Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
I was just about to post that video. A summary from the YouTube video description:
Be relentless!
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.
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.
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
-----
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.
----
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.
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?