or five years, so this caught me by surprise. A new queen, however, is a regular event in the life of a hive. Beekeepers frequently replace their queens every year or two to introduce genetic variety and ensure that the hive has a strong monarch who can lay enough eggs to keep the population up. Bees can also raise their own queen, and when I did an inspection early that spring, I was pleased to see that mine had taken the initiative. Before she died, my old queen must have laid a few fertilized eggs that worker bees raised as replacements. They would have selected six or seven fertilized (female) eggs and fed them only royal jelly. When the first queen hatched, she would have immediately killed any unhatched competition and ideally flown a few mating flights, storing enough semen in her abdomen to spend the rest of her life laying eggs.
While a newborn queen may seem ruthless, the success of a beehive hinges on allegiance to its queen. Though she can mate with an average of 12 different drones, there is only one queen, which makes for a hive of closely related bees. As a new queen begins to produce her own pheromones, the hive slowly aligns with her as the old bees die and new workers hatch. In a sense, the hive is genetically wired to be loyal to the monarchy. If the hive was to raise multiple queens, or if the workers were to start laying eggs, the interests of the population would slowly fracture.
In a healthy hive, a queen will lay hundreds, sometimes thousands of eggs each day in spring and summer, which she either fertilizes or doesn’t. The fertilized eggs, the females, can either grow to be workers or queens. The unfertilized eggs become male drones that do nothing but inseminate the queen—quite literally, flying bags of semen. Drone bees, though crucial for reproduction, don’t forage or sting or raise brood—they can’t even feed themselves.
A queen that is properly inseminated will lay eggs in a uniform pattern at the center of a frame. In the middle is a large section of worker brood, and along the outside are a few drone cells. Worker cells have flat tops, while the drone cells are slightly raised, like tiny bubbles. But in my frames that spring, I had only scattered drone brood, a sure sign that something was wrong. In a healthy hive, the ratio of workers to drones is about 3-to-1. By late April my ratio was probably closer to 1-to-1, and new drones were hatching every day.
I’m generally terrible at admitting when something is wrong, especially when it comes to the bees. I want so desperately for things to go well that I’ll ignore all signs of impending disaster. When I saw the irregular brood, I told myself all was well—the queen would fill out the rest of the frame soon. When I saw that all the eggs were drones, I reasoned that the workers would be along shortly. I even proudly showed the hive to my mother when she came for a visit, asserting that since my hive had raised its own queen, there was an excellent chance it would thrive.
In late April I signed up for a “bee tour” around Brooklyn with some fellow urban beekeepers to compare notes and do some “field work.” Embarrassingly, I had never seen another hive beside my own. So on a sunny day in May, I rode my bike to a garden deep in Brooklyn. I showed up late and sweaty, and everyone else was already around the hives at the back of the garden. The email had asked us to bring a bee jacket, which I had forgotten, and the only one left was a child’s size. With the sleeves just covering my elbows and the hood unzipped, I bashfully edged up to the group gathered around the veteran beekeeper who had come from upstate to show us city-slickers a thing or two.
It was immediately obvious how poorly my hive was doing. Almost every frame in the perfect hive in front of me was already packed with uniform worker brood and even had a little honey in the corners. The bees were industriously packing in pollen and capping cells, and there was the queen scurrying around keeping things in line.
What had happened to my queen? Perhaps there were no drones in the hive to inseminate her when she hatched—they are killed off in the fall because they become just another mandible to feed in the winter. Some of the first eggs a queen lays in the spring are usually replacement drones, but maybe my hive was still drone-less when the new queen emerged. Or maybe it was too cold for her to take a mating flight. Or maybe the chemicals I used to treat for mites compromised the virility of the drones’ semen. Whatever the cause, seeing this new hive made the effect obvious.
When our host tried to slip inside for a glass of water, I rushed up to him in my absurd children’s jacket, caught him by the shirtsleeve and explained my situation. His face darkened.
“There’s not much you can do, really. Try to get a new queen, but this time of year, most breeders don’t have any left.”
“What will happen if I do nothing?”
“Well, the queen will keep laying drones and soon the workers will all die, and then the drones. If I were you, I’d cut my losses and start again next year.”
Someone else volleyed for his attention, asking whether it was important to use organic sugar for feeding. I extricated myself, and felt the panic set in.
Frantically, I spent the rest of the afternoon calling every queen breeder I could find on the East Coast. I eventually found a man in Florida who could send me a queen that would arrive within days. She would cost $50 with shipping. She’d come by regular mail in a small cage about the size of a granola bar with a candied plug, inside a perforated envelope marked “LIVE BEES.” After you remove the old queen, he said, you place the new one—cage and all—between the hive’s frames, and let her chew her way out through the plug. She’ll be laying eggs in a few days.
THE QUEEN'S COURT: Worker bees keep the queen fed not with pollen or honey, but with royal jelly, a secretion from their head glands. VINTAGE IMAGES (VIA ARTRES)
Bees have about 165 pheromone receptors on their antennae and though it’s not entirely clear how workers “decide” what to do and when (the question of agency is still very much up for debate), it is certain that the queen’s pheromones prompt them to go about their business. When the reigning monarch dies or stops laying eggs in her old age, the change in her pheromones prompts the hive to raise a replacement, as my hive had done. Similarly, if a new queen arrives and releases her pheromones before those of the old queen have dispersed, the hive will consider the new queen an invader, and kill her. Above all, they are loyal to their queen. I did not fully grasp this fact. Because I waited only six hours between queens, the worker bees probably stung my new queen to death within an hour.
A week later, when I realized my new queen was dead, I called Todd with a sinking heart. “The hive is moving in its own direction now,” he said, “and it’s a different direction than the one you want.” In other words, if I did nothing, my honey-producing hive of workers would slowly become an unproductive hive of drones that would all eventually die. My tinkering had seemingly led the bees to cultivating the hive’s demise. But at least in this, I was not alone.
If you’ve heard anything about bees in the past decade, it’s that they are dying. Their disappearance is a serious problem, as domesticated honeybees are responsible for pollinating approximately 80 percent of all fruit, vegetable, and seed crops in the United States. There is still much debate among experts about whether so-called Colony Collapse Disorder is a single problem, or whether it might actually be a convenient catch-all that describes multiple threats to beehives. Pesticides, stress, poor diet, infestation, disease, and mismanagement are all possible culprits. In fact, it may not be ideal for hives to be domesticated in the first place. There are feral bee colonies throughout the country that survive perfectly well on their own, even though many began as domesticated hives, like mine. The root of this difference isn’t entirely understood, but it appears that feral bees are more genetically diverse than their domestic counterparts. In a kind of DNA re-wilding, feral bees develop a greater range of ways to respond to environmental changes. If DNA is a manual and the environment determines which instructions should be used to accommodate a given situation, feral bees simply have more instruction sets to choose from.
My unraveling colony made clear to me the complex, fraught relationship between honeybee and beekeeper. Bees are tremendously self-sufficient, and follow a set of old and finely tuned instincts. The beekeeper, ideally, needs only to nudge them in the right direction to make them do what he wants: pollinate an almond orchard, or survive on a Brooklyn rooftop. But to do this correctly, the beekeeper needs to understand what it is the hive wants. In my case, Todd was telling me, it wanted to die. Its queen gone, and its new queen rejected, my best efforts were being brushed off. In a bizarre mash of genetics, instinct, and husbandry, the hive and I were now at odds.
Near the end of the Roald Dahl story, the child’s mother begins to worry about all the weight her daughter has gained. She is unnerved by her husband’s brash use of the royal jelly and even detects “a touch of the bee about this man.” Finally, she undresses the child to weigh her, and sees that though her abdomen has fattened, her arms don’t seem to have grown proportionally. “The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose,” Dahl writes, “like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.”
The father, on the other hand, is ecstatic. He admits that this isn’t even the first time he’s put royal jelly to good use—he’s been secretly eating it himself for the past year. “Why don’t you cover it up, Mabel?” he says to his wife. “We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.”
As much as I don’t like to admit it, I admire this man. He was determined to fatten up his daughter, and I was determined to save my hive. For better or worse I couldn’t stop tinkering. The hive was headed toward disaster, but I refused to follow.
I called my man in Florida again. I alerted the receptionist at work. This time, when the new queen arrived, rather than placing her cage in the center of the hive with all the other bees, I separated the hive in two with a piece of paper. The bees would eventually chew through and reunite the two sides, but cutting the hive in half might mitigate their aggression. I gave them some food and fresh water, and left the hive alone for two weeks. I figured the queen had a 10 percent chance of making it.
So much remains unknown about bees that most of the time beekeeping feels like a matter of luck. As of this writing, my luck is holding. The hive is raising worker brood with a healthy queen. The drone population has leveled out, and there are two brood chambers flush with capped worker cells. There aren’t as many bees as last year, but two honey supers are nearly full. I don’t know if it will be enough to last the winter, but the new queen seems to be on board with my vision. I don’t see her every time I do an inspection, but frequently I’ll seek her out, just to make sure. She is, after all, my partner-in-crime, my hive’s savior—my little queen.
John Knight is a writer, editor, and beekeeper whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere.
Additional Reading
Beshers, S. N., Huang, Z. Y., Oono, Y., & Robinson, G. E. Social inhibition and the regulation of temporal polyethism in honey bees. Journal of Theoretical Biology 213, 461-479 (2001).
Buchler, R. et al. The influence of genetic origin and its interaction with environmental effects on the survival of Apis mellifera L. colonies in Europe. Journal of Apicultural Research 53, 205-214 (2014).
Chittka A., & Chittka L. Epigenetics of royalty. PLoS Biology 8, e1000532 (2010). Retrieved from doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000532
Dahl, R. “Royal Jelly” The Best of Roald Dahl Vintage, New York (1990).
Guo, X. et al. Recipe for a busy bee: microRNAs in honey bee caste determination. PLoS One 8, e81661 (2013). Retrieved from doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081661
Kamakura, M. Royalactin induces queen differentiation in honeybees. Nature 473, 478-483 (2011).
Meixner, M.D. et al. Occurrence of parasites and pathogens in honey bee colonies used in a European genotype-environment interactions experiment. Journal of Apicultural Research 53, 215-219 (2014).
Oliver, R. “What’s Happening to the Bees? Part 5” American Bee Journal June Issue 679-684 (2014).
Oliver, R. “What’s Happening to the Bees? Part 4” American Bee Journal May Issue 535-542 (2014).
Ratnieks, F.L.W. & Helantera, H. The evolution of extreme altruism and inequality in insect societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 364, 3169–3179 (2009).
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/loyalty-nearly-killed-my-beehive?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Israeli start-up Beewise is saving honey bees from extinction!
Beewise developed Beehome, an AI robotic beehive that houses up to 40 colonies.
Bees find refuge from perilous world in robotic hive
By Ari Rabinovitch
August 9, 2021 12:26 PM EDT
BEIT HAEMEK, Israel, Aug 9 (Reuters) - The buzz of the bees drowned out the hum of the robotic arm, which worked with an efficiency no human beekeeper could match.
One after another the machine scanned stacks of honeycombs that together could house up to two million bees - inspecting them for disease, monitoring for pesticides and reporting in real time any hazards that threatened the colony.
The next-generation hive was developed by Israeli startup Beewise, which says that this kind of around-the-clock care is what is needed to minimize the risk of colonies collapsing.
There has been a drastic fall in bee numbers around the world, largely due to intensive agriculture, the use of pesticides, pests and climate change.
Companies have been pursuing different technologies to try to slow down mass colony collapse, like placing sensors on traditional wooden beehives, or methods to cope with the loss of bees, like artificial pollination.
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CEO Saar Safra and Hallel Schreier, head of research, stand next to a robotic beehive developed by the Israeli startup company Beewise in Beit Haemek, Israel July 29, 2021.
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At roughly the size of a cargo trailer, Beewise's hive houses 24 colonies. Inside, it is equipped with a robotic arm that slides between honeycombs, computer vision and cameras. Color-coded openings on the sides allow bees to come and go.
"Anything a beekeeper would do the robotic mechanism can mimic and do it more effectively without ever getting tired, without going on vacation and without complaining," said CEO Saar Safra.
This includes harvesting honey, applying medicine and combining or splitting hives.
Beewise has already raised $40 million of funding from private investors and over 100 of its systems are in use in Israel and the United States.
