I was chatting with my neighbour yesterday and she said that she had had a conversation recently with a beekeeper. He said that the bees are being killed off and if nothing changes within 10 years we are in big trouble.
He said that we had difficulties with bees some years back and the solution was to import some bees, which resulted in an outbreak of some disease that is killing our bees. He said that the remedy was simple at the time – 2 trays of “medicine” (whatever that was) into the hive for two weeks. Unfortunately people thought “well, if 2 is good, then 4 is better and if 2 weeks is good then all the time is even better” and now the “bug” is immune to the medicine and our bees are disappearing.
In our area there is a community of Mennonites and they were getting in a panic because the beekeeper had not brought them the bees yet. It seems that our bees are so limited that they have to use their bee hives to service many areas. The bees are currently at the east coast and will be back to Ontario in a couple of weeks.
I had also heard that cell phones really wreak havoc on the bee population so, between our technology and air waves contamination and the disease, our bee population is reaching a critical low.
My friend said that she was telling some ‘city folk’ and they said, “oh well.. we still have insects to do the pollinating”.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. The problem is that several crops rely on bees to pollinate them in order to produce fruits / crops.
That said, there are other options for pollination such as the use of orchard bees, which are not affected by the honey bees colony collapse disorder.
The problem was not due to the import of bees, as the disorder was the reason they were imported. It’s something else entirely.
Many people are blaming the wide spread use of pesticides and other chemical matter on crops. I’m leaning to this as a reason as well since, think about it.. That garbage ends up on the pollen. Bees collect the pollen.. Bees make honey.. Crap ends up in the honey.
At any rate, there is no known cause of this disorder as of yet, nor is it a disease. It’s an issue where the bees leave the hive, but never return to it, either becoming lost somehow or just plain forgetting. Since bees can not survive away from the hive they die off while wondering around.
You’re correct that a theory is out there that cell phone, or more exactly, the towers are causing huge amounts of problems with bees and their navigating skills.
Either way however there’s still a huge problem. Around 70% of the US bee population has been decimated over the last decade. Like I said though, there are other options for pollination though, just not as good.
If it becomes an extreme problem, expect to see many genetically altered plants pop up which are self fertile.
isn’t it interesting that our solutions end up to be an even bigger problem? (ex. our new fangled light bulbs – great on savings but they are filled with mercury. Yah, I can see that there will be a problem there as people dispose of them ever so carefully and/or break them)
I asked Rick the other day if there was any hard lesson that we, as humans, have learned and not continued to repeat it?
Wouldn’t it be nice to take care of our bees so that we don’t have to go mutant to replace them.
The world only has so long with mankind on it.. Can you imagine how beautiful the gardens will be without us around to pave over them and build buildings?
I know! it won’t take Mother Nature long to clean up after us. Just picture us as those nasty bugs in the garden that we hate and long to destroy before they destroy our plants. We are messing up Mother Nature’s garden. Shame on us.
We have multiplied until we have reached a plague level, and we have found lots of way to consume, mutilate and destroy. Mother Nature sends a pest control our way and we find a way to become immune to it and she has to find another method of pest control. Unfortunately, in the end, we will be our own worst enemy and create our own pest control strategy and we will wipe ourselves right off this planet. Oh we are so wise, so civilized, so advanced! Is there any other creature on this plant who is busy wiping itself out?
There is a lot of bad info out there on the subject. The last solid info I heard (last fall) was they had found a virus they felt was primarily, but not totally responsible. The cranberry growers around us use a LOT of bees. They are having great difficulties with pollination. I noticed last year that the cherry tree in our garden which is usually humming (literally) with 1000’s of bees, only had a few dozen at any one time.
This has happened before however, it seems to be a natural cycle, not something to panic over.
I read this stuff with a skeptical eye…..I’m all for going green, lots of great reasons to do so, but most of the hype is just that, hype….as soon as this story started getting carried by the press some were started to blame global warming.
