We're in the middle of a
bee
emergency. Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared off
the surface of the globe, then man would only have four
years left to live." A mysterious ailment called Colony Collapse
Disorder is causing agricultural honeybees nationwide to
abandon their hives and disappear. It's a kind of mass suicide
in the bee world. We have an UPDATE on this story from a
reader.
UPDATE: A reader from South Texas writes: "Recently you
have been reporting the loss of honey bees....And I just
wanted to comment on something I've noticed recently. We
live in a small rural community south of San Antonio. There
are bee hives on the property next to ours that are man-
made and there is a natural hive in a tree behind our property.
We have an uncovered, above ground pool, and a couple of
weeks ago I began to notice bees floating dead on the
surface. The numbers grew till there were literally hundreds
each day and this went on for weeks. I've never seen
anything like it. The numbers finally slowed and now there
are only about a dozen a day.
"I can't help but wonder about this phenomenon....Why were
so many drowned? The pool has been here for years....Paper
wasps and bees drink from it year round....and there were no
wasps in the mix. It seems strange and I wondered if anyone
else reported the same thing happening in their area."
Entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk says, "Individual beekeepers
are really taking a beating. A guy down in Oklahoma lost 80%
of his 13,000 colonies in the last month. In Florida, there are
a whole lot of people facing 40, 60 and 80 percent losses.
That?s huge."
With CCD, most adult honeybees abandon a hive and
disappear, abandoning the queen and a remnant of younger
bees. This is unheard of, since normally a bee colony will do
almost anything to protect its queen. Since the tasks done in
the hive are very stratified, bees cannot survive on their own.
One of the strongest instincts that bees have is protecting
and nurturing the next generation, but with CCD, the cells of
young bees in the pupa stage are not covered and protected
by their older sisters, probably because most of the adult
bees have left. Dead adult bees aren't even found near the
hive; they are just gone.
Bromenshenk says, "We don?t want to panic the beekeeper
industry because we are not sure it's time to push the panic
button yet, but we do know this is real, it's severe and it's
widespread."
Field technician and self-professed bee lover Scott Debnam
describes visits to the impacted bee yards as "spooky," and
says, "Fortunately the sites I've visited have been
recovering, but in Georgia I saw a lot of small colonies, a lot
of uncapped brood and a lot of early-stage brood. The adults
had flown the coop."
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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