Pollen-sized particles give bees immunity to insecticides
By Nick Lavars
June 01, 2021
Scientists have developed a new type of ingestible microparticle that detoxifies common insecticides and could help address dwindling bee populations across the globe pervach/Depositphotos
Bees play a critical role in pollinating many of plants that humans eat and are therefore key to food security, but populations continue to decline rapidly around the world. A number of factors are contributing to this, including habitat loss and drought, but a tiny new ingestible particle developed at Cornell University takes aim at a key one, by detoxifying deadly insecticides before they can do these important critters harm.
Common insecticides like neonicotinoids, which the EU banned in 2016, are used to protect growing crops from hungry insects, but often bees get caught in the crossfire. These toxic substances interfere with the molecules that help bees produce energy, and can disrupt their sleep cycles and leave them immobile and starving.
The new technology is described as an antidote for these types of chemicals, with the researchers first focusing on what are known as organophosphate-based insecticides, which make up around one third of the market. The Cornell University scientists developed a microparticle the size of pollen, which can be packed with enzymes that break down and completely detoxify these insecticides before the bee absorbs them.
The particles can be mixed into pollen patties or sugar water and fed to the bees, with a protective casing safeguarding the enzymes as they pass through the stomach, which is acidic and would otherwise break them down. They instead travel safely through to the midgut, where digestion takes place, and the enzymes can go to work breaking down and detoxifying the organophosphates.
This was first demonstrated through in vitro experiments and then on live bees in the lab, where the insects were fed both an organophosphate pesticide and the particles, while another control group was administered only the organophosphate pesticide. The scientists observed a 100 percent survival rate in the bees fed the particles, while all the unprotected control bees died in the following days.
“We have a solution whereby beekeepers can feed their bees our microparticle products in pollen patties or in a sugar syrup, and it allows them to detoxify the hive of any pesticides that they might find,” says James Webb, a co-author of the paper and CEO of Beemmunity, a spinoff company that is continuing to work on the technology.
Beemmunity is developing the technology to tackle an even broader range of insecticides. Many of these, including neonicotinoids, work by targeting insect proteins. To combat this, Beemmunity is developing particles that, instead of enzymes, feature a special absorptive oil, and a casing made from insect proteins. The idea is that rather than breaking the insecticide down, the particle soaks up and entraps the insecticide within the casing, which can then be safely passed by the bee.
“This is a low-cost, scalable solution which we hope will be a first step to address the insecticide toxicity issue and contribute to the protection of managed pollinators,” says senior author Minglin Ma.
Beemmunity is conducting trials across 240 hives in New Jersey this US summer, with plans to launch its products in February 2022, all going well.
The research was published in the journal Nature Food.
Source: Cornell University
https://newatlas.com/environment/pollen-sized-particles-bees-immunity-insecticides/
Campaign to Save Earth's Honey Bees!
67,321 signatures toward our 80,000 Goal
Sponsor: The Rainforest Site
Urge the EPA to outlaw neonicotinoid pesticides that are killing off honey bees.
It's long been known that Earth's honey bee population is decreasing at an alarming rate. The fact is, much of our natural ecosystem depends on the processes involved with bee pollination, and if this pollination cannot happen, many of our crops — from broccoli to strawberries — will be in grave peril.
In fact, honey bee deaths are reaching a critical point, whereby it may not be possible to reverse the damage. The good news is that much of the population decline can be attributed to reversible human actions, including the use of neonicotinoids, insecticides chemically related to nicotine that cause honeybees, bumblebees, and beneficial ladybugs to literally drop dead.
We can afford insects eating our plant life; but we simply cannot afford a decimation of the honey bee. Write to the EPA asking that these immensely harmful pesticides are outlawed.
The Petition:
To the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency:
If we don't act now to save Earth's honey bee population, we could reach a critical point of no return. You see, the planet's honey bees have been in steady decline for several years now — climate change, parasites, habitat loss are all contributors. Some of these issues are going to be difficult to tackle, but there's one catalyst that humans can act on right now.
Bees are dying in large numbers as a result of the use of certain neonicotinoids to treat our crops over the past decade. Previously thought to be non-toxic to these precious pollinators, more recent peer-reviewed studies have linked the proliferation of neonicotinoids to a decrease in queen production and an increase in "disappeared" bees, the ones that never return to the hive from their foraging trips.
While insect pests are detrimental to our crops, the loss of our honey bees would be catastrophic. We can handle some less-than-ideal produce. But we can't handle a total decimation of our food supply as a result of lack of bee pollination.
You have the power to save our nation's food supply. Don't let this opportunity slip away: outlaw the use of the neonicotinoids killing our honey bees.
https://therainforestsite.greatergood.com/clicktogive/trs/petition/SaveEarthsHoneybees?
Honeybee venom found to be "extremely potent" against breast cancer
By Nick Lavars
September 01, 2020
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Scientists have found a potential new weapon against breast cancer in the venom of honeybees
The natural world is full of compounds that can do us harm, but medical scientists continue to show us how they can be leveraged for good, or even turned into lifesaving drugs. A groundbreaking discovery made by scientists in Australia is the latest example of this, with the team demonstrating how an ingredient in honeybee venom can be used as an “extremely potent” weapon against breast cancer.
The research was conducted at Australia’s Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, where scientist Ciara Duffy has spent the last few years investigating the therapeutic potential of honeybee venom.
We've previously seen how certain peptides and proteins in bee venom could be used to ferry drugs across the blood brain barrier and even build sensors for explosives, but Duffy’s research focuses on how it might be used to treat various breast cancers. Her work focuses on an active compound in honeybee venom called melittin, and how it can induce cell death in different clinical subtypes of breast cancer.
"We tested honeybee venom on normal breast cells, and cells from the clinical subtypes of breast cancer: hormone receptor positive, HER2-enriched, and triple-negative breast cancer,” Duffy explains.
The team found that a certain concentration of honeybee venom could be used to induce death in 100 percent of the cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells largely unharmed. Melittin, meanwhile, was found to “completely destroy cancer cell membranes within 60 minutes,” according to Duffy.
"We found both honeybee venom and melittin significantly, selectively and rapidly reduced the viability of triple-negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer cells,” she says. “The venom was extremely potent.”
The scientists made some interesting observations around how melittin works. Within 20 minutes, the team found, the compound acts to block some of the key signaling pathways used by the cancer cells to grow and reproduce. This ability of melittin to shut down these key chemical messages by suppressing the activity of certain receptors was a key finding of the study, and one that has the team enthusiastic about where the research could lead.
"This is an incredibly exciting observation that melittin, a major component of honeybee venom, can suppress the growth of deadly breast cancer cells, particularly triple-negative breast cancer,” says Western Australia's Chief Scientist Professor Peter Klinken. "Significantly, this study demonstrates how melittin interferes with signaling pathways within breast cancer cells to reduce cell replication. It provides another wonderful example of where compounds in nature can be used to treat human diseases.”
Promisingly, the team also produced synthetic forms of melitten and tested it against the cancer cells, finding that it mirrored the majority of the anti-cancer properties of the natural version. One of its functions is the puncturing of breast cancer cell membranes, so the scientists investigated whether it could be used in combination with existing cancer therapies like chemotherapy drugs, potentially allowing them easier access to the cancer cells.
"We found that melittin can be used with small molecules or chemotherapies, such as docetaxel, to treat highly-aggressive types of breast cancer,” says Duffy. “The combination of melittin and docetaxel was extremely efficient in reducing tumor growth in mice."
While hugely promising, it is very early days for the research. From here, the team hopes to carry out further studies exploring the best ways of delivering melittin, along with the potential for toxic side effects and what might constitute a safe dose.
The research was published in the journal Nature Precision Oncology.
https://newatlas.com/medical/study-honeybee-venom-breast-cancer-cells/
The EPA Has Just Banned 12 Pesticides After Learning Our Bee Problem Is Worse Than We Previously Thought
By Matthew Russell
The Environmental Protection Agency has just cancelled 12 pesticides linked to the decline of pollinator populations around the world.
The EPAs decision was informed by two studies on the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hungary. The studies found that neonics kill bees and disrupt their reproductive cycles.
According to a report by PBS, neonicotinoids do not immediately harm bee colonies, so the effects of these pesticides is difficult to track. Over time, however, they lower a colony’s capacity to reproduce, and survive into the following generation.
Seven of the 12 pesticides involved in the EPA’s decision were made for seed coatings, intended to promote plant growth while keeping pets away.
Nearly a third of all bees on planet earth have been dieing off, yearly. Source: Pixabay
Active ingredients in neonic pesticides, clothianidin and thiamethoxam, are water-soluble, and can be flushed into local water supplies following irrigation or rain. Amro Zayed, a biologist at York University in Toronto, found that the chemicals can then be traced to flowers and plants miles away, expressed in pollen in nectar, before exposing bees ( https://tinyurl.com/ydg32xl8 ).
Zayed’s study was published in the journal Science, and marks the first time neonic poisoning has been documented outside of the crops which the pesticides are directly applied to.
Moreover, other common fungicides like linuron or boscalid can make neonics even more toxic to bees. When mixed with clothianidin or thiamethoxam, it takes half as much of the chemical cocktail to kill bees as it does when the substances are isolated.
Pesticides manufactured by Syngenta, Valent and Bayer are involved in the EPA’s cancellation.
“After five years of litigation, this settlement represents a positive outcome in the interest of all parties. The terms clearly support America’s farmers while ensuring continued protection of the environment,” Syngenta said in a statement. “The settlement allows growers continued access to trusted neonicotinoid products containing thiamethoxam, essential for controlling destructive pests, managing resistance, and supporting integrated pest management.”
The EPA’s recent cancellation of neonic pesticides involves products from Syngenta, Valent, and Bayer. Source: Pixabay
Without the EPAs support, the pesticides may not be sold or applied in the United States.
“Today’s cancellation of these neonicotinoid pesticides is a hard-won battle and landmark step in the right direction,” said Center for Food Safety legal director George Kimbrell. “This entire class of active ingredient soon will be up for re-registration by 2022. These first 12 were just an interim step.”
Forty-seven more neonic-based pesticide products are still on the market.
Bees come in contact with neonic substances when they wash into water systems and become assimilated into flowering plants. Source: Max Pixel
The European Union has all but banned the use of neonic pesticides in 2018. According to Bloomberg, the pesticides are only approved for use in greenhouses, where honeybee habitats are not typically found.
Bees are responsible for pollinating an estimated one-third of the world’s entire food supply. According to Elite Daily, that includes:
* almonds
* apples
* apricots
* avocados
* blueberries
* cantaloupes
* cashews
* coffee
* cranberries
* cucumbers
* eggplants
* grapes
* kiwis
* mangoes
* okra
* peaches
* pears
* peppers
* strawberries
* tangerines
* walnuts
* watermelons
As entomologist Marla Spivak writes for CNN:
“Honeybee colonies are dying at frightening rates. Since 2007, an average of 30% of all colonies have died every winter in the United States. This loss is about twice as high as what U.S. beekeepers consider economically tolerable. In the winter of 2012-13, 29 percent of all colonies died in Canada and 20 percent died in Europe.
The pesticides don’t kill bees immediately, but lower their ability to reproduce. Source: Wikimedia Commons
“Anyone who cares about the health of the planet, for now and for generations to come, needs to answer this wake-up call…” Spivak continues.
“We need good, clean food, and so do our pollinators. If bees do not have enough to eat, we won’t have enough to eat. Dying bees scream a message to us that they cannot survive in our current agricultural and urban environments.”
https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/neonics-ban/
Bees Are ‘On The Brink Of Extinction’ Due In Part To Lack Of Flowers
By Andrea Powell
Bees used to be a common sight in gardens and among wildflowers, but now the vital species is heading toward extinction.
Bees are responsible for one-third of all food crops in the world and help pollinate 80% of wild plants. One in every three bites of food we eat is the product of their hard work.
The once thriving species saw a 90% decline in population and is “now balancing precariously on the brink of extinction,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The rusty patched bumblebee was the first-ever bee to be listed on the endangered species list back in 2017. Bees are an integral part of our food system, but their populations are declining at an alarming rate due to pesticides, Varroa mites, deforestation, climate change, and lack of flowers.
Animal activists and environmentalists are urging people to stop using dangerous neonicotinoid pesticides that kill bees and other pollinators.
Beekeepers continue to battle the parasite mite, Varroa destructor, that attaches to honeybees and sucks their fat body tissue – killing countless colonies every year. The previous chemical strips and non-chemical solutions have started to become ineffective as the mites build up resistance. It is a major problem for beekeepers and one they still haven’t found a permanent solution for.
Activists are determined to preserve the species by protecting their natural habitats and raising awareness on how the increased temperature due to climate change is killing bees.
