Posted on 10/03/2013 2:35:43 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Diesel pollution makes it harder for honeybees to find flowers by changing the chemical make-up of their scent, scientists have found.
Honeybees use floral odors to find flowers that will give the best yields of pollen and nectar, but diesel fumes can affect their ability to locate and recognize the plants, potentially affecting pollination and ultimately global food security.
British researchers took eight chemicals found in the odor of oilseed rape flowers and mixed them both with clean air, which had no impact on the scent, and air containing diesel fumes.
When mixed with diesel fumes, six of the eight chemicals reduced in volume and two disappeared completely within a minute, changing the chemical mix of the scent as it reacted with nitrogen oxides (NOx) found in the exhaust fumes.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Lab results not being the same as real-world results? Only place you have the highest concentrations of diesel fumes are in cities, and gasoline cars still outnumber them greatly. The honeybee problem is happening far from civilization, too.Bees cant sniff out flowers because of CARS: Diesel fumes change the odor of blooms and could cause a global food crisis
/johnny
I’m so sick of these people.
Never mind transport it on diesel-powered cargo ships.
Hmmmm, did they test biodiesel?
And what about the thousands of years of unabated wood and then coal burning? Bees were just fine back then and I’ll bet the atmosphere was smokier....
Diesel smoke has been around 70 years
Because diesel fumes have gradually become less polluting over the least few years, this problem should be getting BETTER, not worse.
EPA’s fault, 100%.
What a lie - in my backyard this morning I watched several bees go from flower to flower with no hesitation and no uncertainty ...
“British researchers took eight chemicals found in the odor of oilseed rape flowers...”
Flowers, no means no!
God should have put large colorful leafy thingys on flowers so that the bees could find them. He should have called the pedals.
1) They seem to do just fine out on the farm, where the tractors have been using diesel for 70 years,
2) Bees seem to avoid smoke,...always have. Maybe that’s why bee-masters carry around a little can with coals to generate smoke when they are working around the bees.
I think this article is BS. I have several oil wells om
my property and four supers full of bees by the back fence.
You can stand by the oil pumps with the bees all around
along with the smell of sweet Texas crude. They don’t seem
to be bothered with the smell. Ants don’t seem to mind
either. Some times they build a mound right around the well stem.
Well, these people have always been slightly behind the power curve.
It does read as biased in a “green agenda” fashion. I wouldn’t expect a meaningful experiment to look like this. I’d rather expect it to use actual diesel engines and actual fields with actual bees. Do trucks roaring by bee fields affect the bees this badly? Maybe yes, maybe no, but how could we know without putting that to a literal test?
‘I watched several bees go from flower to flower with no hesitation and no uncertainty ...’
We need bees for Congressional leadership.
bah
You would not be able to complain when you were stung by legislation, then (duck’n & runn’n)
Some very smart engineers are working on this problem of “Diesel fumes”. One of the prospective changes, and in fact, on the way to becoming fully realized, is the conversion of Diesel engines to compressed natural gas, with ZERO particulates, virtually stoichiometric combustion, which is the ideal ratio of air to fuel to allow all fuel to be burned with no excess air, meaning no Nitrogen Oxide complexes (NOx), no carbon monoxide, AND no sulfates.
But even on the short term, the refining of Diesel fuel to higher purity (minimizing sulfur content) and the use of urea injection (to control NOx emissions), has greatly reduced the potential for Diesels to cause any actual pollution.
There is a lot of phony junk science that “proves” one of the two remaining emissions of a Diesel engine, water vapor and carbon dioxide, is a dangerous “greenhouse gas”.
In the concentrations at which it exists in earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful and influential “greenhouse gas” of them all, water vapor, actually works to influence the moderation of earth’s atmospheric temperature. The other “greenhouse gas”, carbon dioxide, is in such minute quantity in relation to water vapor, it has virtually no effect on weather patterns or the regulation of temperature in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide makes up only about 350 parts per MILLION of the composition of our atmosphere, while the second most corrosive element in the universe makes up some 200,000 parts per million. Only fluorine is more reactive than oxygen, and neither can remain as an uncombined element for more than a very short while. In fact, if oxygen is not replenished at a very high rate throughout the world, it would be depleted entirely within a very few years. And oxygen requires the presence of carbon dioxide and water vapor to form:
6 H2O + 6 CO2 + (photosynthesis) -—> C6H12O6 + 6 O2
In order to breathe, the plants have to be making carbohydrates. They need to be sucking up huge quantities of carbon dioxide EVERY DAY.
Carbon dioxide is plant food.
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