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Open Source Beehives Designed To Help Save Honeybee Colonies
Lemeowski writes "Honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate, with a third of U.S. honeybees vanishing last year. Since bees pollinate many fruits and vegetables, the disappearance of honeybees could cause the United States to lose $15 billion worth of crops, and even change the American diet. The honey bee disappearance is called Colony Collapse Disorder, a serious problem of bees abruptly leaving their hives. A new open source effort called the Open Source Beehives project hopes to help by creating "a mesh network of data-generating honey bee colonies for local, national, and international study of the causes and effects of Colony Collapse Disorder." Collaborators have created two beehive designs that can be downloaded for free and milled using a CNC machine, then filled with sensors to track bee colony health."
http://action.sumofus.org/a/bayer-bees-lawsuit/
http://globalnews.ca/news/903394/the-plight-of-the-bees/
http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2013/private-letters-reveal-syngenta-and-bayers-furious-lobbying-against-bee-pesticide
Collaborators have created two beehive designs that can be downloaded for free and milled using a CNC machine, then filled with sensors to track bee colony health.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+build+a+beehive%3F
No CNC machine. Just some wood and glue. Want sensors? Add them. I'm actually surprised this didn't ask for 3D printers!
Perhaps, if you want to stop bees from dying, perhaps, just perhaps, ban systemic pesticides. Ban nicotinoids. Don't want to? Well, then don't bitch all all bees are killed off.
While commercial beekeepers have been having trouble with their bees, here in Florida we've had more wild bees than ever before. They're building hives in residential areas - in attics, in backyard trees, under manufactured homes, in walls of abandoned homes, etc. Commercial beekeepers don't want these bees because it's more expensive to test them to determine whether they are "Africanized" than to buy new, so they are usually killed by exterminators. If bees were truly as threatened as the headlines claim, wouldn't at least some beekeepers be collecting these hives instead of homeowners having to pay hundreds of dollars to have them killed?
The cause is known but for some reason some countries refuse to take the necessary action - ban the harmful pesticides, fungicides and stop over-working the bees.
Here in Britain we have a history of allowing poisons - MDF, air pollution, pesticides, Asbestos, trans-fats, BPA, a whole slew of nasty shit that are called food additives, if banning anything causes some company to lose money then it isn't banned.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/scientists-discover-another-cause-bee-deaths-and-its-really-bad-news.html
When bathing in a bath of poison, switching to a different bath design is not going to help.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
But the insecticide companies say there must be a different explanation, so that's settled then. A massive multinational chemical company wouldn't lie.
Ummm...no. The current instance of Colony Collapse Disorder is a marked difference in bee colony behavior that began in about 2007-2008. The dieoffs are far larger than anything seen before.
Current theories are that neonicitinoids were introduced at about the same time that CCD began devastating bee colonies. Neonicitinoids, such as imidicloprin, are some of the latest and safest insecticides on the market, with very little harmful effects on mammals. But they have one huge drawback: it has been recently learned that they are extremely lethal to bees - up to 150X more lethal to bees than to other insects. They are neurotoxins. Even sub-lethal doses cause visible confusion in the bees, resulting in "incorrect" dances that the bees use to tell other bees about nearby sources of food.
John
Basically, the problem is that beekeeping has a monoculture problem - watch the video at the end of this link which explains that basically the bees are not treated well and there's not really a diversity of managed bees.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's real simple: monoculture and chemicals -- agricultural chemical warfare.
Hobby beekeepers are not having this problem in the cities. It's the commercial guys out where the spray'n'pray farms are who are losing bees.
The only reason that *everyone* doesn't know this yet -- is because the makers of said chemicals (cough Monsanto cough and others) have heavily invested in creating confusion around the issue to hide the fact that it's THEIR PRODUCTS killing the bees.
There is nothing further to investigate. We don't need any goddamn sensors in the beehives. We don't need to spend any more tax dollars or time researching this. We need to start banning some shit. Now. Yesterday.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Why does no one ever give the full story about bees? There's only one species of bee suffering from colony collapse disorder(CCD) and that's been going on and written about since the 1800's so it's not a new thing.
While most of the colony collapse disorders affected the European Bumble Bees, other bees are also affected.
The culprit is the MITES, specifically the Varroa Mites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder#Varroa_mites
There is NO WAY to kill those mites without harming the bees, and the mites can evolve much faster than the bees, making them effectively immune to whatever chemical concoction that we use to kill them, while the bees can't cope with the same chemicals (when we use it inside the beehives)
Even the Asian bees, which groom themselves much thoroughly than the European Bumble Bees, are also affected by the goddamn mites !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I work for a university in central Illinois that does a large amount of bee related research. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of the researchers. I do the repair work on their instruments from vacuum pumps to mass specs. The guy in the shop across the street does even more work for those groups. We get to talk to them a lot about their work, and bees are an interest of mine. see below for the reasons.)