IN THE UK OUR HONEY BEE POPULATION HAS BEEN REDUCED ALREADY BY 20%, IN A PROGRAMME I WATCHED LAST WEEK IT WAS SAID THAT IN AMERICA IT WORSE. WHY DON`T THE GOVERNMENTS LISTEN TO THE BEE KEEPERS.THIS SERIOUS PROBLEM HAS GOT TO BE ADDRESSED.
Neonicotniodes have been banned over here since 2003 as far as I know. They were kicked out of France even before that. (1993) We must be diligent to stay the course of sleuthing this killer and not be side tracked by environmental wackos and their giant leaps to judgment. It makes no envronmental sense to truck Bee populations from one side of the continent to the other for pollination of crops if in doing so we end up infecting every hive on the planet.
There is no time for nonsense this time.
So again I repeat. chasing around a bunch of householders with roundup or mecoprop in their possession is disingenous of the municipal, provincial and federal governments here in Canada.
They are merely postulating and pandering to the voters.
It’s like looking for your car keys under a street lamp because there is more light there!
Bob
-- I want to believe in a lot of things but, in the meantime I have to deal with the truth
I hope you are right about the natural cycle and while I’m hoping I’ll try to do everything I can to make a difference as well
as I’ve said before… ultimately it is up to “me”. I can’t put the responsibility on the government and then continue to undermine Mother Nature by my actions.
I think we really are more danger to ourselves I think than terrorism
But we are supposed to trust then manufactures of food products so it doesn’t poison us. But everything is all about profit these days no matter how they do it
This film , this does not surprise me at all
Altymiers, autism. memory disorders in bees, it sounds all linked to me.
Even makes sense for MS and my disease they is no known cause. Attacking the muscles. yep sound linked
scarey
-- NS Zone 5B 200 KM East of Halifax cheers Bunting------Having a place to go – is a home. Having someone to love – is a family.
i haven’t used a pesticide in 20 years and my veggie gardens are strong and healthy
I stopped spraying my apples trees 10 years ago but the crop had really declined
What apples I get are full of worms now
Last year I had very few blossom so no apples. I noticed I hd very few bees around also
Yes I also read article written by scientist if we don’t have bees we are in terrible danger of starving within 5 years. As we know we have a world food shortage now
Does any one know what I could spray the apple trees with that would be natural?
Thanks
-- NS Zone 5B 200 KM East of Halifax cheers Bunting------Having a place to go – is a home. Having someone to love – is a family.
Bunting – Apples:
| Try copper sulfate after the blooms are finished and once the fruit is set. Use enough Copper sulfate that the water is sky blue ( 50 ppm) Put on with a sprayer and don’t allow it to drip on the ground. http://www.oldbridgechem.com/msdscuso4.html Bob
-- I want to believe in a lot of things but, in the meantime I have to deal with the truth
Saturday, February 23, 2008 bees may be affected by bacillus thuringus pesticilde
Subject: Fw: is bacillus thuringus killing bees? known as BT A paper on Bacillus Thuringus in 1996 re a new 1994 amazing bacteria that kills crop eating bugs. My theme was that BT would add 12% to the food chain. My professor Dr Sheppard did not agree as he was concerned of the BT finding it’s way into forest adjacent to the farms and streams etc. therefore killing off populations of bugs we need as well as bugs in the soil,rivers lakes etc.
IN a nut shell I believe that bees may be poisoned by BT. BT is a bacterium that can pass from plant species like tomatoes to corn to cotton and used heavily in the States It can be gene spliced and can change it’s DNA. The plant can then produce BT to kill invading bugs. This is a Billion dollar pesticide industry. http://beesdyingpossiblecause.blogspot.com/ Bob
-- I want to believe in a lot of things but, in the meantime I have to deal with the truth
At least here they advertised it as so and I bought it the year we had that invasion of a worm eating everything in site even pine needles Can’t remember the worm type. The Maritimes were loaded with them
They stripped tress for miles and miles. of leaves and needles but not a leaf or needle left
it lasted just 6 weeks and then my maples leafed out again
Euuuueeee darn things, The worms would hang off a tree branch by a tiny web and then land down your neck and in your hair
awful things
-- NS Zone 5B 200 KM East of Halifax cheers Bunting------Having a place to go – is a home. Having someone to love – is a family.