The past five years have been the hottest on record, which has led to more bees either leaving areas they once lived for cooler areas, or dying. Wild flora, food source for bees, has also died off due to the increased temperature and deforestation.
Peter Soroye, doctoral student at the University of Ottawa, performed a study on how climate change is affecting bumblebees across North America and Europe. The results were posted in the journal Science. “These declines are linked to species being pushed beyond temperatures they haven’t previously had to tolerate,” he states.
The study found, “that an increasing frequency of unusually hot days is increasing local extinction rates, reducing colonization and site occupancy, and decreasing species richness within a region.”
The world cannot survive without bees and changes need to be made in order to protect the most important species on the planet. Albert Einstein said, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
With the increasing air temperature and more natural disasters, flowers and plants that are a food source for bees and other pollinators are being destroyed. Millions of acres have been burned from wildfires, uprooted by tornadoes, and flooded by hurricanes – destroying all food sources for bees and thousands of other species.
Bees are starving in some areas due in part to the lack of wildflowers. One honeybee can visit up to 100 flowers on a single flight, with most bees making multiple flights a day. Project Peril, a signature program of GreaterGood.org, stepped up to help beekeepers in Florida after Hurricane Michael destroyed three million acres of forest. Through generous donations, beekeepers are being provided supplemental feed of sugar and pollen where honeybees live until wild flora returns. Project Peril is committed to saving ALL bee populations working with the best non-profits to help plant bee-friendly forage and raise awareness on the importance of bees.
One of the ways you can help save the bees is by making your yard more bee-friendly. Bee kind and plant native wildflowers that bloom all seasons and forgo dangerous pesticides.
What flowers can I plant for bees?
In order to save the bees, we all need to plant more flowers. Local beekeepers are a great resource of information and can recommend which flowers to plant in your area. Here are some flowers that we know bees love:
Anise Hyssop
Asclepias (AKA Milkweed)
Bergamot
Calendula
Cosmos
Echinacea
Sunflowers
In addition, add a wooden bee house to your yard in a location that gets morning sun. More pretty flowers turns into more bees that pollinate more crops for more food. So as you can see, it is a win for everyone.
Together, we can save the hardworking bees by planting wildflowers for them to feed on. With your help, we are planting pollen-rich wildflowers in areas devastated by natural disasters. Donate now to help save the bees!
National Honey Bee Day was August 15th and bees are in desperate need of our help. Learn more in the video below.
Algae-based feed could help save struggling bee colonies
By Ben Coxworth
May 11, 2020
Honeybees sample dried spirulina (Arthrospira platensis) – its nutritional profile is said to closely resemble that of pollen
Vincent Ricigliano, ARS-USDA
As factors such as habitat loss decrease the number and variety of flowering plants in the environment, beekeepers are increasingly starting to augment their insects' diet with artificial feeds. It now turns out that microalgae may be a particularly good form of "bee chow."
Malnutrition is thought to be a contributing factor to colony collapse disorder, as it amplifies the effect of existing stressors such as pathogens, parasites and pesticides. As a result, many colonies now receive supplemental feeds, designed to replace the naturally-obtained flower pollen that's missing in their diet.
These products are typically made of ingredients like wheat, soy, lentils, yeast and milk proteins. According to scientists from the US Agricultural Research Service, though, such feeds may be lacking in essential nutrients and antioxidants. With that in mind, the researchers have instead looked to spirulina, a type of microscopic blue-green algae.
It was found that the microalgae is high in the amino acids that are required for immune function, protein synthesis and colony growth in honeybees, plus it contains the prebiotics necessary for the growth of beneficial gut bacteria. What's more, the algae can be sustainably grown in shallow ponds, requiring little more than nutrient salts, water and sunlight.
The scientists now plan on conducting field tests, to see if honeybees from nearby colonies will be attracted to a feed product made of spirulina. They are also working on developing new microalgae strains, aimed specifically at use in bee feed.
A paper on the research, which is being led by entomologists Vincent Ricigliano and Michael Simone-Finstrom, was published this week in the journal Adipologie.
Source: United States Department of Agriculture
https://newatlas.com/biology/microalgae-bee-colony-feed/
Campaign to Save Earth's Honey Bees!
55,022 signatures toward our 80,000 Goal
68.78% Complete
Sponsor: The Rainforest Site
Urge the EPA to outlaw neonicotinoid pesticides that are killing off honey bees.
It's long been known that Earth's honey bee population is decreasing at an alarming rate. The fact is, much of our natural ecosystem depends on the processes involved with bee pollination, and if this pollination cannot happen, many of our crops — from broccoli to strawberries — will be in grave peril.
In fact, honey bee deaths are reaching a critical point, whereby it may not be possible to reverse the damage. The good news is that much of the population decline can be attributed to reversible human actions, including the use of neonicotinoids, insecticides chemically related to nicotine that cause honeybees, bumblebees, and beneficial ladybugs to literally drop dead.
We can afford insects eating our plant life; but we simply cannot afford a decimation of the honey bee. Write to the EPA asking that these immensely harmful pesticides are outlawed.
Sign the petition below:
https://theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/clicktogive/ars/petition/SaveEarthsHoneybees
Honeyland: Life lessons from Europe's last wild beekeeper
By Tamara Kovacevic BBC News
9 February 2020
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51401315?fbclid=IwAR3ar2oByAybQvnnRx4u1n-BjepbUda7ZmlPQZkbPQhRqjaeobG5Yfh3Ejo#
The Bee Is Declared The Most Important Living Being On The Planet
By Admin
July 04, 2019
Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more.
The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.
Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.
WHY HAS BEES BEEN DECLARED AS THE MOST VALUABLE LIVING BEING ON OUR PLANET?
The Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA), conducted a study where it was determined that bees are the only living being that it is not a carrier of any type of pathogen, regardless of whether it is a fungus, a virus or a bacterium.
The agriculture of the world depends on 70% of these insects, to put it more clearly and directly, we could say that 70 of 100 foods are intervened in favor by bees.
Also the pollination that the bees make allows the plants to reproduce, of which millions of animals feed, without them, the fauna would soon begin to disappear.
The honey produced by bees, not only serve as food, but also provide many benefits to our health and our skin.
WHAT ARE THE REASONS AND HYPOTHESES ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES?
The Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland, proposes a theory that blames the waves produced thanks to mobile telephony. They explain that these waves emitted during calls are capable of disorienting bees, causing them to lose their sense of direction and therefore their life is put in danger.
The researcher and biologist Daniel Favre, along with other researchers, made 83 experiments that show that bees in the presence of these waves, produce a noise ten times higher than usual, behavior that has been observed to make it known to other bees They are in danger and it is important to leave the hive.
Undoubtedly, the greatest reason for its disappearance is attributed to the constant fumigation of crops, an example of this is what happens in Colombia, since during the last three years 34% of bees with agrotoxins have died of poisoning.
ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM?
There are indeed solutions, the problem is that it is very difficult to carry them out, because there are very entrenched practices in production and agriculture.
However, three solutions are proposed with the hope that they can be done in a short time:
* Prohibit, not reduce, the use of toxic pesticides.
* Promote completely natural agricultural alternatives.
* Perform constant research and monitoring of the health, welfare and conservation of bees.
This is an example of the problem that is being experienced with bees and the urgency of creating changes in our management of resources, says Luciano Grisales, representative to the Chamber of Commerce of Colombia.
It is of vital importance to establish the strategic nature of the protection and repopulation of bees and other pollinators, since not to do so in 10 years would not be counted on bees in Colombia. This would lead to a food catastrophe and a health crisis in the country. - Luciano expressed to Sustainable Week.
Source: Sustainable Week.
https://science-andinfo.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bee-is-declared-most-important.html
Bolsonaro Greenlights New Pesticides Even as Advocates Mourn Half Billion Dead Bees in Brazil
"The death of all these bees is a sign that we're being poisoned."
By Jessica Corbett
staff writer
Tuesday, August 20, 2019 by Common Dreams
A protester holds dead bees prior to the annual shareholders meeting of German chemicals and pharmaceuticals conglomerate Bayer AG on April 26, 2019 in Bonn, Germany. (Photo: Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Pointing to the deaths of more than half a billion bees in Brazil over a period of just four months, beekeepers, experts, and activists are raising concerns about the soaring number of new pesticides greenlighted for use by the Brazilian government since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January—and the threat that it poses to pollinators, people, and the planet.
Indigenous and green groups have expressed alarm about dangers of Bolsonaro's anti-environment policies—especially for the Amazon rainforest—since even before Bolsonaro's inauguration. Recent reports highlighting that the Bolsonaro government has approved a record 290 pesticides so far this year have further heightened worries about his environmental agenda and its consequences.
"Between December 2018 and March 2019, more than 500 million bees were found dead by beekeepers in four Brazilian states," SciDev.net reported Friday, citing figures revealed earlier this year. "Beekeepers' associations and agriculture authorities suspect this was caused by the widespread use of two classes of pesticides—fipronil and neonicotinoids—on flowering crops."
Fipronil is banned by the European Union and classified as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As studies have shown that neonics are harmful to bees, the E.U. and countries such as Canada have moved to outlaw them—while other nations, like the U.S. under the Trump administration, have defied scientists' warnings and rolled back rules.
In Brazil, Bloomberg noted Monday, "the die-off highlighted questions about the ocean of pesticides used in the country's agriculture and whether chemicals are washing through the human food supply—even as the government considers permitting more."
"The death of all these bees is a sign that we're being poisoned," Carlos Alberto Bastos, president of the Apiculturist Association of Brazil's Federal District, told Bloomberg.
US Beekeepers File Suit Against Trump EPA Charging 'Illegal' Approval of Insecticide Linked to Mass Die-Off
"Honeybees and other pollinators are dying in droves because of insecticides like sulfoxaflor, yet the Trump administration removes restriction just to please the chemical industry."
By Jon Queally, staff writer
Friday, September 06, 2019
"It is inappropriate for EPA to solely rely on industry studies to justify bringing sulfoxaflor back into our farm fields," said Michele Colopy of the Pollinator Stewardship Council, a party to the suit. "Die-offs of tens of thousands of bee colonies continue to occur and sulfoxaflor plays a huge role in this problem. EPA is harming not just the beekeepers, their livelihood, and bees, but the nation’s food system." (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
A group of beekeepers joined forces on Friday against Trump's EPA by filing a lawsuit over the agency's move to put a powerful insecticide—one that scientists warn is part of the massive pollinator die-off across the U.S.—back on the market.
The lawsuit (pdf) charges that the EPA's approval of sulfoxaflor—touted by its manufacturer, agro-chemical giant Corteva, as a "next generation neonicotinoid"—was illegally rendered as it put industry interests ahead of the health of pollinators and ignored the available science.
"Honeybees and other pollinators are dying in droves because of insecticides like sulfoxaflor, yet the Trump administration removes restriction just to please the chemical industry," said Greg Loarie, an attorney with Earthjustice, the legal aid group representing the beekeepers. "This is illegal and an affront to our food system, economy, and environment."
According to a statement by Earthjustice:
EPA first approved sulfoxaflor in 2013, but thanks to a lawsuit brought by Pollinator Stewardship Council, the American Beekeeper Federation, and Earthjustice, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The Court ruled EPA failed to obtain reliable studies regarding the impact of sulfoxaflor on honeybee colonies.
In 2016, EPA re-approved sulfoxaflor subject to significant restrictions to reduce the risk to honeybees and other pollinators. On July 12, 2019, without any public notice, the Trump administration removed these restrictions on sulfoxaflor and approved a host of new uses for the bee-killing insecticide.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include beekeeper Jeff Anderson, the Pollinator Stewardship Council, and the American Beekeeper Federation.
"It is inappropriate for EPA to solely rely on industry studies to justify bringing sulfoxaflor back into our farm fields," said Michele Colopy of the Pollinator Stewardship Council. "Die-offs of tens of thousands of bee colonies continue to occur and sulfoxaflor plays a huge role in this problem. EPA is harming not just the beekeepers, their livelihood, and bees, but the nation's food system."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/06/us-beekeepers-file-suit-against-trump-epa-charging-illegal-approval-insecticide
EPA approves use of bee-killing pesticide
Agency also suspends study of bee populations
Award winning bees at the Iowa 2018 State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa. The EPA said Friday it was permitting the broader use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor. (Tom Williams/Roll Call file photo)
By Elvina Nawaguna
Posted Jul 15, 2019 11:00 AM
Just days after another federal agency suspended its periodical study of honey bee populations, the EPA greenlighted the wider use of a pesticide that environmental activists warn could further decimate the pollinators.
