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Why So Many Crashes of Bee-Carrying Trucks?
Hugh Pickens writes "Interstate 15 in southern Utah has been reopened and officials say 25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for after a flatbed truck heading for California carrying 460 beehives overturned near a construction zone. The bees were on their way to Bakersfield, California for almond pollination next spring. 'The driver lost control, hit the concrete barrier and rolled over,' says Corporal Todd Johnson with the Utah Highway Patrol. 'Of course we then had bees everywhere.' But a similar incident happened in July, when 14 million bees, as well as a river of honey, flowed out of a wrecked semi in Idaho; and 17 million bees escaped a fatal truck crash in Minnesota last year. Why so many highway accidents involving bees? The uptick results from more and more honey bee colonies being transported around the country via highways in recent years. Local bee populations are rapidly dying off from a little-understood disease called 'colony collapse disorder': 'The number of managed honey bee colonies [in the U.S.] has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today,' says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Unfortunately, some honey bee scientists suspect that the rise of migratory beekeeping may be contributing to the species' decline as transporting hives from farm to farm spreads pathogens to local bee populations."
With all the little hairy fellows flying around, the truck loses it's grip on the road.
Maybe it's like that scene in Finding Nemo where all the fish swim in the same direction to break free of the net. Except it's the other way around.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.
is that bee keepers continue to transport them all over. It seems like the smart thing is to require that at the least they be in only one state. IOW, no transportation over state lines.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's well known that when half the bees are flying, the truck weighs half as much. I think Mythbusters proved it.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Bees you say?
http://www.apathymachine.com/gallery/d/1973-1/oprah-bees.gif
If trucks transporting bees are statistically more likely to crash than other trucks (although an example of two doesn't suggest so) then you'd have to consider what might cause that and maybe it's drivers being just a little bit nervous about there being a few million bees just a few feet away.
the start of a Hitchcock movie.
They accounted for ALL 25 000 000 bees? Were any hurt in the accident? Did any die?
A suspiciously round number. too.
rewriting history since 2109
Someone! The Doctor wont listen to me. The bees are disappearing!
Clearly an EVIL conspiracy of some sort - we just have to figure out what and who?
AREA 51 is not far from there, could this be related to the UFO they have hidden???
Clearly an EVIL conspiracy of some sort - we just have to figure out what and who? AREA 51 is not far from there, could this be related to the UFO they have hidden???
25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for
So ... who counted them all?
Required reading for internet skeptics
There is a really good documentary about why this is happening. It has a lot to do with the pesticides we use and the monoculture we are moving to in planting crops.
If you are truly interested please check out the website (http://www.vanishingbees.com/). I think netflix also has this as a streaming feature also, not sure now since i canceled my netflix :P
When the majority of the population will realize just how truely FUCKED the world would be without bees...
never?
With something like that in your pocket, you just pound the brewskies going down the road without a care in the world.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Obviously the killer bees are lying in wait, to ambush the semis as they come around the corner on the highway in an effort to free their cousins.
You don't think the media can make something out a truck full of CUSHION's crashing?
As for beans... those jokes just write themselves.
This is the media, low standards are to them a challenge.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I for one welcome our new truck-crashing bee overlords.
Monstar L
We all know that this Colony Collapse Syndrome is caused by evil cell-phone radiation. Well, the bees have evolved a defense mechanism which can sabotage electronics in their vicinity, thereby giving the truck drivers' GPS devices "Bee Jamming Syndrome" and causing a sharp rise in these kinds of accidents...
"Why So Many Crashes of Bee-Carrying Trucks?"
Because bees are crappy drivers?
...with their tiny little legs.
Their they're doing there hair.
Colony collapse disorder is caused by the pesticides we put on our grain seed. Scientists figured out how to make the whole plant resistant to pests. Our EPA / FDA tested the stuff with adult bees and approved it. They didn't check to see what happens to the bee larvae - the new bees (as opposed to nubies) have no sense of direction and can't survive outside the colony for more than 24 hours.
France knows this. France has banned the pesticides. The USA needs more proof.
It seems that the skill of Semi truck drivers have went from skilled professionals to "i can drive a truck" idiots. you used to feel somewhat safe around semi trucks, now mostly idiots drive them that in order to drive 0.5mph faster than the one in front of them they cut hard into passing traffic, many times causing accidents so they can drive 0.5mph faster than the other truck that they were getting a drafting effect from and saving fuel.
in the past 4 years we have had 5 semis drop off of an overpass because it seems they cant read the big yellow sign that says, "25mph ramp speed"
it's just idiots driving big rigs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for? How did they do that? One at a time?
