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TenBears
Penny Hoarding Member
873 Posts |
 Posted - 03/27/2008 : 17:20:15
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I didn't want to hijack a previous thread regarding what we all would do in case TSHTF. Thus, this thread.
Several said they would keep bees if TSHTF. I was curious, have any of you that keep bees experienced CCD?
Strange, but most of us think of a SHTF scenario coming from economic collapse or some sort of nuclear war. But, I read today that the US lost approximately 37% of its bee population in the last year to a very little understood problem known as Colony Collapse Disorder. I suppose that sh-- could hit the fan if we lost all our bees and no crops were pollinated. Imagine the US not being able to grow its own food for the first time in the history of the nation.
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"Rich," the Old Man said dreamily, "is not baying after what you can't have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whiskey to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven't got." Robert Ruark
there are too wild Indians...
there are too wild Indians...
there are too wild Indians...-----still taunted
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Cody8404
Penny Collector Member
USA
340 Posts |
Posted - 03/27/2008 : 17:45:52
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I have learned a little about CCD. It also taught me about how overworked the bees are.
They take the bees to a field, give them a few days to do thier work and then pack them up to the next farm. The bee keepers sell this service because the native bees have already disappeared.
Yes it really is scarry. |
Awake, O kings of the earth! Come ye, O, come ye, with your gold and your silver, to the help of my people, to the house of the daughters of Zion, to the help of the people of the God of this Land even Jesus Christ. |
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me2
Penny Pincher Member
192 Posts |
Posted - 03/27/2008 : 18:00:25
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There are lots of ways of looking at any classification system, but here is one worth considering:
There are two kinds of bees, Colony Bees, and Solitary bees.
http://www.territorialseed.com/prod_detail_list/s
Territorial Seed is a great company.
I've dealt with them several times, and I give them an A+ rating on service, price, everything.
Check them out.
They sell bees and hives and all kinds of good stuff. |
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The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
John Maynard Keynes,
English economist (1883 - 1946)
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knibloe
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
537 Posts |
Posted - 03/27/2008 : 20:45:24
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I have been bee keeping on a small scale for 10 years. Mine are doing fine. However, I do not truck them around the country, I do not medicate them, and I leave more honey for them to overwinter on than most bee keepers do. I also the area I live in is marginal agricultural ground and there are more fields fallow than planted. I believe that this reduces my bees exposure to pesticides.
Bees directly pollinate 30% of our food and indirectly pollinate another 30% through livestock food. You may find it interesting to note that honey bees are not native to America. They were brought here by the colonists. There are other bees that pollinate plants, but they are not nearly so numerous, and I believe that if honey bees are in trouble theother bees will likely be in trouble as well. |
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misteroman
Moderator
USA
1246 Posts |
Posted - 03/27/2008 : 22:51:34
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I read that somewhere before.If there were no bees left on earth,humans would die off within 10 yrs.Anyone believe that?
Derek |
****Always buying wheats and Pre 82's!!!! See post or PM me for details****
http://realcent.forumco.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2014 |
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cheeple
Penny Sorter Member
USA
67 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2008 : 02:28:59
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Hey on another subject, what ever happened to the Killer Bees that were supposed to be here by 2004 and wipe out america???
Just another media lie to keep us scared and consuming? |
Retire in 2 years with a monthly income of $1,396 per month, what makes this recession proof? it's over 60 Countries Strong. berrytreemadeeasy.com |
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knibloe
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
537 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2008 : 16:11:57
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I think we could survive without bees. There is a region in china that has lost all of it's bees due to pollution. They hand pollinate the pear crop there. One pear at a time with a feather!!
Killer bees have made there way from Brazil to Texas. They have been slowed a little as the weather gets colder the farther north that they go. They are mean, and in some cases lethal, but the media and movies have made it worse that it really is. |
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lilyrdape
Penny Pincher Member
USA
120 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2008 : 16:37:10
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| lol without bees it would be alot harder to get enough food together from hand pollinating them i would think...atleast the cost of producing the food would go up. |
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RAlex
Penny Sorter Member
USA
26 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2008 : 18:09:45
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| I havent had any losses from CCD based on what information that I have found. I also do not use any chemicals on my bees. I do dust them with confectionary sugar for the varroa mite. A friend of mine lost 70 out of 85 hives last year. He does use chems and pollinates crops. When we think about the consequences of the bees dieing most dont consider that they also pollinate the plants that our beef feeds on as well. AHB (African Honey Bee) has established wild colonys in florida now as reported last spring. I suspect they might not survive in northern climates as they tend not to store enough winter supply and they tend to swarm more than the European Honey bees. |
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wolvesdad
Penny Collector Member
398 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2008 : 18:12:06
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I don't know if CCD is being understood.
from the way I understand it(I read a little bit of research about it), it has nothing to do with overworking the bees.
It is very likely to be a parasite(bacteria, or fungal, or small work?) or a virus. I think the virus is the theory mostly believed at this point.