A major conservation group says it will take the agency to court over the decision.
The EPA said Friday it was permitting the broader use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor, a move that follows a request by chemical manufacturer Dow AgroSciences LLC.
“EPA is providing long-term certainty for U.S. growers to use an important tool to protect crops and avoid potentially significant economic losses, while maintaining strong protection for pollinators,” Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said Friday.
The EPA approval of sulfoxaflor follows a decision by the Agriculture Department last week to suspend its study of bee populations, a tool that beekeepers use to track the decline of colonies. The USDA cited limited “fiscal and program resources” as justification for its decision to stop collecting the data.
Dow Chemical Co., the former parent of Dow AgroSciences, gave President Donald Trump $1 million for his 2017 inauguration, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics.
Gregg Schmidt, a spokesman for the company, now called Corteva Agriscience following its spinoff after the merger of Dow and DuPont, said it was “pleased” with EPA’s decision. “Growers should have access to tools that can be used safely according to the product label,” he said in an emailed response.
Researchers have observed the sudden and quick disappearance of honey bee colonies in the U.S. and other parts of the world, with implications for ecosystems, crop yields and nutrition.
Blame for the bees’ losses have been assigned to intensive farming practices; planting of a single crop on the same land year after year, or mono-cropping; excessive use of agricultural chemicals and higher temperatures due to climate change, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“Bees are under great threat from the combined effects of climate change, intensive agriculture, pesticides use, biodiversity loss and pollution,” said FAO’s Director-General José Graziano da Silva in a video for World Bee Day in May. “The absence of bees and other pollinators would wipe out coffee, apples, almonds, tomatoes and cocoa to name just a few of the crops that rely on pollination.”
Between April 2018 and the same month this year, beekeepers in the U.S. lost about 40.7 percent of their colonies, according to a report by of the Bee Informed Partnership, a program partly run by the University of Maryland and Auburn University.
“Just looking at the overall picture . . . it’s disconcerting that we’re still seeing elevated losses after over a decade of survey and quite intense work to try to understand and reduce colony loss,” Geoffrey Williams, assistant professor of entomology at Auburn University and co-author, said in comments accompanying the June 19 report. “We don’t seem to be making particularly great progress to reduce overall losses.”
A study published in the journal Nature found exposure to sulfoxaflor reduced bees’ ability to reproduce.
“The Trump EPA’s reckless approval of this bee-killing pesticide across 200 million U.S. acres of crops like strawberries and watermelon without any public process is a terrible blow to imperiled pollinators,” Lori Ann Burd, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, said following EPA’s announcement. “With no opportunity for independent oversight or review, this autocratic administration’s appalling decision to bow to industry and grant broad approval for this highly toxic insecticide leaves us with no choice but to take legal action.”
The Obama administration in 2015 moved to ban the use of the pesticide after a lawsuit brought by beekeepers. Another court decision later prompted the Obama EPA to allow the use of the pesticide although it restricted it to only crops that are not attractive to pollinators.
Dow AgroSciences, the manufacturer of the pesticide, in 2018 filed an application to the EPA for wider use of sulfoxaflor, according to a filing in the Federal Register.
EPA’s decision on Friday not only adds new uses for the pesticides but also removes previous restrictions.
https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/epa-approves-use-of-bee-killing-pesticide
This past winter saw the highest honeybee colony losses on record
On top of colony collapse, beekeepers are now facing unprecedented losses from extreme weather
Bees on a honeycomb this week in La Bollene-Vesubie, France. (Eric Gallard/Reuters)
By Laura Reiley
July 5, 2019
Commercial honeybee colonies have had a rough run. And it’s not over yet. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.
More troubling was this past winter’s losses of 37.7 percent. Winter bees tend to live longer, clustering in the hive to keep the queen warm. This winter’s losses were 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average and the highest winter loss since the annual bee survey began 13 years ago.
Karen Rennich, the partnership’s executive director, said the nonprofit has been collecting loss data from beekeepers and conducting a longer survey of management data since 2010. “We’re trying to drill down and see which management practices are correlated with lower mortality,” she said.
Rennich points to the three months of California wildfires, with bees affected by smoke and by the lack of plants on which to forage. She also cited the wet winter in the Midwest and the spring’s slow planting schedule. But drought, fires, hurricanes and the Midwest’s “bomb cyclone" are just the start of bee woes.
The honeybee crisis of the past decade is often blamed on increased use of fungicides, herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup and pesticides called neonicotinoids. In addition to colony collapse disorder, in recent years bees have suffered from viruses carried by varroa mites, as well as problems with queen vigor, weakened immune systems and poor nutrition. Longtime beekeepers such as David Hackenberg say the bee life span has fallen to just 25 to 30 days. It used to be more than twice that.
A bee outside Moscow last month. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)
When people think of bees, they think of honey. But since the early 1990s, many beekeepers have made the majority of their money renting out their hives to farmers to pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons and squash. (Row crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are wind-pollinated or self-pollinating.)
Hackenberg winters his bees in Trilby, Fla., then he starts his year by pollinating California almonds. (It takes nearly 2 million hives to pollinate California’s almond crop alone, with nearly half the country’s hired-gun pollinator bees trucked in from all over.) After that he heads to Georgia to pollinate peaches, then to Pennsylvania, then to Maine for blueberries and New York for clover honey, before finishing up by pollinating pumpkins back in Pennsylvania. He trucks his bees 80,000 to 100,000 miles each year, moving them up to 22 times.
Hackenberg coined the term “colony collapse disorder” in 2006.
“In 2017 we had 1,671 hives and our losses for the year were 1,458 hives. Last year we had 1,832 hives and lost 2,093 hives,” Hackenberg said this week by phone. And while losing more than 100 percent seems like a mathematical impossibility, he explained: “All we’re doing is making replacement bees to make up for our losses. I’ve been talking to the big guys across the country who had 20,000 hives and they didn’t have 1,000 hives to go to [California’s] almonds. It’s not nice to say, but the almond farmers were renting a lot of empty boxes.”
Our tax dollars have subsidized beekeepers’ losses. The 2014 farm bill earmarked $20 million for the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-Raised Fish Program, known as ELAP, to compensate for losses of livestock, honeybees and farmed fish. That number was bumped up to $34 million in April 2018 to deal with the year’s large number of natural disasters.
“When they established ELAP numbers in 2007 or 2008, they paid out for anything over 17 percent losses, which was fairly normal in the early 2000s,” Hackenberg recalled. “We might have gotten paid 60 cents on the dollar. A year ago, they changed it because they were paying out so much money — they jumped it from 17 to 23 percent losses. Beekeepers are living off our equity.”
Hackenberg is convinced that pesticide, herbicide and fungicide use is the culprit — and there is a lot more fungicide sprayed in a really wet spring — while Rennich said there may be other contributing factors, such as “monocropping,” the growing of a single crop on the same plot year after year, which reduces forage for bees, and the movement of hired-pollinator bees risking the spread of disease.
Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and chief scientist for the Bee Informed Partnership, said that while extreme weather has worsened honeybees’ plight, the biggest threat is varroa mites. It has been hard to develop a chemical compound that will kill the mites without killing the bees.
“There have been products that work, some at 95 percent," he said. "But varroa mites are increasingly resistant, and we’re trying to understand that a little better. They are acting differently than they have in the past.”
Management practices can extend the health and life of bees, but vanEngelsdorp said vigilance is essential.
“That’s the message we’re trying to get across," he said. "People can get their mite population down to zero, and then they stop monitoring. This requires constant monitoring.”
Jim Doan’s bees winter in Florida and spend the rest of the year in New York. Last year he moved his 1,200 hives to the western part of New York’s Allegany County, an area he says is away from high-intensity agriculture.
“This is dairy country, and dairy has taken a downward spiral," Doan said by phone. “And because we’ve seen a lot of rain, nobody has gotten their corn or soy in the ground, so nobody has sprayed. I think it’s about getting bees to a pesticide-free environment.”
“This past year, [bee] mortality was around 70 percent, which is about average for where we’ve been,” he said. "It’s not where I’d like to see it, but it’s better than where it’s been.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/05/last-winter-saw-highest-honeybee-colony-losses-record/
That Big Rig You're Passing Might Be Full of Bees
Illustration: GMG Art Department/Peter Nelson (The Pollinators)
By Andrew P. Collins
6/25/19 11:40am
There are still cowboys driving livestock across America in 2019. While most of us are snoozing, they’re rolling up to dark fields with trucks full of creatures that are critical to our nation’s agriculture: thousands and thousands of bees.
“Very few people know that this happens, and it happens as a necessity of the way our agriculture’s done,” Apiarist and filmmaker Peter Nelson explained to me. “I see bee trucks when I’m on the road, but most people don’t recognize them because it looks like a truck with boxes covered by a net.”
Continues at:
https://jalopnik.com/that-big-rig-youre-passing-might-be-full-of-bees-1834383949
Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive
My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered.
By John Knight
Some time ago I read a short story by Roald Dahl called “Royal Jelly.” It’s the tale of a father desperately searching for ways to save his malnourished infant daughter who refuses her mother’s milk. This man is an apiarist, and while looking for answers, he picks up the latest article on royal jelly—the microbial mix that honeybees feed to their larva when they want to raise a new queen. “Royal jelly… must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power,” he eventually tells his wife when she discovers that he has been secretly feeding it to their child, “for on this diet alone, the honey-bee larva increases in weight 1500 times in five days!” Soon his daughter is rapidly gaining weight and ravenous for her milk.
I became fascinated with bees after reading this story. I bought guidebooks, joined beekeeping meet-ups, watched documentaries, and, last year, finally sent away for a nuc of 20,000 bees. I asked a friend if she thought this was a good idea, and after a telling pause, she said, “Well, you’ll have to be okay with being that guy.” Undeterred, I installed the bees on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment and began the absurd process of learning how to keep them alive. Incredibly, they flourished, and by October I had perhaps 70,000 bees and had harvested nearly 30 pounds of honey.
Then, this past spring, disaster struck. The queen wasn’t laying fertilized eggs, and if I didn’t act quickly, the hive would be dead by the end of summer. Thus began a months-long struggle that I only later realized was really about loyalty: mine to the hive, and the hive’s to its queen.
For the first few months I had the hive, I checked on it incessantly. I had no idea what I was looking for, but felt like I had to do something—there were thousands of bees on my roof. If I wasn’t opening the hive to pull out frames and check for eggs, I was watching the bees come and go. Worker bees can fly up to 15 foraging flights a day, and seeing them return with little balls of pollen on their hind legs gave me a strange sense of accomplishment.
And I really did become that guy. I went to a beekeeping class where I met Jessica, another novice beekeeper, and found that just describing how I was lighting my smoker felt good. She knew what it was like. For months, anyone who expressed mild interest in the hive received a personal tour. Even my roommate, who was allergic to bees, found himself standing on the roof bundled in four sweaters and a mosquito net asking when he could go back inside. I had been thinking and reading about bees for so long that I was oblivious to the fact that not everyone shared my enthusiasm. It wasn’t until halfway through the summer that I started noticing how my friends remained on the far side of the roof while I, with bee suit and dish gloves, marched around pulling out frames and yammering on about drones and brood and propolis.
Every beehive is unique, so despite classes and guidebooks, the novice beekeeper inevitably engages in a lot of improvisation. If I had to clear a frame, I brushed the bees off with a feather. When I harvested honey, I used spaghetti strainers and cheesecloth. Worried that my whole approach was too haphazard, I asked Todd Hardie, a friend’s father who has an apiary that provides honey for his distillery in Vermont, to come see the hive. We went up to my roof one night in the middle of a torrential rainstorm, and, incredibly, he was impressed. As I shined a nearly-useless flashlight, he grasped the bottom board and tipped the hive back for a brief moment.
“How many brood chambers did you say you have?”
“Three.”
“And two honey supers?”
“Yes.” We were practically yelling at each other over the rain and wind.
“You’re fine. This is one of the best hives I’ve seen all year.” I felt my heart thump a little more quickly. “I’ve never seen a first-year hive do so well.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the weight.” He said a full hive needs about 60 to 80 pounds of honey to survive the winter. He thought mine probably weighed 100 pounds. It’s rare that a beekeeper can harvest anything their first year. “Whatever you’re doing,” he shouted, “they like it.”