Want to smell any of my fingers? Including the big one?
How many bee transport journeys were made? What percentage of those journeys resulted in accidents? How does that compare as a percentage to the transportation of other goods?
It's not a possible question to answer without a lot more data. It's not even possible to determine the question has a valid premise as yet.
Cheers,
Ian
Is what truck drivers use to make their lines of coke on a mirror
...to see what all the buzz was about.
What a nightmare....a bunch of Terrorists hijack 4 or 5 mega trucks full of bees into Times square and then crash the trucks into the median releasing them. Now THAT would be horrific.
Surely there's an Eddie Izzard joke in here somewhere.
"...and officials say 25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for..."
"1,234,112, 1,234,113, 1,234,114, 1,234,115... damnit, will you all stop flying around, I have to account for you all!"
At least here in Germany, a glass of pure (unblended) honey costs about €10, that's about US$15. Bee populations have been dying off over here as well.
I can't bee-lieve....
there, fixed that for ya, but you are still offtopic
Really all there is too it
Not to lend credence to anything that one might read on about.com, but it's not just "bee researchers" that are starting to look at migratory beekeeping with a jaundiced eye. Inspectors are looking more carefully at the truckloads as they cross state lines as well. Trucking them all over the country not only spreads pathogens, but exposes the colony to a witches brew of agricultural chemicals and pesticides. CCD-affected hives tend to exhibit symptoms of any number of bee diseases and parasites, but also residue of dozens of pesticides.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
AFAICT migratory beekeeping is unheard of in other parts of the world. Why does the US do it? Does it have any benefit over stationary bees?
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
I'm not saying it's the cause of CCD, but trucking bees across the continent and working them year round doesn't mimic their natural cycles, not to mention the heavy dependence on fossil fuels for all the transportation. Just my gut feeling, but I get the sense we're pushing things a bit too far here.
My family farms cranberries, so I get to haul bees all the time. This doesn't have anything to do with missing honey bees. There are plenty of them where we're at. This is more like "Fertilizing" the bees. Farmers want more than natural usually provides. If they miss a season, it's no big deal. This is just the latest fad in "How to get more yield" In fact, most people near me are using bumble bees, which to my knowledge aren't having the problems honey bees are. Farmers share them around here. One sends his bees over, while you let him borrow a tractor, etc...
also, more accidents hauling bees? Yea... try hauling a couple hundred hives on a flatbed and it becomes obvious why there are so many crashes. They get into the cab... no mater how tight you've got the windows shut. We've taken to wearing bee suits while we drive. Then you have all the other people on the road that seem to drive differently, especially when they are on motorcycles or convertibles, when you pull up next to them with a couple million bees in tow.
There's no plausible hypotheses let alone an answer in the summary. So we're asked to provide them?! A bunch of unwashed geeks that avoid fresh air like the plague? Gimme a break.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The mysterious force that causes truckloads of bees to overturn also causes wild car chases to overturn a fruit vendors stall or strike an old flatbed truck carrying four dozen chicken coops.
I like my women like I like my coffee.
COVERED IN BEES.
The article is junk. Well, no, the fact of needing to transport and all that is fine.. so maybe more so of the summary.
First, that's not a huge figure. And being shocked about it is crazy.. that's like saying "well there was one wreck of a Honda cr-z last year, and two this year... why the huge increase?!?! What's going on???" Even though there are many, many more AC indents involving other makes/models, or even just models of Honda's, you're making a big deal over 3 cr-z crashes... and the fact is there wasn't many on the road before because its a new model, and there's now more on the road than before. And if you'd look, most likely you'd find there's the same number of average crashes for the cr-z based on the # made and on the road vs other models.
Same would apply to this summary.
It's no wonder there are crashes...
Q.E.D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quBYjBH_1-Y
The transport of bees however is completely understandable. It's the only way to keep churning out more copies of "Sock Full of Bees".
(Audio NSFW, Audio/Video NSFE [not safe for empathy])
http://www.myspace.com/video/sarah-leigh/sock-full-of-bees/2773468
Quoting from the article "officials say 25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for", I wonder how many people it took to count all 25 million of them to makes sure they were all there. Also was the roadway covered with tiny little white sheets covering the bodies of those less fortunate bees that lost their lives?
