Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
The magnetic field of the UFO disturbes the sense of direction of the bees and thus they collectively bash their heads in against the board separating them from the driver. As the driver is stung by the surviving bees it fails to controll the truck and thus the truck crashes.
The conspiracy is that they claim they have found all the bees (who counted them? It must be a lie!) in order to be able to "disprove" the truth, since the thruth could not have happend if the bees survived.
Thus the existence of the UFO's has been covered up.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
More likely there's only the perception that bee trucks are crashing more often because the media pick up on the slightly more interesting cargo. I'm sure trucks full of salt or beans or cushions crash all the time, they just don't stick in the mind or get the same media focus as "25 million bees loosed by crash!!". If anything, I'd say the crashes are suggestive that the drivers aren't nervous of their cargo - if they were they'd probably take more care (it's rare to hear of cargos of toxic chemicals or nuclear waste crashing, probably because the people driving them around are terrified and extra careful).
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.
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...
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.
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
With self-insured big trucking outfits having a one strike rule for their drivers, does this surprise you? A single ticket or accident ends your career with any big outfit. At that point, you can't get hired in the industry unless you can pony up the cash for your own private tractor. Anecdotal story: I once saved a driver's job by getting a ticket issued for backing up into a telephone pole overturned in NYC traffic court. If the ticket had stood, he'd have been unemployed the next day.
Never mind the GPS tracking of their rigs...true story, I got a call in 1992 or 3 to drive to a shopping mall in Brielle, NJ. There was a JB Hunt rig sitting there parked. I was told to take pictures of it, leave, then send them to the safety department. It seems the driver had gone to visit his girlfriend there with his rig. They saw the transponder there and wanted documentation so that he could be fired when he showed up at his terminal in Ohio or somewhere. Mind you, he was going to show up on time at the terminal, but that didn't matter, he'd diverted from their mandated route.
Policies like this create a lot of churn in the industry. Who would want to work for these people long term?
The end result is that the quality of long haul drivers declines over time. It also means they pay less to drivers over time. I think that's the objective.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Didn't some slashdotter confess to having developed UV-vision bee powers not too long ago?
Have we ruled out the possibility that he is systematically eradicating the non-aligned colonies in order to cement his grip on power?
Last I heard, CCD was linked pretty strongly to a combination of a fungus and a virus, occurring in every colony affected in the study (but individually not accounting for the effect).
With the rise of migratory bee-keeping (as mentioned in the summary) suspected of being the factor that has lead to the increased spread of these issues in bee colonies. My understanding was the key insight that led them to do this study was that someone correlated the increased incidence of bee colony die off with the increase in migratory bee-keeping. Migratory bee-keeping allowed for an explanation of the, relatively, recent increase in the incidence of bee colonies being infected with both the virus and the fungus.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
"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!"
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
"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.
My wife is a backyard beekeeper. CCD is a big deal and nobody is sure what's causing it. And it does not affect just large honey operations.
You are waxing a bit too poetic about bees. There are all kinds of pathogens that bees don't "self manage" away: Varroa, tracheal mites, wax moths, not to mention mice, etc.
The interesting thing about hives that have had CCD strike is that _nothing_ wnats anything to do with the hives. We've had a colony get weak before and nearly immediatley , wasps and other bees were robbing the hives while the remaining bees tried in vain to defend it. The yellowjackets can smell the larvae and wreack havoc all over the hive.
Normally if a colony gets weak or otherwise leaves a hive, all kinds of critters move in and take the various parts that are interesting to them.
But apparently in CCD hives, that doesn't happen. It's like all of the normal pests/predators can tell something is wrong. It's a literal overnight ghost town. There will be hundreds of pounds of honey sitting in there and nobody wants it.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The solution is for the farmers to keep their own bees, along with enough plant diversity to keep them happy year-round.
Trucking bees cross-country from monoculture to monoculture is a fundamentally stupid idea.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
" It has already been solved."
no, it hasn't.
What we have is a bunch of people who don't know jack about the subjects making wild guesses at what to do based on the preconceived uneducated notion of how the world should work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on