FIGHT TO THE DEATH: Two queens bees battle to the death as worker bees look on. The winner of the fight will be accepted as the new queen. VINTAGE IMAGES (VIA ARTRES)
Shortly after Todd’s visit, my landlord sold our apartment. For weeks I had dreams about beehives wrapped in plastic bags in the back of taxis. Finally, I decided to move out, but to keep a set of keys, leave the hive where it was, and hope the new landlord wouldn’t raise a fuss. I treated for mites (a crucial beekeeping task), made sure food reserves were up, and left the hive to weather the winter.
As far as I can tell, my queen died sometime in the spring. Queens typically live for about four or five years, so this caught me by surprise. A new queen, however, is a regular event in the life of a hive. Beekeepers frequently replace their queens every year or two to introduce genetic variety and ensure that the hive has a strong monarch who can lay enough eggs to keep the population up. Bees can also raise their own queen, and when I did an inspection early that spring, I was pleased to see that mine had taken the initiative. Before she died, my old queen must have laid a few fertilized eggs that worker bees raised as replacements. They would have selected six or seven fertilized (female) eggs and fed them only royal jelly. When the first queen hatched, she would have immediately killed any unhatched competition and ideally flown a few mating flights, storing enough semen in her abdomen to spend the rest of her life laying eggs.
While a newborn queen may seem ruthless, the success of a beehive hinges on allegiance to its queen. Though she can mate with an average of 12 different drones, there is only one queen, which makes for a hive of closely related bees. As a new queen begins to produce her own pheromones, the hive slowly aligns with her as the old bees die and new workers hatch. In a sense, the hive is genetically wired to be loyal to the monarchy. If the hive was to raise multiple queens, or if the workers were to start laying eggs, the interests of the population would slowly fracture.
In a healthy hive, a queen will lay hundreds, sometimes thousands of eggs each day in spring and summer, which she either fertilizes or doesn’t. The fertilized eggs, the females, can either grow to be workers or queens. The unfertilized eggs become male drones that do nothing but inseminate the queen—quite literally, flying bags of semen. Drone bees, though crucial for reproduction, don’t forage or sting or raise brood—they can’t even feed themselves.
A queen that is properly inseminated will lay eggs in a uniform pattern at the center of a frame. In the middle is a large section of worker brood, and along the outside are a few drone cells. Worker cells have flat tops, while the drone cells are slightly raised, like tiny bubbles. But in my frames that spring, I had only scattered drone brood, a sure sign that something was wrong. In a healthy hive, the ratio of workers to drones is about 3-to-1. By late April my ratio was probably closer to 1-to-1, and new drones were hatching every day.
I’m generally terrible at admitting when something is wrong, especially when it comes to the bees. I want so desperately for things to go well that I’ll ignore all signs of impending disaster. When I saw the irregular brood, I told myself all was well—the queen would fill out the rest of the frame soon. When I saw that all the eggs were drones, I reasoned that the workers would be along shortly. I even proudly showed the hive to my mother when she came for a visit, asserting that since my hive had raised its own queen, there was an excellent chance it would thrive.
In late April I signed up for a “bee tour” around Brooklyn with some fellow urban beekeepers to compare notes and do some “field work.” Embarrassingly, I had never seen another hive beside my own. So on a sunny day in May, I rode my bike to a garden deep in Brooklyn. I showed up late and sweaty, and everyone else was already around the hives at the back of the garden. The email had asked us to bring a bee jacket, which I had forgotten, and the only one left was a child’s size. With the sleeves just covering my elbows and the hood unzipped, I bashfully edged up to the group gathered around the veteran beekeeper who had come from upstate to show us city-slickers a thing or two.
It was immediately obvious how poorly my hive was doing. Almost every frame in the perfect hive in front of me was already packed with uniform worker brood and even had a little honey in the corners. The bees were industriously packing in pollen and capping cells, and there was the queen scurrying around keeping things in line.
What had happened to my queen? Perhaps there were no drones in the hive to inseminate her when she hatched—they are killed off in the fall because they become just another mandible to feed in the winter. Some of the first eggs a queen lays in the spring are usually replacement drones, but maybe my hive was still drone-less when the new queen emerged. Or maybe it was too cold for her to take a mating flight. Or maybe the chemicals I used to treat for mites compromised the virility of the drones’ semen. Whatever the cause, seeing this new hive made the effect obvious.
When our host tried to slip inside for a glass of water, I rushed up to him in my absurd children’s jacket, caught him by the shirtsleeve and explained my situation. His face darkened.
“There’s not much you can do, really. Try to get a new queen, but this time of year, most breeders don’t have any left.”
“What will happen if I do nothing?”
“Well, the queen will keep laying drones and soon the workers will all die, and then the drones. If I were you, I’d cut my losses and start again next year.”
Someone else volleyed for his attention, asking whether it was important to use organic sugar for feeding. I extricated myself, and felt the panic set in.
Frantically, I spent the rest of the afternoon calling every queen breeder I could find on the East Coast. I eventually found a man in Florida who could send me a queen that would arrive within days. She would cost $50 with shipping. She’d come by regular mail in a small cage about the size of a granola bar with a candied plug, inside a perforated envelope marked “LIVE BEES.” After you remove the old queen, he said, you place the new one—cage and all—between the hive’s frames, and let her chew her way out through the plug. She’ll be laying eggs in a few days.
THE QUEEN'S COURT: Worker bees keep the queen fed not with pollen or honey, but with royal jelly, a secretion from their head glands. VINTAGE IMAGES (VIA ARTRES)
Bees have about 165 pheromone receptors on their antennae and though it’s not entirely clear how workers “decide” what to do and when (the question of agency is still very much up for debate), it is certain that the queen’s pheromones prompt them to go about their business. When the reigning monarch dies or stops laying eggs in her old age, the change in her pheromones prompts the hive to raise a replacement, as my hive had done. Similarly, if a new queen arrives and releases her pheromones before those of the old queen have dispersed, the hive will consider the new queen an invader, and kill her. Above all, they are loyal to their queen. I did not fully grasp this fact. Because I waited only six hours between queens, the worker bees probably stung my new queen to death within an hour.
A week later, when I realized my new queen was dead, I called Todd with a sinking heart. “The hive is moving in its own direction now,” he said, “and it’s a different direction than the one you want.” In other words, if I did nothing, my honey-producing hive of workers would slowly become an unproductive hive of drones that would all eventually die. My tinkering had seemingly led the bees to cultivating the hive’s demise. But at least in this, I was not alone.
If you’ve heard anything about bees in the past decade, it’s that they are dying. Their disappearance is a serious problem, as domesticated honeybees are responsible for pollinating approximately 80 percent of all fruit, vegetable, and seed crops in the United States. There is still much debate among experts about whether so-called Colony Collapse Disorder is a single problem, or whether it might actually be a convenient catch-all that describes multiple threats to beehives. Pesticides, stress, poor diet, infestation, disease, and mismanagement are all possible culprits. In fact, it may not be ideal for hives to be domesticated in the first place. There are feral bee colonies throughout the country that survive perfectly well on their own, even though many began as domesticated hives, like mine. The root of this difference isn’t entirely understood, but it appears that feral bees are more genetically diverse than their domestic counterparts. In a kind of DNA re-wilding, feral bees develop a greater range of ways to respond to environmental changes. If DNA is a manual and the environment determines which instructions should be used to accommodate a given situation, feral bees simply have more instruction sets to choose from.
My unraveling colony made clear to me the complex, fraught relationship between honeybee and beekeeper. Bees are tremendously self-sufficient, and follow a set of old and finely tuned instincts. The beekeeper, ideally, needs only to nudge them in the right direction to make them do what he wants: pollinate an almond orchard, or survive on a Brooklyn rooftop. But to do this correctly, the beekeeper needs to understand what it is the hive wants. In my case, Todd was telling me, it wanted to die. Its queen gone, and its new queen rejected, my best efforts were being brushed off. In a bizarre mash of genetics, instinct, and husbandry, the hive and I were now at odds.
Near the end of the Roald Dahl story, the child’s mother begins to worry about all the weight her daughter has gained. She is unnerved by her husband’s brash use of the royal jelly and even detects “a touch of the bee about this man.” Finally, she undresses the child to weigh her, and sees that though her abdomen has fattened, her arms don’t seem to have grown proportionally. “The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose,” Dahl writes, “like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.”
The father, on the other hand, is ecstatic. He admits that this isn’t even the first time he’s put royal jelly to good use—he’s been secretly eating it himself for the past year. “Why don’t you cover it up, Mabel?” he says to his wife. “We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.”
As much as I don’t like to admit it, I admire this man. He was determined to fatten up his daughter, and I was determined to save my hive. For better or worse I couldn’t stop tinkering. The hive was headed toward disaster, but I refused to follow.
I called my man in Florida again. I alerted the receptionist at work. This time, when the new queen arrived, rather than placing her cage in the center of the hive with all the other bees, I separated the hive in two with a piece of paper. The bees would eventually chew through and reunite the two sides, but cutting the hive in half might mitigate their aggression. I gave them some food and fresh water, and left the hive alone for two weeks. I figured the queen had a 10 percent chance of making it.
So much remains unknown about bees that most of the time beekeeping feels like a matter of luck. As of this writing, my luck is holding. The hive is raising worker brood with a healthy queen. The drone population has leveled out, and there are two brood chambers flush with capped worker cells. There aren’t as many bees as last year, but two honey supers are nearly full. I don’t know if it will be enough to last the winter, but the new queen seems to be on board with my vision. I don’t see her every time I do an inspection, but frequently I’ll seek her out, just to make sure. She is, after all, my partner-in-crime, my hive’s savior—my little queen.
John Knight is a writer, editor, and beekeeper whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere.
Additional Reading
Beshers, S. N., Huang, Z. Y., Oono, Y., & Robinson, G. E. Social inhibition and the regulation of temporal polyethism in honey bees. Journal of Theoretical Biology 213, 461-479 (2001).
Buchler, R. et al. The influence of genetic origin and its interaction with environmental effects on the survival of Apis mellifera L. colonies in Europe. Journal of Apicultural Research 53, 205-214 (2014).
Chittka A., & Chittka L. Epigenetics of royalty. PLoS Biology 8, e1000532 (2010). Retrieved from doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000532
Dahl, R. “Royal Jelly” The Best of Roald Dahl Vintage, New York (1990).
Guo, X. et al. Recipe for a busy bee: microRNAs in honey bee caste determination. PLoS One 8, e81661 (2013). Retrieved from doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081661
Kamakura, M. Royalactin induces queen differentiation in honeybees. Nature 473, 478-483 (2011).
Meixner, M.D. et al. Occurrence of parasites and pathogens in honey bee colonies used in a European genotype-environment interactions experiment. Journal of Apicultural Research 53, 215-219 (2014).
Oliver, R. “What’s Happening to the Bees? Part 5” American Bee Journal June Issue 679-684 (2014).
Oliver, R. “What’s Happening to the Bees? Part 4” American Bee Journal May Issue 535-542 (2014).
Ratnieks, F.L.W. & Helantera, H. The evolution of extreme altruism and inequality in insect societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 364, 3169–3179 (2009).
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/loyalty-nearly-killed-my-beehive?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Breeding bees with "clean genes" could help prevent colony collapse
By Michael Irving
February 18th, 2019
Researchers have identified genes associated with cleanliness behaviors in bees, which could ultimately help protect colonies from collapse(Credit: Shaiith79/Depositphotos)
Honeybees are increasingly under threat, even recently making it onto the endangered species list in the US for the first time. In a development that could help save these vital creatures from extinction, researchers from York University have identified a group of genes that appear to be related to how hygienic a particular colony of bees is, and selective breeding for these genes could help fight colony collapse.
In the last few years, populations of bees have drastically fallen across much of the world. No single cause has been agreed upon yet, but plenty of possible explanations have been proposed, including infections of parasites or our overzealous use of pesticides. Whatever the reason, the serious problem is that bees are one of the bottom blocks in the Jenga tower of natural ecosystems. Once they're gone, plants that rely on bees for pollination will follow, and so will the animals that eat those plants, and so on.
For the new study, the York researchers investigated a positive trait that certain colonies seem to have. Some beehives seem to be generally "cleaner" than others, and worker bees in these colonies have been observed removing the sick and the dead from the hive. These hygienic behaviors have been linked with higher chances of survival for the colony as a whole, since the pathogens are likely being taken out too.
Ideally, breeding colonies to be cleaner could make for hardier bees, offsetting some of the rapid decline of several species. So the York team sequenced the genomes of three populations of honeybees – two of which had been bred to be highly hygienic, while the third colony had more normal levels of cleanliness.