"Beeeeees! Bees in the car! Bees everywhere! God, they're huge and stinging like crazy! They're ripping my flesh off! Run away, your firearms are useless against them!"
Two a year is a lot? Too small a sample to show a pattern.
The bees are acting as a hive mind.
...So Long, and Thanks for All the "Pollen" (?)
Gimme a break...
http://www.belch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/seinfeld_beees.jpg
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
They're the problem and we all know it. They just drive around listening to raps and shooting all the jobs.
What are they plasmid-phobes or something?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There would be a lot fewer crashes if the drivers didn't have a buzz on.
Because I'm covered in bees!
Having married into a beekeeping family, I couldn't help but notice that the writer of this article seems fairly uninformed.
For one thing, TFA mentions the rise in the trucking of bees and attributes it without explanation to CCD. Bees are subject to a number of well understood diseases and parasites that beekeepers spend lots of time and money to protect their bees from. CCD is the blanket term for all the less well-understood diseases, parasites and harmful environmental factors. It strikes me as odd to assert that beekeepers would move their businesses around the country in an effort to combat an unknown threat, especially since for all they know, the new location (or the act of moving itself) could contribute to CCD.
AFAIK, there are two primary reasons for migratory beekeeping:
1) To protect bees from *known* diseases and parasites. Wintering bees involves letting the hives power down for a few months. Unfortunately, during this time of lowered activity, they have an increased susceptibility to problems like wax moths and other parasites. Moving the bees in the winter to places where pollination needs to occur means getting the bees to a warmer and healthier environment and let's them end the winter stronger.
2) Financial incentive. Trucking your bees across the country means moving your entire business at least twice a year and is a large personal and financial burden. However, because demand for pollination services is so high, doing so actually ends up being profitable, and businesses that do not engage in this practice end up being less viable and more vulnerable to the random setbacks that plague any agricultural endeavor.
In other words, migratory beekeeping is a matter of survival rather than preference. Moving your bees is a pain in the butt and often involves being away from your family for months at a time, but it is deemed necessary to stay competitive with both domestic and international (e.g. Argentina & China) producers.
Another troubling phrase in the article is "industrialized hives." I'm not really sure what this might refer to, since economies of scale don't apply as much to beekeeping as they do pig farming or corn growing. You can't just create a mega-honey factory with millions of hives. The bees have to be distributed across a large area. Bees live as hives of a size governed by biology, and because bees have a well-understood range, only so many hives can be put in any one place. I am sure that very large honey outfits do exist, but in my experience, very small businesses (less than 10 people) is actually the norm, and these small businesses are as affected by the various diseases and parasites as anybody else.
Any finally, I just have to say something about this assertion, "Transporting the hives from farm to farm then spreads the pathogens to local bee populations." This may be true, but these pathogens spread even before migratory beekeeping became common. In fact, they spread in spite of a universal desire to keep them from spreading and international and interstate restrictions on moving bees. The irony is that the spread of these pathogens was one of the factors that made migratory beekeeping necessary. On the other hand, maybe keeping all hives local would slow the spread of new diseases and disease variants. That would be a good thing, I suppose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_the_honey_bee
Obviously the bees are mind-controlling the drivers so they'll crash and the bees will be able to spread themselves over a wider area.
If accident rates for bee trucks are higher than rates in the general trucking industry (which I don't think is established in TFA), it could be because a small number of bees get into the cab during loading, and then emerge to startle the driver en route. Insect distractions are a significant cause of non-commercial auto accidents.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
"Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear." They went off to occupy wall street.
Keeping migratory hives from, well, migrating, would incur a huge financial hit on beekeepers. Additionally, if they aren't migrating, they aren't polinating. Given the current batch of CCD, it's not like in-state hives (natural or man-owned) could compensate, so you'd also see a significant impact on cash crops.
What's your suggestion for them?
(And, yes, I've kept bees.)
Those darn Africanized Honey Bees are doing it, they are banding together and causing the trucks to flip. What better way to get rid of your enemy then attacking when they are in the middle of being transported.
All that buzz just has to lull them.
Don't be fooled there are no bees just drunk drivers usig the bee excuse..."your weapons are useless against them"...
500,000 trucking accidents occur each year. Two crashes involving bee trucks, and this "Live science" rag tries to claim there's some sort of pattern here?