True, some select bees could be immune, and repopulate the continent...
but it is very scary. I hope it is solved soon, or the virus mutates and becomes harmless (again). |
"May your percentages ever increase!" |
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RAlex
Penny Sorter Member
USA
26 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2008 : 18:14:08
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| Also Honey queens can be AI (artifically inseminated) so that producers know their queens are of the European breeds....Rick |
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TenBears
Penny Hoarding Member
873 Posts |
Posted - 04/18/2008 : 08:48:05
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A new article on coinflation regarding bees dying off:
http://www.komotv.com/news/17831534.html |
"Rich," the Old Man said dreamily, "is not baying after what you can't have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whiskey to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven't got." Robert Ruark
there are too wild Indians...
there are too wild Indians...
there are too wild Indians...-----still taunted
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Flbandit
Penny Collector Member
USA
428 Posts |
Posted - 04/19/2008 : 09:06:09
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| It's affected where I work a bit. We do a Honey Distillate product that is a good seller for us. It was difficult to get enough honey for awhile, and of course the price went up significantly. |
Are you throwing that out? |
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starwarsgeek171
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
602 Posts |
Posted - 04/19/2008 : 09:55:05
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Mystery of the dying bees
7 March 2007 by Benjamin Lester
Cosmos Online
One of the most important crop pollinators in the world, honey bees in the United States have been decimated in recent months by a mysterious disease.
Something mysterious is killing honey bees, and even as billions are dropping dead across North America, researchers are scrambling to find answers and save one of the most important crop pollinators on Earth.
The almond trees are blooming and the bees are dying, and nobody knows why. All up and down California's vast San Joaquin Valley, nearly 2,500 square kilometres of small nut trees arranged in laser-straight rows are shaking off the cobwebs of winter. They're gearing up once again to produce nearly half a billion kilograms of nuts, worth US$3 billion to the U.S. economy.
The trees cannot produce the bounty on their own, however. They need bees - a million hives worth - trucked in from nearly forty U.S. states to move pollen from one tree to another, fertilising the blooms in the largest managed pollination event on Earth.
But even as the beekeepers reap record fees for renting their hives, their livelihood is now threatened by the largest loss of honey bees in the history of the industry.
Since October 2006, 35 per cent or more of the United States' population of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) - billions of individual bees - simply flew from their hive homes and disappeared.
When the almonds were being plucked from the trees late last year, Gene Brandi of Los Banos, California had 2,000 hives, but by late February he had just 1,200 - a loss of 40 per cent.
And Brandi is one of the more fortunate. Across the 24 U.S. states affected by the mysterious phenomenon, losses have ranged up to 90 per cent. "I've had a couple of yards where I've had 200 hives and they're down to 10 hives that are alive," says David Bradshaw of Visalia, about 180 kilometres southeast of Los Banos along California's Route 99.
What's causing the carnage, however, is a total mystery; all that scientists have come up with so far is a new name for the phenomenon - Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - and a list of symptoms.
In hives hit by CCD, adult workers simply fly away and disappear, leaving a small cluster of workers and the hive's young to fend for themselves. Adding to the mystery, nearby predators, such as the wax moth, are refraining from moving in to pilfer honey and other hive contents from the abandoned hives; in CCD-affected hives the honey remains untouched.
The symptoms are baffling, but one of the emerging hypotheses is that the scourge is underpinned by a collapse of the bees' immune systems. Stressed out by cross-country truck journeys and drought, attacked by viruses and introduced parasites, or whacked out by harmful new pesticides, some researchers believe the bees' natural defences may have simply given way. This opens the door to a host of problems that the bees can normally suppress.
What's surprising is that mysterious declines are nothing new. As far back as 1896, CCD has popped up again and again, only under the monikers: 'fall dwindle' disease, 'May dwindle', 'spring dwindle', 'disappearing disease', and 'autumn collapse'.
Even the current outbreak has possibly been going on undetected for two years, according to the CCD Working Group - a crack group of U.S. researchers from institutes including the Pennsylvania State University and University of Montana, who are trying to unravel the mystery.
What has made the members of the Working Group - as well as conservationists, beekeepers, and farmers - really sit up and notice is the scale of this year's decimation; something in the environment has allowed CCD to reach an unprecedented scale that threatens the very survival of the pollination industry.
"We have never seen a die-off of this magnitude with this weird symptomology," says Maryann Frazier, a bee researcher at Pennsylvania State University. "We've seen bees disappear over time and dwindle away, but not die-off so quickly."
Asian mites and latent viruses
A problem preventing clear identification of CCD is that honey bees are already under threat from manifold foes.
Even without CCD, the number of managed hives in the U.S. has dwindled by nearly 50 per cent since the industry's peak in the 1970s. The main culprit for the die-offs is a tiny Asian mite. Known as Varroa destructor to scientists and the 'vampire mite' to beekeepers, these tiny parasites - circular, crab-like arachnids about the size of a bee's eyeball - have been quietly parasitising the Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana) in Southeast Asia for millennia.