Bunting, we are blurring the line between ”natural” and ”man made” Commercial interests take a natural product like BT and culture it so that this one single gene set is multiplied by billion of times and sell it.
This does not happen in nature.
They remove the checks and balances of nature by changing the playing field.
Once a bee ( for instance) sucks honey from a plant containing BT it will carry it back to the hive. It is possible that this transference of innocuous material to the developing larva’s is more sensitive on the youth population of a hive?
I don’t know I am merely thinking out loud like a scientist.
There is no question that somelthing is going dreadfully wrong – fast!
Cheers Bob
-- I want to believe in a lot of things but, in the meantime I have to deal with the truth
Yes, according to British scientist Paul Williams of the Natural History Museum in London.
Williams, who’s in Toronto this week for a conference on building a worldwide bee DNA database, has been studying the winged workers for more than three decades.
“What we’ve been finding with bumblebees in Europe is that some species have declined quite sharply and other species have hardly changed at all,” he told the Star yesterday at York University.
“We think that it’s a reduction in some flowers, particularly clovers, which used to be important in agriculture,” he said.
Declines in bee populations on this continent are more complicated to explain, he said.
Vanishing flowers “may be part of the story, but there are a couple of species that were among the most abundant across North America and they have declined precipitously in the last 10 years.”
Williams said some theorize that bee diseases from Europe may have attacked hives here. “Some of the most common bumblebees, you can’t find any more,” he said. “They’ve almost completely disappeared and that’s very worrying.”
Bees are the most common pollinator of crops and flowers and tree fruit, not only in your backyard, but in huge commercial vegetable operations around the world worth billions of dollars.
“If you buy tomatoes, they’ve almost certainly been pollinated by bumblebees that have been raised specifically to do that job,” Williams said.
York’s biology professor Laurence Packer said concern is growing over the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder, where the worker bees abruptly leave a colony and don’t return.
“The bees disappear from the hives, especially over winter … and so the colony dies.”
Jim Wilkes
-- blooz 5b - You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt. ~author unkown
“We think that it’s a reduction in some flowers, particularly clovers, which used to be important in agriculture,”
That almost makes sense, but as an additional problem.
For years in the US yards were seeded with a clover mix. Anymore however, you see almost now clover in most “lawns”.
I’ll be over seeding with a mix, this fall.
Tent caterpillars are FUN to play with! Now, there’s some other kind of caterpillar that I saw this year that looks somewhat like them however that aren’t fun to play with.. Looked like mean little suckers.
Oh, and I’ve seen several honey bees on our blackberry bramble in the back yard. Also seen a bunch of bumble bees, but they’re not as important IMO.
I saw in our local paper sometime in the past month making their yearly announcement that noxious weeds have to be removed by law. All I could see were the milkweeds being removed and the monarch butterflies starving… and now I see clover wilting and bees disappearing.. when will we stop?
They were actually spraying the sides of the roads the other day!! Could smell it from miles around! It was the “county” doing that! can you believe it!
-- Eklectic, Follow my Bliss, South East Ontario 5a
They aren’t going to spray the road sides this year and next as a test to see i that is killing our bees
Thank Heavens
They were spraying to kill the weeds and any new young spruce trees.
This year they just took a machine and cut everything down about 12 feet off the roads.
They never did this spraying as I was growing up, why the panic to do it now
My apple trees and honey suckle trees are coming in bloom. aaaaah the aroma so nice but I still haven’t seen a bee. Normally they are loaded with them by now
so this means no apples again this year. I am really worried
-- NS Zone 5B 200 KM East of Halifax cheers Bunting------Having a place to go – is a home. Having someone to love – is a family.