Liberty in your lifetime
Have you ever tried to drive a rig while being jacked by bees?
sounds like a MythBusters test can bees in a truck make it flip over?
The Truth is Out There!!!!
I live next to a retired farmer. he still keeps bees. he was old fashioned in that his farm had its own bee hive. He said this bee problem never touched him and doesn't today. The people he knows don't think there is a bee problem; but they are non industrial bee keepers and are more natural about it. He thinks organic farming also helps with these GM crops and chemicals just adding to the list of things attacking the bees. Bees are tough and self managed better than anything except ants; if they have problems its most likely something we are doing.
Speaking of which, I grew up with finches all over; gradually they went away and I didn't notice-- but I remember lots of them and the noise they made come spring-- now its not even comparable. I wonder what we've done to lower that population as well... Plus the butterflies are lower too... Climate change is still minor over here (but the extremes are getting so common, it doesn't mean anything when we break a record) so it hard to believe a few decades of those changes would be the cause...
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Umm get a large number of them to push a large rock into the middle of the road early, and when the truck starts driving, a large number would fly infront of the windshield to blind the driver.
But neither am I sure it's a good one. Farmers already do plenty of work -- tacking on beekeeping makes it that much harder. Beekeeping of 20 years ago was an inherently easier job than it is now; even if you discount CCD, there are mite incursions as well as "foul brood" issues that didn't exist then that are the bane of beekeepers now. I suppose it's a slippery slope -- what if your idea *did* "fix" everything that was wrong? That'd be great. But it would also be an honest-to-God pain; beekeeping no longer consists of putting bees in a hive and hoping they don't swarm too often. Each hive is a significant hit on both time and money; they now have to be carefully monitored and managed. And learning this stuff doesn't come magically, either: there are additional hits for time (and money) spent on training, e.g., college short courses, agricultural extension agents, etc.
In a perfect world, I agree: your suggestion would be the right way to go. But I don't think you're taking into account the potential downsides and ramifications of your idea.
that you answer in the summary.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
CCD isn't some mystery. It has already been solved. Over generations, bee-keepers have lost some of the finer points of bee-keeping, especially where there is an adherence to natural processes involved. This is understandable, given that beekeeping and honey cultivation are productivity-driven processes, intensified toward creating more product and not necessarily accommodating "bee nature". However, "bee nature" is directly affected by fungi such as nosema and cordyceps, and though their forefathers understood the necessity of such things as opening hives for aeration or "letting nature take its course" from time to time, the control-minded and productivity-driven behaviour of current beekeepers has them shrugging their shoulders over what to do. This has already been discussed at length, but you can look all over the internet and find discussions between beekeepers:
"what do I do about my bees having constant diarrhea all over the nest, or fungal infections? should i use a chemical?"
answer: "... open you hives and let them air out. give up harvesting, this year. check again next year. source... some latest findings by grant-driven scientific research? nope! some centuries-old book on beekeeping your grandpa probably had two copies of and probably never had to read once. maybe you should think about another line of work?"
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Bee careful !
I'd put a bet on driver fatigue being the main cause.
Bee keeping is mostly a day time job except when you need to move a hive. If you close down a hive during daytime then lots of bees are flying and you get losses.
The bee keeper is working outside his normal shift, drives for hours to the bees, spends half the night closing them down and loading them on the truck and then has to drive for hours to the new site hopefully before the sun gets too hot and cooks the closed down hives that can't really vent themselves.
The bee keeper isn't really a professional driver, doesn't know the roads as well as a professional who would be more likely to be familiar with the road works. Tired and surprised so doesn't react appropriately so crashes.
There's no modern OS that could possibly run on something so advanced, hence, all the crashes.
Your cost analysis makes sense to me
even cheap restaurants like fast food joints seem a lot more expensive than cooking at home, let alone regular restaurants or fancy places.
FWIW, 14 pounds is 22 dollars or so. Could easily do a burger meal for 4 at home for a bit less than $10, about half of the McD's estimate. :)
Homemade burgers taste much better anyway.
Cooking even simple stuff like burgers yourself is a huge help in terms of both food cost and health.
Pasta, pancakes and French toast are a few other examples.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
not allowing them to cross state lines would clearly fall within Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.
this is as opposed to regulations within the state, which state governments might involve themselves in to varying degrees.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"Judge Wapner, oh my, you gotta be Rain Man to like this guy." - Weird Al Yankovic, I Can't Watch This (parody of U Can't Touch This by MC Hammer)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.