Posted on 05/04/2007 1:15:21 AM PDT by Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit
BELTSVILLE, Md. -- Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.
"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.
While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.
U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies -- or about five times the normal winter losses -- because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.
Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.
Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.
"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."
Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.
"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.
A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.
Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.
Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse -- and we took it for granted."
"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.
Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.
USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.
The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.
A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.
The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.
However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.
Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.
First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.
Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.
What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.
University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.
Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.
Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.
Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.
"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."
“Clover fields”-—that sounds nice.
After years of fighting clover to grow turf, we decided to fight turf and grow clover. What’s the secret?!
How many millions of acres of agriculture did the Native Americans have to be pollinated?
According to an article posted yesterday, there are 3,500 species of pollinating bees native to America. Just because they are not honeybees (not native to America), there are still a lot of bees pollinating.
If someone saved that article, could one put the link up, please? I can’t find it now.
Thank you.
Completely agree that this deserves more treatment than global warming.
And I’m seeing the same thing here as you are. I have two apple trees in full bloom. Normally I would have seen a lot of bee activity by now. In past years, there have been so many bees that when parked under the trees we had to be careful not to trap one of the bee sin the car. This year, little to no activity at all.
What type of equipment and setup is involved with irradiation?
Well, before the spanish traveled through the mississippi valley and florida and killed off whole tribes, they had most of the mississippi valley under agriculture. This has been proven and if you would read a little history you would know that. Plus, the whole of the country was under natural cultivation, ever hear of that? It's called nature, you know wild crops, grasses, trees, shrubs, all sorts of vegetation that had to be polinized and didn't use one honey bee to do it.
The crops the Indians had were mainly the three staples of their society, corn, beans and squash, and the tribes that farmed took up quite a few acres.
We don't need honey bees, this is another scare that just won't quit giving, one more disaster to make sure we cave in to the rules of the Dems. Buy into it if you want, but please read a little and actually study the scares when they crop up, it will save on your ulcer.
Oh, I remember that. I also remember the fedgov flying cargo planes over South Louisiana dropping tons of DDT-laced meal granules trying to kill them off. I just wonder if that just "might" be why DDT got the bad rep as an environmental contaminant.
Clover is good for ‘fixing’ nitrogen in the soil. Here it is a spring weed but goes away on its own as the weather warms.
In 2007, there will be 90,500,000 acres of corn alone grown in the U.S.
Natural cultivation does not even start to require the type of pollinization that U.S. agriculture needs.
Natural cultivation took in the whole of the US. Many more acres than are under cultivation today. Also, you ignored the Indians who grew crops, many, many acres of them before the Spanish wiped them out with diseases such as measles and small pox.
To think that honey bees are the only polinizers in the US, or on the planet, is just plain idiotic. Many crops were raised here in this country before honey bees were imported to the US also. How do you account for that? As I said, nature doesn't rely on one method to do a job. Crops will be pollinated.
Many insects besides bees pollinate crops.
For one thing ALL honey bees are not dead. Just two days ago an ER was shut down because a swarm of 7000 honey bees covered the ambulance entrance and they had to call a bee keeper to come get them.
I have hives near my home and the bees are just fine and thriving. As I said, this is the latest scrare tatic. If all else fails we can import bees to this country again, there are plenty in Europe, South America and Africa to draw from.
So take your head out from under the covers and stop quaking in fear, the problem(if one really exists) will be solved.
Hmmmm.
I can’t help but recall previous ‘dire warnings’ from the past three or four decades. They all have the same language of ‘we’re doomed!’.
Lets see....in the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter told us we would deplete the entire planets raw crude oil by 2000....I drove an H2 to work this morning, and I’m pretty sure its 2007.
In the 1980’s, Ted Danson told us via The Tonight Show all the oceans would be devoid of life by 2000. Pretty sure I can order fish for lunch today.
In 1989, the CDC estimated 1 in 6 college males would be infected by the HIV virus. Simply didn’t happen, not even remotely close actually. Of course, the CDC also estimated up to 100 million would be HIV positive in this country by now....(eyes rolling).
On a more related theme to this story, we were told decades ago ‘killer bees from south America’ would eventually destroy crop production here, and kill quite a few people. Didn’t happen.
I don’t know how ‘real’ this story is in short, because of all the previous hysteria about stuff that simply didn’t happen. Worth watching I suppose, but I’m not going to hoard honey any time soon.
Of course other insects pollinate. What a lousy straw-man argument.
But are you suggesting that the Native American tribes grew more acres of crops in pre-Colombian days than what we grow today?
That’s ludicrous!
Even the Cahokia didn’t have near the agriculture that modern day St. Louis has within a 100 mile radius. And while the main city of the Cahokia would have dwarfed most major European cities at it apex (around 1200AD), it would have been a decent sized suberb of St. Louis in today’s standard (around the size of Belleville, IL if I remember correctly).
Even at the most inflated estimate of the most ardent pro-Native pre-Colombian pseudo-historian, the population of the “New World” would have been around 100 million people pre-1492.
The population of the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil alone is 6 times that amount. The whole of North and South America just crests over 1 billion people.
There is no way that native agriculture was any where near then what it is now. Not a chance.
We’ve got them here in Southern Indiana too.
By the Gazillions!
Very annoying, but typically we’re only infested indoors for a week or two in both Fall and Spring.
The pregnant females can get in and hibernate over the winter in any crack they can find. Then, in February or so (depends on the Sun angle, again), they crawl out by the hundreds looking for a way outside.
I had them crawling out of floor cracks and from behind molding....like something out of a horror film. They would form these “warming balls” behind furniture on southern exposure walls. I have had an exterminator for three years now and typically only see 20 or less in any given late Spring. His treatment will kill them when they contact it inside or outside, plus they will track the poison to the hiding spots where there are many of them. He says they are an *invasion* as opposed to an *infestation*, because they don’t breed indoors, just hibernate.
I hate them!
You are correct regarding the history of bees and the fact that there are other native pollinators, and if we were living off of the land the shortage of honeybees may not pose a significant problem. However, most of the foods we eat are not native and have no natural pollinators, most of which are species specific.
This clover was here when I bought the property. I think it must be mowing that is the secret because the more I mow the more clover I seem to have.....
My wife and I just returned from The Huntington Library in San Marino. The gardens were filled with honey bees, thankfully. Perhaps the Islamofascists have gotten sci-fi advice from the Chinese to poison our food supplies. Who knows?
You think a visible coat of pollen is funny?! LOL Obviously, you’ve never been in eastern NC in the spring! Pine trees shed copius amounts of yellow pollen-they’re wind pollinated. It coats everything. You can see sheets of it blowing across yards and fields and parking lots. It looks like some fed up fairy godmother, instead of sprinkling a little here and there, upended her bag and dumped it all at once!
Lol!
I live in N. CA. I see honey bees all the time. My mom’s fruit trees, that we planted bare root last spring, are loaded (and I mean loaded) with fruit. We’ve already had to thin the trees from all the fruit. This spring there was so much pollen that I had to dust my keyboard, which is in my dining room. Nature cannot be controlled, bees know what they need to do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.