Though there is thought that the neonicotinoids may be related, it's probably not the whole story. (see: http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/3231/page=1/list=list and http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/73513/page=1/list=list for some insight by two of our researchers). Most of the ones I've talked to think it's a combination of factors.
Agriculture here uses large amounts of the neonicotinoids, and the bee declines started before they were being used.
Just from my own observations (I kept bees along with my dad when I was a kid), the declines in bee population were happening here in Illinois long before the neonicotinoids were fielded. I was amazed at the drop in the numbers of wild bees here in the early nineties. The stress of varroa mites was likely a big part of that. Some other diseases are thought to have been involved as well.
The EU has largely restricted the neonicotinoids so we should have some comparison data in a few years.
Given the importance of bees in our agricultural system, I'd think that a little caution would be prudent. There's no need to ban substances outright on a permanent basis, but a 2-3 year moratorium would allow us to see whether it solves the problem and decide whether the ban should be made permanent.
The "let's do nothing until we're sure" strategy isn't really the way you want to play the "preserving a resource we need to produce our food" game.
Seeing a lot of comments espousing the sentiment that we already know the answer, so this won't help. They each claim a different answer. Which one is having the most impact? Is it a combination? Is there something out there we are using that is doing damage we don't yet see? Are any proposed ideas problematic?
The fact is - more research always helps - so long as it is not taken as an excuse for inaction when known issues are present. Glad to see work is being done to further understand the problem, and I hope the diverse reasons cited in the comments for this article are taken seriously and addressed before it is too late.
http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/ ...
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
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Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
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This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming
In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.
The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Problem is CCD happens on organic farms and in countries where neonicotinoids are banned. In Australia, and large parts of Canada where these insecticides are widely used they DON'T have CCD.
The fact of the matter is that this is a witch hunt, and lots of innocents are being burnt on no reliable evidence.
But what the heck. Science be damned we KNOW it's the fault of some greedy company somewhere.
"Killer" or Africanized honeybees are not as big a problem as the mass media made them out to be. The solution turns out to be rather interesting.
Africanized bees like different dimensions in their hives -- smaller boxes, less space between frames. They're angry in European-sized bee equipment, but give them homes they're comfortable with, and their "killer" behavior goes away. Colonies of Africanized bees can be re-queened with gentler European queens, too.
In Brazil, the Africanized bee is considered to have been re-domesticated this way, and it's only a matter of time before it's the case everywhere.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Yeah, but to be fair, a lot of our crops aren't entirely native to this continent either.
Yes, because light, temperature and humidity values are highly valued by the intelligence community.
That is not how beehives are made. I should know, I grew up as the son of a beekeeper. It is the "CNC milling" part in this initiative that may make it fail. Beekeepers have other things to do, and are often too money-stretched, than to invest in such equipment.
Thing is, already 35 years ago the first waves of Varroa mite swept over Europe and killed a bazillion beehives all over the continent. And we still don't have any insight into what CCD exactly is, what combination of factors it is caused by, what factors favorize it. We just and only gained some insight into how Varroa spreads. Apis carnica has hard times ahead...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Folks, check out hivetool.net and hivetool.org. We've been putting sensors in hives for about three years - have about 15 on-line in the southeast US and California. We desperately need DBAs and programmers to help with some of the software tools. I work for a commercial beekeeper in the southeast US. We run about 2000 hives. Last fall we had our first experience with colony collapse. A brief description can bee seen at hivetool.org/cc When you troubleshoot a system that was working, whether it's hardware or software, the first thing you do is undo the last thing you did. In this case it could be the introduction of Neonicitinoids. The EU has banned them for a few years. This is similar legislation in the US: The save the American Pollinators Act of 2013, HR 2692 This is a real problem that is starting to affect the food supply - seen the the price of almonds this year? And yes, we probably have seen this before in the late 1800s- only it was called Disappearing Disease or Dwindling Off. Guess what insecticide was used then?
also cnc shops are cheaper than ever for such work.
They are not in fact cheaper than whipping out a hand saw. You can build a beehive with ten dollars in tools: pencil, saw, and hammer.
There is some debate on what the best shape for a beehive is, though. It's fairly conclusively not square, from the bees' point of view. They can make a hive almost anywhere, but what is optimal?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No native American plants require honey bees for pollination..
Many native American plants require do require bees for pollination but the imported (and possibly undocumented) European bees just don't do the job.
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See Native Bees of North America: http://bugguide.net/node/view/475348
No brain, no pain.