The difference is clear between "unhygienic" bee colonies (left) and hygienic ones (right)(Credit: York University)
When they compared the three genomes, the team was able to identify at least 73 genes that seemed to be related to hygiene behaviors. With those candidates found, the researchers plan to develop tools that help beekeepers breed cleaner bees, which ultimately may help reduce the number of colonies that go on to collapse.
"Social immunity is a really important trait that beekeepers try to select in order to breed healthier colonies," says Professor Amro Zayed, corresponding author of the study. "Instead of spending a lot of time in the field measuring the hygienic behavior of colonies, we can now try breeding bees with these genetic mutations that predict hygienic behavior."
The research was published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
https://newatlas.com/honeybee-hygiene-gene-study/58516/
How the mushroom dream of a ‘long-haired hippie’ could help save the world’s bees
Originally published October 4, 2018 at 6:43 pm Updated October 4, 2018 at 8:41 pm
Paul Stamets, an expert on mushrooms and owner of Fungi Perfecti, had an epiphany: Something in mushrooms could help keep bees healthy. (John Lok / The Seattle Times, 2010)
https://tinyurl.com/y7vctvwj
Urgent planting of wildflowers will attract pollinators and boost farmers’ food crops, expert to tell UN
Bee populations have plummeted worldwide. The UN conference will debate ways of reducing use of harmful pesticides. Photograph: Michael Kooren/Reuters
Jonathan Watts
Fri 23 Nov 2018 01.30 EST
Last modified on Fri 23 Nov 2018 01.38 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/23/scientist-unveils-blueprint-to-save-bees-and-enrich-farmers?fbclid=IwAR1-lYkJHFp-EBhdZ6mds-hlcU2VISfoTt9iCq2Ti8D2NlSYfHbWDO6M1j4
These Photos Capture The Startling Effect Of Shrinking Bee Populations
In rural China, humans pollinate flowers by hand.
By Casey Williams
04/07/2016 11:07 am ET
These Photos Capture The Startling Effect Of Shrinking Bee Populations
In rural China, humans pollinate flowers by hand.
https://www.thescinewsreporter.com/2018/10/insects-are-rapidly-disappearing-around.html?fbclid=IwAR2gkwKcFr1JagptUzvRes_Inuo_DXKNL-AKuYGPcGdTiB3T6ZzZnm_D7UA
Study shows honeybees are starving because of Roundup
06/27/2016 / By Vicki Batts
http://www.glyphosate.news/2016-06-27-study-shows-honeybees-are-starving-because-of-roundup.html
Why are so many Florida honeybees dying?
Times Beekeeper Jim Doan, of Fort Meade, smokes a beehive in one of his beeyards on Monday, May 7, 2018, in Fort Meade, Fla. Doan is one of the beekeepers in the testing trial of BeesVita Plus feed that claims to help bees combat varroa mites.
By Laura Reiley
June 6, 2018 at 05:47 AM
FORT MEADE -- Jim Doan pats the bees gently with the flat of his big palm. Without acrimony, the nurse bees and worker bees amble toward the edges of the frame, revealing the larvae underneath. They are fat and pearly, the way they should be. Doan’s bees may be turning the corner, but it’s too early to say. He has lost 300 hives this spring and added 500, netting 200 the hard way.
He slides the frame back into the wooden super, the name for the basic beehive box, and fits the cover on. He’s getting ready to go, moving his bees from their wintering Florida home back to upstate New York. The bees get stressed on the road — he’s got to keep the trucks moving and drive through the night. But this is a minor worry in the scheme of things.
Doan’s bees are in trouble.
Concerned citizens have read about colony collapse disorder; they may have even heard about varroa mites and the staggering statistic that something is annually killing 30 to 40 percent of bees worldwide. We know honeybees are under siege. But Florida honeybees are in even bigger trouble. Hurricane Irma in September added to their existing challenges.
According to the Florida Department of Agriculture’s chief apiary inspector David Westervelt, Hurricane Irma drastically compounded the state’s ongoing problem of honeybee colony loss. He says at least 75,000 of Florida’s 600,000 honeybee colonies were affected by the storm: Bees drowned, were blown off course, or died of starvation due to destruction of the nectar- and pollen-rich vegetation on which they forage.
And it’s not just about honey. Honeybees are critical to pollinating Florida’s $4 billion blueberry, cantaloupe, cucumber, honeydew, raspberry and watermelon crops.
Florida bees matter nationwide: Twenty to 25 percent of the nation’s honeybees pass through Florida, often wintering here to gain strength before or after pollinating California almonds. Beekeepers from New York, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan winter their bees in Florida to fortify the hives: In 2006, Florida had 1,000 registered beekeepers, now it’s 5,000. Let’s call them snowbees.
When people think of bees, they think of honey. But talk to commercial beekeepers like Doan and it’s clear that being hired-gun pollinators is the bees’ big money; honey is secondary. It takes 1.8 million hives to pollinate California’s almond crop alone, by bees that are trucked in from all over the country. Doan says it was about 1991 when he started making more money on pollination than on honey. He says his bees these days don’t have the vigor to produce honey in any quantity.
Unsustainable losses
The honeybee crisis is often blamed on fungicides, herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup and pesticides called neonicotinoids. Not so fast, say researchers like University of Florida apicultural scientist Jamie Ellis. Yes, these may be implicated, but the biggest challenges for beekeepers in Florida and around the country are viruses carried by tiny varroa mites, as well as weather, queen quality and bee nutrition.
Most years after pollinating California almonds, David Hackenberg brings his bees to Trilby, near Dade City, for the winter, to build his hives stronger. He says Florida gives him a head-start on the season. Then he heads to Georgia to begin pollinating peaches, then to Pennsylvania, then to Maine for blueberries, New York for clover honey and finally to pollinate pumpkins back in Pennsylvania. With one of the largest apiaries on the East Coast, he moves his hives 22 times a year and trucks 80,000 to 100,000 miles. Hackenberg, who coined the term colony collapse disorder in 2006, says bee longevity is a serious problem. His bees used to live two months; now it’s a little more than half that.
When Hackenberg started beekeeping more than 45 years ago, it was a leisurely life, he says. You did a little bee work and then you went fishing. A 5 or 6 percent annual loss was average, and you didn’t have to feed them. Now, he says he spends all his time feeding bees and making replacement bees to cover his losses. He has had to rent someone else’s bees to fulfill his pollination commitments.
"Essentially, we have an industry that is shielding the public from the loss of bees because the beekeepers are taking that burden upon themselves," Ellis says. "Losing 30 percent of one’s stock yearly is a tremendous stress on a business. The situation is not sustainable."
The public hasn’t really been shielded. Our tax dollars have subsidized honeybee losses.
For the past four years, $20 million has been earmarked annually by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the Emergency Livestock Assistance Program to compensate for losses of livestock, honeybees and farmed fish. In April, that number was bumped up to $38 million to deal with 2017’s stunning number of natural disasters (hurricanes as well as blizzards, drought and wildfires). For Hackenberg and others, this means the government is writing a check for their lost hives and revenue. But because farmers have had to pay more for a dwindling number of pollinators, Hackenberg predicts consumers will soon see increased prices in the grocery store for items like watermelon, cucumbers, cantaloupes, squashes and eggplants.
Florida first
Dennis Van Engelsdorp is a professor at the University of Maryland and president of the Bee Informed Partnership, which studies honeybee health on a large scale. He says the varroa mite evolved on Asian honeybees — a native and largely benign pest of another species of bees — and was introduced to U.S. honeybees in Florida in 1987. They were first found around Ocoee, many people assuming they came in on Asian bees at Orlando International Airport. Because the mites are arthropods and honeybees are arthropods, it’s hard to develop a chemical compound that will kill the mites without killing the host. But Van Engelsdorp says some of the reason agrochemical companies haven’t leapt into action to solve the mite problem is economic.
"Compared to other agricultural crops, beekeeping is not a very lucrative one," he says. "For the chemical companies to invest all that money in research, it would be hard for them to see a return on their investment."
For Hackenberg and other beekeepers, the mites became an ongoing problem, but one they could live with. It was around 2006 when systemic pesticides came on the market, chemicals that are soluble in water so they can be absorbed via a plant’s vascular system and moved around its tissues. Researchers like Ellis are careful to say that these systemic pesticides are not responsible for killing honeybees — in fact, Ellis thinks things like bee management need to be examined as possible contributors for honeybee decimation.
"Honeybees are routinely moved around the country to provide pollination services, where they are eating a single crop for six weeks," Ellis says. "You’re putting bees on monocultures at high density, these generalist foragers. It seems like a pretty easy way to spread around pathogens."
Beekeepers like Hackenberg and Doan, who are cousins, say that these days the presence of varroa mites, which carry up to 13 different viruses, is a near death sentence for hives. They attribute this to weakened immune systems and poor nutrition.
Hackenberg and son Davey have developed their own protein supplements. Davey estimates that each hive gets 40 pounds of protein annually, with a steep increase in labor to feed the bees and administer mite treatments, a total he says comes to $110 per year per hive, money that used to be all profit.
And that’s where companies like Healthy Bees step in. Florida entrepreneur Lee Rosen and chief scientist Dr. Francesca del Vecchio have developed an all-natural bee food called BeesVita Plus. Van Engelsdorp and the Bee Informed Partnership are conducting a field trial of the product, an enormous study of honeybees in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Turkey and in the United States by scientists and beekeepers in California, Pennsylvania and Florida, at apiaries like Doan’s and the Hackenbergs’.
Doan started feeding his bees this food in March and is hopeful. But it’s a big shift: When he started beekeeping 50 years ago, they were mostly self-sufficient. Where he used to spend 45 minutes a year on a single hive, that number is now up past 2 hours.
In Fort Meade, Argentinian field technician Martin Paul helps Doan spread the BeesVita Plus powder across the tops of the hive frames, one cup for every 10 frames. The bees are docile during the process, the air perfumed by oregano and lemon oil, both ingredients in the feed along with dextrose, kelp and brewer’s yeast.
As Doan readies his hives for the long trip back to New York, he’s unsure whether this new feed will help combat mites and other problems, or whether the vigor of the bees and honey yield will increase. One thing he’s sure of, though, is that the life of a Florida beekeeper is much harder than it used to be.
"Beekeepers are spending a lot of time and money making up their losses," he says. "Imagine if those losses were cattle or hogs."
Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley.
Numbers of note
* In the United States, honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops ranging from alfalfa, almonds and apples to berries, cherries, peaches, pears, melons and zucchini. In the United States and Canada, 98 different crops rely on honeybee pollination, according to a 2016 White House report on the status of pollinators in North America.
* It takes 13 visits from a pollinating honeybee to yield a straight cucumber. Zucchini and yellow squash also require honeybee pollinators to yield straight, not curved, vegetables.
* Honeybee pollination is required to make pumpkins with rounded sides and to dramatically increase the tonnage of butternut squash.
* China is the largest beekeeping country (10 million colonies) and Turkey is the second largest (7.9 million colonies). The United States is ninth, with 2.8 million colonies. The U.S. honeybee colony population has steadily declined from a post-World War II high of about 6 million.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, United Nations, International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations
A busy schedule
Oct. 1 Beekeeper Jim Doan’s bees come to Fort Meade for rest and food.
End of January Bees are shipped to California where they pollinate almonds for four weeks.
End of February Bees head back to Florida.
Mid-April Bees are shipped back to western New York (just west of Rochester) to pollinate apricots, cherries and apples.
Until the end of June Bees are "rested" in a honey location.
Beginning of July Bees pollinate cucumbers and summer squash in western New York.
Later in July Bees pollinate pumpkins in western New York.
Late August Beehives are all grouped back together and put on goldenrod to get some weight on the bees and make some honey.
End of September Hives are stripped of excess honey and bees are readied to go back to Florida.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/consumer/Why-are-so-many-Florida-honeybees-dying-_168148061?utm_source=TBT_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daystarter&utm_email=69854d45cc299746a9ac94464d2d24a7 ;
UN, EU call for global action to protect bees
AFP
May 19, 2018
Bees help pollinate 90 percent of the world's major crops (AFP Photo/Jure Makovec)
Brdo castle (Kranj) (Slovenia) (AFP) - The United Nation's food agency and the European Union on Saturday called for global action to protect pollinators, and bees in particular, which are crucial for ensuring food security.
"It is not possible to have food security if we don't have pollinators," the head of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, Jose Graziano da Silva, told a conference in Slovenia ahead of the first-ever World Bee Day.
Pollinators, such as bees, birds, bats, butterflies and beetles "are responsible for most of the crops and food that we eat," he said.
To cope with the impact of pesticides, shrinking forest areas and reducing wildlife, the world needs to find "ways to increase, preserve biodiversity," he said.
