Slashdot Mirror
The Science and Politics Behind Colony Collapse Disorder; Is the Crisis Over?
iONiUM writes: An article at the Globe and Mail claims that there is no longer any Honeybee crises, and that the deaths of the Honeybees previously was a one-off, or possibly non-cyclical occurrence (caused by neonics or nature — the debate is still out). The data used is that from Stats Canada which claims "the number of honeybee colonies is at a record high [in Canada]." Globally, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization says that "worldwide bee populations have rebounded to a record high." The story reports: "I have great news for honey lovers everywhere. The Canadian honeybee industry is thriving. Despite those headlines about mass die-offs and and killer pesticides, the number of honeybee colonies is at a record high. Last year, according to Statistics Canada, nearly 700,000 honeybee colonies produced $200-million worth of honey. Bee survival rates have rebounded even in Ontario, which was hard hit by unusually high winter die-offs."
Chaos theory and nonlinear systems should be mandatory in high school, together with statistics. Seriously.
(Did you know that global warming has taken over from smoking as the leading cause of statistics in America?}
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Except that also means other insects we like a lot less are also likely evolving resistance, which means we'll produce even nastier toxins and start wiping out bee populations again.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The government says the crisis worsens (http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2015/150513.htm) ... is written by Syngenta ...
And there is more numbers http://ecowatch.com/2015/05/14/honeybee-population-plummets/
While at least the second quoted article claiming all is well
And the Canada link is only listing colonies, but not if they are actually honey producers (that includes sick colonies are barely alive colonies too). Just because they increase the number of hives doesn't mean the number of active bees is larger. To the contrary it can mean that they try desperately to bring the population up by seeding more hives.
No, you have Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, so I think consider the source is alive and well.
She's the Alfred E. Neuman of why the bees collapsed in the first place. What, me worry?
In this very article, she's right up there with Ronald Reagan saying "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."
Do trees pollute the atmosphere?
True, but it's all part of a long-term biological equilibrium that didn't seem horrible until after industrial-scale human pollution was added to the mix as a driving factor. I don't recall Cicero damning the trees.
Here's Wente:
Once again, natural pathogens which the bees have presumably been contending with for thousands of years. I also don't recall Cicero orating on missing bees, or Shelley's ode to a collapsed colony.
If there was a forcing factor, it was probably the dang pesticide, which after all was explicitly designed to kill insects, selectively if possible, but that might be easier said that done.
Her entire piece is written in distractor mode, touching on who is cranky with whom laced with speculation about nefarious or misguided agendas, while she can't even bother herself to distinguish (possible) industrial forcing terms from established biological baselines.
Yes, indeed, consider the source.
The link represented as a UN FAO article is by syngenta. Pesticide manufacturer. just saying..l
Yeah sure. That's why there are no more wild honey bees in europe and the organic honeybee producers had lots of trouble recovering this winter. On top of the mites it was an unuasual mild winter with early up bees and not enough pollen to collect. There was a funny article cited on a speech last year which claimed that the wild population has finally stabilized and therefore all problems are over. Zero is a pretty stable population. The best you can get from a mathematicians point of view. If you don't catch a wild swarm of honeybees in europe it is estimated to be killed by mites in a few months as it needs to be treated.
Look who paid for the cited article and don't dip to deep into the health benefits of honey. Btw any saturated fluid helps with bee, wasps and moscito stings: Wet salt does the same. Nothing magic with honey.
I can think of several reasons - different sides of the press are not averse to being selective of their sources, depending on which conclusion they are pursuing, for one thing. There are strong industry interests at play here - the producers of insecticides want to find that they are not guilty, the big bee-keepers want to hear that it has nothing to do with the way they cart bees around etc. So, you cherry-pick your data.
Secondly, it is often seen, in long-running illnesses and epidemics, that there are periods of remission before it starts going the wrong way again. If bee-numbers are up this year, that may be all it is; we will know in the coming years.
I think the truth is that we are seeing a long, slow decline; we won't lose all honey bees in the world, but the industrial scale bee keeping, particularly in the US, will be severaly challenged, and will probably have to change their business model fundamentally, from carting their monocultures around with a heavy load of varroa mites, viruses etc, to being much more locally based. It has for many decades been a common practice to rely only on a very limited number of bee strains with specific properties, like high productivity, low swarming and low agression. It isn't really a surprise that we now find all bee colonies susceptible to emerging diseases, I think. And, of course, queen bees have been posted all over the globe, helping the spread of infections.
This is just a minor part of the more widespread problem, that originates with the industrialisation of agriculture: the tendency to have enormous estates of monocultures. The chemical industry are one of the major culprits in this, in that they have made it possible to mask problems with insect plagues and depletion of nutrition; we must, by necessity, come to a point where these things no longer are effective, and then it is likely to come crashing down. A sensible way out of this would, in my opinion, be to get away from gigantic monocultures and possibly also commercial production for global export.
I live in Ontario and own lands which are full of wild and domestic fruit trees, vines and canes all if which symbiotically support and rely upon wild bee populations. I can assure you that they have NOT rebounded here at ALL. This year in fact is the worst so far with the vast majority of everything remaining unpollenated and no bees, wasps or hornets to be found anywhere. Ten years ago my outbuildings had many mud and paper wasp nests every single year, it has been at least three years since I have seen even a single one.
You might label what I am saying as being purely anectodtal and dismiss it, I'm sure that Monsanto and their cronies & apologists will. On the other hand using StatsCan sales figures to measure the health and vitality of bee populations nationwide is something that I'm going to just go ahead and call moronic. What's next? A slow cycle of ice cream sales and they will claim the planet is cooling down?
"I grand the paper..."
"..by shotty editorial policies."
Are you sure you're someone who can judge others' writing?
World honey prices, like world diamond prices, are kept artificially high by a South African monopoly. For diamonds, the monopoly company is called de Beers. For honey, the monopoly company is called de Bees.
Tip the veal, try the waitress . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.
Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase
My cousin and her C/L partner run a bee "farm" here in Ontario, over the last 4 years they lost 60% of their hives. This year they had a massive rebound in the numbers of bees, and have been hive splitting like crazy. In nearly all the hives that were wiped out it was either parasites, fungus, or a combination of the two. Their theory? Honey Bee monoculture, and that's a serious problem.
Om, nomnomnom...
I had the same reaction as epine: "Margaret Wente, really? People still pay attention to her"?
If you did go to the Stats Can link that Wente provided, you should have noticed that the link only shows stats for the years 2010 to 2014, a very short period of time. Now, Statistics Canada is a very good, reputable government agency, so I didn't dismiss their stats out of hand, but still... What was going on?
Do as I did and as iONiUM should have done before posting this article here: Click on the Add/Remove Data tab, right next to the default-selected Data Table tab. You can change the range of years reported. At Step 3 - select the time frame I selected a range from 1984 to 2014. Lo and behold!: the bee population nowadays is less than half of what it was in the mid--eighties - from 20,810 in 1984 to 8,777 in 2014, the year of Wente's purported rebound...
Frackin' info-cherry-picking Margaret Wente! She's one of the reasons I stopped reading the Globe and Mail.
Not sure monoculture is the problem since honeybees weren't the only bees collapsing.
Wild bees, bumble bees, and non-social bees have also been collapsing.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Not necessarily.
We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.
The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.
They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.
Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.
Support my political activism on Patreon.