Silence of the Bees aka Colony Collapse Disorder

While silencing (honey) bees sounds like it might be a good idea to those who have a fear of bees or severe allergy, in truth the disappearance of over 800,000 honey bees from their hives in the United States alone is the tip of a devastating problem that it is said will rival global warming.

While watching the PBS Nature show this evening "Silence of the Bees" I couldn't help think how familiar some of the issues surrounding this problem sounded. And then I realized that the film King Corn that I wrote about just a week ago shares some of the same themes. Disappearing bees is another example of how fragile our food supply is and how exponentially increasing crop yields and using toxic pesticides can create a dangerous imbalance.

What is a bee? Honeybees live in hives or colonies. A small hive contains about 20,000 bees, while some larger hives may have over 100,000 bees. Hives include one queen, many (even hundreds of) drones (males), and thousands of sterile (female) worker or forager bees. The queen bee is female and lays from 1,500-3,000 eggs a day to create all the babies for the hive. The queen is known as an "egg laying machine." She is attended to by young worker bees who take care of her feeding and cleaning. The drones' main function in the hive is to be ready to fertilize a receptive queen. The babies are sent off to work at about three weeks old. A group of bees known as the advance teams go out to see where they can find food (pollen and nectar) and then return to the hive and share the information with all the other worker bees. They communicate this information in a series of dances and the sounds from the movement of the bees is picked up by the tiny hairs on the bee's head. Honeybees collect nectar and store it as honey in their hives. Nectar and honey provide the energy for the bees' flight muscles and for heating the hive during the winter. Honeybees also collect pollen which supplies protein for bees to grow. Worker bees must visit over four thousand flowers to make just a tablespoon of honey. When hivekeepers take the honey from the hive they replace it with sugar water. The relationship between the plant and the insect is called symbiosis and goes back 100,000 million years. So flowering plants evolved with bees.

So why are bees important? Bees pollinate one-third of the food produced in America or $15 billion worth including

fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds (and while we're at it cotton plants) as they feed on flower after flower unintentionally shuttling grains of pollen from one plant to the next. Without bees pollinating, the plants would be unable to reproduce and the only food left for us to eat would be corn, wheat and rice unless we pollinated by hand and let me tell you that is truly not sustainable; bees only make it look easy. Pollinating by hand would make food so expensive starvation would become the norm in America too--the $15 billion dollars the bees charge would inflate quickly to $90 billion if pollination was taken up by humans. Think of it this way: bees pollinate 3 million flowers a day while humans could only handle about 30 trees a day. This is a case where nature really is the only answer--there is no substitute for the bee. As an example of how CCD is effecting the price of honey, I am a rather fond consumer of raw (unfiltered and unheated) honey for its health properties and I have noticed a $2.00 jump in a 16oz jar of local (NY State) over the last six months.

What is Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD? Basically it means that bees are disappearing; they leave the hive as if to work, but do not come back. When bees become ill under ordinary circumstances they leave the hive to die to prevent infection to the whole colony, but CCD is a mass evacuation of all worker or forager bees. The only bees left at the hive are the Queen bee and very young bees not yet ready to forage. CCD is occurring in the USs as well as in Italy, Poland, Portugal, Central and South America and China. The problem is so acute that the scientists in the infectious disease labs at Columbia University are now studying the problem. This is the first time the university has studied non-human diseases. The Columbia University scientists have been studying bee DNA from CCD hives and they have noticed that bees are actually afflicted with many different infections and health related problems, but they have not yet absolutely identified the one cause of CCD. Their disappearance has so far been linked to either toxic pesticides, malnutrition or an auto-immune virus like AIDS. The one most promising diagnosis is a virus known as IAPV or Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. They can track IAPV back to Australia and since the US has purchased bees from Australia to help in the pollination process it is possible that the disease was imported. Some European scientists have said that they "almost hope CCD is caused by a parasite because that would be easier to resolve; problems found in nature are not easy to figure out or resolve."

The US has purchased bees because there is such a demand for high crop yields in this country, beekeepers have had to purchase thousands of bees and literally truck them around the country to pollinate the crops. Every year in May bees travel all over country to pollinate food. They are trucked to Maine for the blueberries, for the apples in Pennsylvania and the cantaloupes in Florida. Bees are actually accumulating more miles around this country than your average business person. And doesn't this sound like all that corn we're growing that we supposedly asked for?

What about a solution? One plan put forth while the scientists continue to study the DNA is to breed Afrikanized bees with honeybees to create a much stronger strain. Scientists also are waiting for this winter to see if colonies are still disappearing. So in fact, there is no answer yet, but only a lot of unanswered questions while our food supply becomes less secure.

For more information: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/agriculture_dem/pr_062808_CCD.html

Silence of the Bees (NOTE: your computer will need to be equipped with speakers to hear this video):

Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 08:04PM by

[Holly] in Sustainable Living, Life on the Farm, Resource Preservation, Food Safety, Public Health |

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