To underline the importance of the issue, and following a Slovenian proposal, the UN has named May 20 as World Bee Day, as it marked the birthday of Anton Jansa (1734-1773), a Slovenian pioneer in modern beekeeping.
Bees help pollinate 90 percent of the world's major crops, but in recent years many have been dying off from "colony collapse disorder", a mysterious scourge blamed partly on pesticides.
The UN has warned that 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators -- particularly bees and butterflies -- risk global extinction.
EU environment commissioner Karmenu Vella, also attending the conference, announced that Brussels is scheduled to present its action plan to protect pollinators on June 1.
"Basically, we'll be addressing the threats, the causes, the consequences but also the actions that we have to take," to protect pollinators and stop the decline of biodiversity, Vella told journalists.
"We have to take actions not just in Slovenia, not just in Europe, but globally," he added.
Last month, EU countries voted for a ban on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticides in fields, allowing its use only in covered greenhouses where they cannot get into the environment.
Graziano da Silva saw the ban as "the right way forward."
33 reactions
https://www.yahoo.com/news/un-eu-call-global-action-protect-bees-154849021.html
EU agrees total ban on bee-harming pesticides
The world’s most widely used insecticides will be banned from all fields within six months, to protect both wild and honeybees that are vital to crop pollination
People protest ahead of the historic EU vote on a full neonicotinoids ban at Place Schuman in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Olivier Matthys/AP
By Damian Carrington
Environment editor
Fri 27 Apr 2018 17.00 EDT
(please note: The underlined words are 'clickable' links when accessed via the link at the bottom of this page)
The European Union will ban the world’s most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees.
The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.
Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.
But in February, a major report from the European Union’s scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids.
Vytenis Andriukaitis, European commissioner for Health and Food Safety, welcomed Friday’s vote: “The commission had proposed these measures months ago, on the basis of the scientific advice from Efsa. Bee health remains of paramount importance for me since it concerns biodiversity, food production and the environment.”
The ban on the three main neonicotinoids has widespread public support, with almost 5 million people signing a petition from campaign group Avaaz. “Banning these toxic pesticides is a beacon of hope for bees,” said Antonia Staats at Avaaz. “Finally, our governments are listening to their citizens, the scientific evidence and farmers who know that bees can’t live with these chemicals and we can’t live without bees.”
Martin Dermine, at Pesticide Action Network Europe, said: “Authorising neonicotinoids a quarter of a century ago was a mistake and led to an environmental disaster. Today’s vote is historic.”
However, the pesticide manufacturers and some farming groups have accused the EU of being overly cautious and suggested crop yields could fall, a claim rejected by others. “European agriculture will suffer as a result of this decision,” said Graeme Taylor, at the European Crop Protection Association. “Perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but in time decision makers will see the clear impact of removing a vital tool for farmers.”
The UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said the ban was regrettable and not justified by the evidence. Guy Smith, NFU deputy president, said: “The pest problems that neonicotinoids helped farmers tackle have not gone away. There is a real risk that these restrictions will do nothing measurable to improve bee health, while compromising the effectiveness of crop protection.”
A spokesman for the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs welcomed the ban, but added: “We recognise the impact a ban will have on farmers and will continue to work with them to explore alternative approaches.” In November, UK environment secretary Michael Gove overturned the UK’s previous opposition to a full outdoor ban.
Neonicotinoids, which are nerve agents, have been shown to cause a wide range of harm to individual bees, such as damaging memory and reducing queen numbers.
But this evidence has strengthened recently to show damage to colonies of bees. Other research has also revealed that 75% of all flying insects have disappeared in Germany and probably much further afield, prompting warnings of “ecological armageddon”.
Prof Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex, said the EU ban was logical given the weight of evidence but that disease and lack of flowery habitats were also harming bees. “Also, if these neonicotinoids are simply replaced by other similar compounds, then we will simply be going round in circles. What is needed is a move towards truly sustainable farming,” he said.
Some experts are worried that the exemption for greenhouses means neonicotinoids will be washed out into water courses, where they can severely harm aquatic life.
Prof Jeroen van der Sluijs, at the University of Bergen, Norway, said neonicotinoids will also continue to be used in flea treatments for pets and in stables and animal transport vehicles, which account for about a third of all uses: “Environmental pollution will continue.”
The EU decision could have global ramifications, according to Prof Nigel Raine, at the University of Guelph in Canada: “Policy makers in other jurisdictions will be paying close attention to these decisions. We rely on both farmers and pollinators for the food we eat. Pesticide regulation is a balancing act between unintended consequences of their use for non-target organisms, including pollinators, and giving farmers the tools they need to control crop pests.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agrees-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides
Pesticides put bees at risk, European watchdog confirms
By Kate Kelland
February 28, 2018
A bee is seen on a flower in a forest near the village of Berezhok, north of Minsk, July 23, 2014. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko
LONDON (Reuters) - Wild bees and honeybees are put at risk by three pesticides from a group known as neonicotinoids, Europe's food safety watchdog said on Wednesday, confirming previous concerns that prompted an EU-wide ban on use of the chemicals.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report, which covered wild bees and honeybees and included a systematic review of scientific evidence published since EFSA's 2013 evaluation, is seen as crucial to whether the European moratorium on neonicotinoid use remains in place.
The updated risk assessment found variations due to factors such as species of bee, exposure and specific pesticide, "but overall the risk to the three types of bees we have assessed is confirmed," said Jose Tarazona, head of EFSA's pesticides unit.
The European Union has since 2014 had a moratorium on use of neonicotinoids - made and sold by various companies including Bayer and Syngenta - after lab research pointed to potential risks for bees, which are crucial for pollinating crops.
EU nations will discuss a European Commission proposal to ban three neonicotinoids next month in the Plant Animal Food and Feed Standing Committee.
"This is strengthening the scientific basis for the Commission's proposal to ban outdoor use of the three neonicotinoids," a spokeswoman for the EU executive said.
Crop chemical companies have argued that real-world evidence is not there to blame a global plunge in bee numbers in recent years on neonicotinoid pesticides alone. They say it is a complex phenomenon caused by a number of factors.
The industry lobby said that while it allows that there may be a risk to bees, EFSA has overstated it. It argued that any risk can be managed and a ban would cause further harm by forcing farmers to extend agricultural lands.
"Farmers need access to a broad range of tools to protect their crops," Graeme Taylor of the European Crop Protection Association said.
Two major field studies in Europe and Canada published last year that sought to examine real-world effects gave mixed results. They found some negative effects after exposure to neonicotinoids in wild and honeybee populations, and also some positives, depending on the environmental context.
Environmental campaigners said the study confirmed regulators should act to ban the use of neonicotinoids.
"National governments must stop dithering ... to prevent the catastrophic collapse of bee populations," said Franziska Achterberg, Greenpeace EU food policy adviser.
Wednesday's EFSA report looked in detail at three specific neonicotinoids - clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam –and assessed bee exposure to them via three routes: residues in bee pollen and nectar, dust drift during sowing or application of treated seeds, and water consumption.
Some scenarios, such as when the pesticides are used on crops inside glass greenhouses, present a low risk to bees, Tarazona told Reuters. But others, such as using neonicotinoids on flowering field crops that attract bees, are high risk.
He said EFSA's findings would now be shared with European Commission risk managers and then with EU member States, who will decide on any potential changes to current restrictions.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Additional reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels; Editing by Jon Boyle; Editing by William Maclean)
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pesticides-put-bees-risk-european-watchdog-confirms-100548872.html ;
Study Funded by Pesticide Company Shows That Its Own Product Kill Bees
By Justin Gardner
Free Thought Projec
July 7, 2017
Bayer Chemical funded a large-scale study in Europe and the UK hoping to prove that neonicotinoid pesticide, manufactured by Bayer, is harmless to bees. The results, however, confirmed what farmers and bee keepers have been reporting for over a decade: Bee-colony collapse is directly related to the pesticide. –G. Edward Griffin
A large-scale study on neonicotinoid pesticides is adding to the growing body of evidence that these agricultural chemicals are indeed harming bee populations ( http://tinyurl.com/yc5aqdja ). Carried out at 33 sites in the United Kingdom, Germany and Hungary, the study found that exposure to neonicotinoids “left honeybee hives less likely to survive over winter, while bumblebees and solitary bees produced fewer queens.”
Bayer and Syngenta, makers of “neonic” pesticides who stand to reap massive profits if Europe lifts the neonic ban, promptly disputed the researchers’ conclusions—even though they partially funded the study.
The authors note that this is the first real-world experiment demonstrating direct causation between neonics and reduced bee populations, and is consistent with other findings.
According to the study abstract ( http://tinyurl.com/y96d3o44 ):
“Winter-sown oilseed rape was grown commercially with either seed coatings containing neonicotinoids (clothianidin or thiamethoxam) or no seed treatment (control). For honey bees, we found both negative (Hungary and United Kingdom) and positive (Germany) effects during crop flowering. In Hungary, negative effects on honey bees (associated with clothianidin) persisted over winter and resulted in smaller colonies in the following spring (24% declines). In wild bees (Bombus terrestris and Osmia bicornis), reproduction was negatively correlated with neonicotinoid residues. These findings point to neonicotinoids causing a reduced capacity of bee species to establish new populations in the year following exposure.”
Negative effects on bumblebees and solitary bees were observed in all three countries, where higher concentrations of neonicotinoid residues in nests resulted in fewer queens. Harmful effects were found on honeybees in the U.K. and Hungary, which is consistent with observations of high hive mortality in the U.K. and a 24 percent decrease in colonies in Hungary.
However, no harmful effects were found on overwintering honeybees in Germany. This relatively small subset of the study’s findings was pounced on by Bayer and Syngenta to claim that their products are safe for bees, or the results are inconclusive. The two companies make the neonic pesticides used in the study.
“We do not share the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s interpretation that adverse effects of the seed treatments can be concluded from this study, and we remain confident that neonicotinoids are safe when used and applied responsibly,” said Dr. Richard Schmuck, environmental science director at Bayer.
It should come as no surprise that the makers of an agricultural pesticide worth billions of dollars would seize on the smaller part of a study to push doubt in the public mind. The scientists who actually performed the study provide a different interpretation—one based on the entire body of evidence.
“Our findings are a cause for serious concern,” said study author Richard Pywell of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire. “We’ve shown for the first time negative effects of neonicotinoid-coated seed dressings on honeybees and we’ve also shown similar negative effects on wild bees. This is important because many crops globally are insect pollinated and without pollinators we would struggle to produce some foods.”
The data will be studied as part of an assessment due in November to the EU, which will decide whether to keep the neonic ban in place. The BBC reports that the EU is “working on new draft proposals to extend the ban on neonicotinoids.”
To illustrate the complex nature of the problem, as neonics have been banned since 2013, some European farmers are spraying larger quantities of other pesticides such as pyrthroids, which may be doing its own harm to bees and beneficial insects.
There certainly is a need for pest management in agriculture, but what cost is the chemical approach exacting on the natural environment and honeybees that pollinate our food crops? The evidence on neonics says bees are highly sensitive to these chemicals, but farmers also need alternative solutions.
To address the issue, we must consider how we got here. Pests have been introduced all around the world by hitching rides on human ships and other vehicles. Pests often find their new locations devoid of natural predators that would normally keep them under control.
Agricultural practices aggressively pushed by chemical manufacturers and GMO companies have also increased pest problems. The corporate, patent-driven agricultural model involves monoculture crops dependent on high chemical inputs. This creates a positive feedback loop where pest plants and insects become resistant to herbicides and pesticides, prompting companies to make other, more toxic chemicals.
This ever-growing dependence on chemicals, which threatens natural ecosystems and human health, is highly profitable to companies like Bayer and Monsanto.
The chemical approach completely ignores thousands of years of human learning. The concept now known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM)—involving practices such as polyculture, crop rotation, soil enrichment and native shrub borders—is an effective alternative to the chemical approach.
Read full article @ http://tinyurl.com/ybmkc4qw
https://needtoknow.news/2017/07/study-funded-pesticide-company-shows-product-kill-bees/
Do your part and save the bees with these 10 easy-to-grow flowers
By Frances Bloomfield
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Bee populations have dwindled in recent years. Pesticides, parasites, and the disappearance of wildflowers have all been cited as reasons for the declines of domesticated and wild bees. Without these important little pollinators, the amount of agricultural crops would shrink considerably. Less bees means less food for us. Fortunately, the simple act of planting annual flowers can help bring bee numbers back up. These are ten bee-friendly flowers that are easy-to-grow and highly recommended by TreeHugger.com.
1. Garden Nasturtium – Beloved as both an ornamental and medicinal plant, Garden Nasturtiums are also noteworthy as popular climbers in American and European gardens. If you don’t have a large garden, don’t fret; there are shorter, more compact varieties available that are perfect for growing in pots.
2. French Marigold – Commonly used as a companion plant, French Marigolds protect vegetable crops from harmful insects like white flies. Honeybees aren’t as repulsed as other pests; in fact, honeybees have been known to flock to Marigolds. The single flower varieties are the better choice for bees, so keep this in mind when picking flowers.
3. Common Marigold – These are fast-growing plants blessed with aromatic leaves and vibrant flowers. They also serve as excellent substitutes for saffron in rice dishes.
4. Californian Bluebell – These are hardy flowers that do well in dry soil, require little attention, and attract pollinators.
5. Common Sunflower – Whether you plant giant Sunflowers or the shorter varieties, be sure to plant them where they can get the most amount of sun. There are pollen-free cultivars on the market which aren’t good at attracting bees, so avoid these at all costs.
6. Baby’s Breath – These delicate white flowers are known for being easy to grow from seeds. More than just bouquet fillers, Baby’s Breath lure in honeybees with ease.
7. Cosmea – Brightly colored and beautiful, the towering Cosmea also comes in smaller varieties for easier planting.
8. Honeywort – Their rich, purple flowers and blue-purple bracts are highly enticing to bees and butterflies. To get the best Honeyworts, soak the seeds in water 12 hours before sowing.
9. Borage – Also known as Starflower, Borage flowers aren’t just good at drawing in bees. Once a bee has a visited a flower, it refills with nectar within two minutes, making it a perfect honey plant as well as a bee-friendly annual.
10. Cornflower – The “flower” of this plant is actually made up of several smaller flowers. This is an affordable plant famous for being irresistible to bees.
Bees already do so much for us, so this is the least we can do for them. You don’t need a big garden to grow these flowers; a few pots and a windowsill will do. However, there are a few more things to keep in mind while choosing the perfect flower for your bee-friendly garden. First, be sure to pick plants native to your region, since plants that aren’t from your area can do a lot of damage. Additionally, a lot of commercial establishments carry seedlings infected with insecticides. Avoiding these is easy: simply turn to a local provider for organic plants. When it comes to caring for your flowers, don’t under- or over-water the soil. The majority of these annuals will thrive in a temperature ranging from 57 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, seeds usually begin germinating within six to 10 days, and should be flowering within seven to 10 weeks.
Keep up to date on what pesticides are doing to the environment by visiting Pesticides.news
Sources include:
TreeHugger.com
OneGreenPlanet.org
http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-05-10-save-the-bees-with-these-10-easy-to-grow-flowers.html
100% of honeybee colony food found to be heavily contaminated with toxic pesticides
By Earl Garcia
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Honeybee colonies were found to be heavily laden with toxic pesticides, according to a recent study. As part of the study, researchers at Cornell University examined 120 honeybee colonies placed near 30 apple orchards around New York state. The bees were allowed to forage for a few days during the flowering season. The research team then assessed each colony’s beebread to check for pesticide residues. Beebread refers to the honeybee food stores that were made from gathered pollen.
The research team found that the beebread in 17 percent of honeybee colonies exhibited acutely high levels of pesticide exposure. The study also found that 73 percent of colonies displayed chronic pesticide exposure. According to researchers, more than 60 percent of pesticides found were accounted to surrounding farmlands and orchards that were not sprayed during the blooming season. The study’s lead researcher inferred that the pesticides might be coming from other treated crops that surround the orchard. It could also be that pre-bloom sprays have accumulated in nearby flowering seeds, the lead author stated.
“Surprisingly, there is not much known about the magnitude of risk or mechanisms of pesticide exposure when honeybees are brought in to pollinate major agricultural crops. Beekeepers are very concerned about pesticides, but there’s very little field data. We’re trying to fill that gap in knowledge, so there’s less mystery and more fact regarding this controversial topic…We found risk was attributed to many different types of pesticides. Neonicotinoids were not the whole story, but they were part of the story. Because neonicotinoids are persistent in the environment and accumulate in pollen and nectar, they are of concern. But one of our major findings is that many other pesticides contribute to risk,” said study lead author Scott McArt in ScienceDaily.com.
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Pesticides can wreak havoc in the human body
A vast number of studies have long established that pesticide use and exposure result in detrimental health effects among humans. A type of pesticide called neonicotinoids, for instance, was known to affect the body’s central nervous system. “These synthetic pesticide chemicals do not limit their damage to the nervous systems of insects,” warns environmental scientist and lab director Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. “Via the same biochemical pathways, these same pesticide chemicals also disrupt and damage the nervous systems of humans, promoting Alzheimer’s and dementia,” Adams warns.
According to a report by the European Food Safety Commission (EFSA), neonicotinoid pesticides inhibit the normal development and function of the human nervous system. The toxic pesticide was also known to cause damage in brain structures and functions essential in learning and memory. As a result, EFSA’s Plant Protection Products and their Residues panel has called for a definition of standards that will indicate when developmental neurotoxicity studies can be submitted.
According to the panel, two types of neonicotinoid pesticides – acetamiprid and imidacloprid – were shown to negatively impact “the development of neurons and brain structures associated with functions such as learning and memory. It concluded that some current guidance levels for acceptable exposure to acetamiprid and imidacloprid may not be protective enough to safeguard against developmental neurotoxicity and should be reduced. These so-called toxicological reference values provide clear guidance on the level of a substance that consumers can be exposed to in the short- and long-term without an appreciable health risk.”
A 2016 review also showed that exposure to the toxic chemical was associated with adverse developmental or neurological outcomes such as autism spectrum disorder and anencephaly. The pesticide was also found to cause a congenital heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. Chronic neonicotinoid exposure was also associated with memory loss and finger tremor. The findings were published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Furthermore, the National Cancer Institute‘s Agricultural Health Study showed that farmers using toxic pesticides had higher cancer rates compared with the general population. According to the study, farming communities exhibited higher rates of multiple myeloma, soft tissue carcinoma, leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Sources include:
ScienceDaily.com
EFSA.Europa.eu
EHP.NIEHS.NIH.gov
Cancer.gov
http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-04-30-100-of-honeybee-colony-food-found-to-be-heavily-contaminated-with-toxic-pesticides.html
The important reason Honey Nut Cheerios removed its bee mascot from cereal boxes
By Devra Ferst
Mar 13th 2017 1:52PM
A familiar cereal mascot has gone missing. Buzz, the ever-smiling bee who typically graces boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, has disappeared and in his place, a blank silhouette. Buzz's disappearing act is part of the General Mills' Bring Back the Bees campaign, the Twin Cities Business Journal reports.
The company is highlighting the declining bee population. General Mills relies on honey for more than just the honey in Honey Nut Cheerios; the company says 30 percent of the ingredients it uses depends on pollination. To help bring back the bee population, the company is asking customers to plant 100 million wildflowers this year. The seeds are free, and so far, the company is 10 percent through its goal.
#PEI's #VeseysSeeds
@Veseys featured on more than 10 million boxes of #HoneyNutCheerios #BringBackTheBees http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-veseys-bees-2017-1.4012106 …
https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/13/the-important-reason-honey-nut-cheerios-removed-its-bee-mascot-f/21884480/
Bee optimistic: this drone can still pollinate plants even if all the bees die
Meet the artificial pollinators of tomorrow
By Alessandra Potenz
Feb 9, 2017, 12:00pm EST
(please note: The underlined words are 'clickable' links when accessed via the link at the bottom of this page)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7952859/drone.jpeg)
The artificial pollinator with animal hair. Photo by Eijiro Miyako / Chem
It's Official: First Bumble Bee Species Listed as Endangered in 'Race Against Extinction'
By Lorraine Chow
Jan. 11, 2017 04:54PM EST
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has declared the rusty patched bumble bee an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). This is the first-ever bumble bee in the U.S., and the first wild bee of any kind in the contiguous 48 states, to receive ESA protection.
The Xerces Society
@xercessociety
@USFWS to officially list the rusty patched bumble bee as protected under the Endangered Species Act! #protected #victory Photo @cbnatphoto
88 Retweets 104 Likes
11:19 AM - 10 Jan 2017
This landmark decision was made in "a race against extinction" of the Bombus affinis which is "balancing precariously on the brink of extinction," the agency said in its announcement Tuesday.
The bee, known for its distinctive reddish mark on its abdomen, was once common and abundant across 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces, but has plummeted by 87 percent since the late 1990s. Only small, scattered populations remain in 13 states and one province.
"The rusty patched bumble bee is among a group of pollinators—including the monarch butterfly—experiencing serious declines across the country," USFWS Midwest Regional Director Tom Melius said. "Why is this important? Pollinators are small but mighty parts of the natural mechanism that sustains us and our world. Without them, our forests, parks, meadows and shrublands, and the abundant, vibrant life they support, cannot survive, and our crops require laborious, costly pollination by hand."
The rusty patched bumble bee is already listed as "endangered" under Canada's Species at Risk Act and as "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.
The insect is an important pollinator of prairie wildflowers, as well as food crops such as cranberries, blueberries, apples, alfalfa and more.
"Bumble bees are especially good pollinators; even plants that can self-pollinate produce more and bigger fruit when pollinated by bumble bees," the USFWS said. "Each year, insects, mostly bees, provide pollination services valued at an estimated $3 billion in the United States."
According to the invertebrate conservation group Xerces Society, the rusty patched bumble bee's faces a number of threats including the spread of pests and diseases by the commercial bumble bee industry, other pests and diseases, habitat destruction or alteration, pesticides, invasive species, natural pest or predator population cycles and climate change.
The group and its partners have petitioned the government for the listing of the insect for years.
"We are very pleased to see one of North America's most endangered species receive the protection it needs," Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at the Xerces Society, said in reaction to the listing. "Now that the Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the rusty patched bumble bee as endangered, it stands a chance of surviving the many threats it faces—from the use of neonicotinoid pesticides to diseases."
The use of highly toxic insecticides known as neonicotinoids have been identified as a major culprit to the widespread decline of pollinator species. Germany, France and Italy have banned neonicotinoids and in March, Maryland became the first U.S. state to pass strict restrictions on neonicotinoids for consumer use to protect its bees.
EcoWatch
@EcoWatch
THIS IS HUGE! Maryland to Become First State to Ban Bee-Killing Pesticides for Consumer Use http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/25/maryland-ban-neonicotinoids/ …
287 Retweets 231 Likes
12:07 PM - 25 Mar 2016
Specifically, the use of neonicotinoids continues to grow throughout the range of the rusty patched bumble bee.
"A number of scientific articles clearly document the lethal and sublethal effects that these chemicals are having on bees and other pollinators, and their use has intensified extensively within the rusty patched bumble bee's range during the same time period that declines have been observed," the Xerces Society explains.
The Xerces Society also suggests that the massive rise in the use of the controversial herbicide glyphosate on genetically modified corn and soybean fields in the last 20 years has effectively eliminated milkweed and other wildflowers from the agricultural landscape.
"While no direct link has been made from the use of these pesticides to the declines observed in the rusty patched bumble bee there is little doubt that stressors like pesticides at the very least put increased pressures on an already imperiled bumble bee, especially when one considers the scope at which these chemicals are being adopted and used," the group points out.
Lori Ann Burd, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health program, also warned that neonicotinoids are a particular threat to pollinators and urges the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to rein in use of "bee-killing pesticides."
"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's wise decision to protect the rusty patch bumble bee as endangered acknowledges the much larger threat dangerous neonicotinoid pesticides pose to all of the world's pollinating insects, including the 4000 species of wild bees right here in North America," Burd said. "Until the Environmental Protection Agency takes the necessary steps to rein in the reckless use of bee-killing pesticides on hundreds of millions of acres on the American landscape, we'll continue to see declines of the pollinators critical to the long-term health of our ecosystems."
Rebecca Riley, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who partnered with the Xerces Society to encourage the USFWS to take action on the listing petition for this species, also praised the new designation.
Riley called the listing "the best—and probably last—hope for the recovery of the rusty patched bumble bee."
The final rule listing the rusty patched bumble bee as endangered will be listed in the Federal Register on Wednesday and takes effect on Feb. 10.
Note: There are active links contained within the original article at the website linked below.
http://www.ecowatch.com/bumble-bee-endangered-species-2188665139.html
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"Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS)[1] is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
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