Varroa destructor, a tiny tick-like arachnid, has been wreaking havoc on U.S. honey bees since it was inadvertently introduced from Asia in the 1980s.
Scott Bauer/Wikipedia
Some time in the early 1980s, though, the mites hitched a ride to America and hopped on new hosts - spreading like wildfire throughout the defenceless Western honey bee population with the help of migratory beekeepers who obligingly trucked them around the country. The mites suck the vital juices out of both developing and adult bees, and left unchecked can kill a hive within 12 months.
In addition to the damage that the mites do themselves, they also spread viruses. Furthermore, the mites appear to assist the viruses by somehow sabotaging the bees' immune system.
"There's something about a mite feeding on a bee that just knocks its immune system out. [Then] the viruses can take over," says Eric Mussen, a bee researcher at the University of California, Davis.
But mites and their viruses have been infecting U.S. honey bees for nearly 30 years. What has experts worried is that CCD kills bees even more efficiently than mites - destroying a healthy colony in a matter of weeks.
All stressed out
As if having its bodily fluids sucked out by a parasite wasn't enough to weaken a bee, some suspect its immune system is also under attack from plain old stress.
Just as humans fall ill more readily after draining tasks or emotional upheavals, Mussen says stress is a sure-fire way to compromise bee immunity too.
And the lives of commercial honey bees are filled with stress. A typical year for a hive might entail up to five cross-country truck trips, chasing crops to pollinate and clover fields to make honey in. Banging the bees around during cross-country journeys can take a heavy toll.
"Some of the beekeepers you talk to will tell you that they'll lose 10 per cent of their queens" on every trip, Mussen says. And besides transportation stress, many of the hardest-hit beekeepers have reported that their hives underwent extraordinary stresses like drought, overcrowding, or famine, in the months before die-offs occurred.
Stress alone won't kill a bee, but Mussen thinks that it's just one more factor conspiring against them. "It's the knocking down of the immune system, it's having mites around - everything is just piling up - they haven't got much of a chance."
Fly away and die
Pesticides are designed to kill bugs and other pests on crops without causing harm to humans or the environment. But in a never-ending biological arms race, miscreant insects develop resistance to new pesticides nearly as fast as chemists can create them. In this tit-for-tat exchange, scant attention is paid to effects that new pesticides have on beneficial insects like honey bees.
While many pesticides are downright lethal to bees, some new studies have pointed to other strange effects found at low doses. For example, low doses of new compounds called neonicotinoids might be interfering with bee minds. Potentially, this prevents them from remembering their colony's location and causes them to get lost and never return.
According to Pennsylvania State University entomologist Diane Cox-Foster, another possibility is that neonicotinoids are another factor impairing bee immunity.
Yet another hypothesis is that sick adult bees may be self-sacrificing: flying away to die in order to protect the hive from further infection.
When the Working Group first examined samples of CCD-killed bees from across the country, one factor they found in common was fungal growth in the bees' guts. The fungi may be from the genus Aspergillus, a group of fungi that produce toxins which can kill young adult bees. Studies published in the past have reported that bees infected with the fungus fly away from the colony to die.
Not that Aspergillus is the only possibility. "We're asking if there is anything new that may have been brought in accidentally," says Cox-Foster. "We know that there are a couple of potential routes for introduction of new pathogens."
Hands off the hive
When a colony is weakened other bees or insects usually move in to take advantage of the gap and score a free lunch in the form of honey. Not so in CCD-killed hives; wax moths and other predators stay away, at least for much longer than they would normally.
According to Cox-Foster, it could be that insects' keen sense of smell may be keeping them away from dangerous chemicals present in the dead hive. "We know that insects are very good at detecting chemicals in their environment. There are studies that have taken caterpillars and shown that they'll actually feed around a droplet of pesticide on a leaf because they can detect it"
"One of our hypotheses is that the fungus itself is producing toxins that are being detected by the other insects. Likewise, it could be one of these environmental contaminants [like pesticides]," she says.
That's as far as the research detectives have gotten to date. Are bees, under stress from many sources, succumbing to pressure from new pathogens or chemicals? Between mites, viruses, fungi, stress and new pesticides, the insects are under threat like never before.
Fully one-third of fruits, vegetables, and nuts consumed in America are dependent on pollinators - overwhelmingly honey bees. The net value of all this produce to the U.S. economy is roughly US$15 billion per year. And across America experts are scrambling to find answers to the mystery before it turns into an even bigger economic and agricultural disaster.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benjamin Lester was an intern at COSMOS who wrote stories for both the print magazine and Cosmos Online. He's a graduate of evolution and ecology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.
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Ardent Listener
Administrator
USA
2627 Posts |
Posted - 04/19/2008 : 11:46:24
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| Yet honey is still rather cheap. I just bought about five pounds of it and though I can't recall the price I paid, it was not half as much as I expected. I don't have a big sweet tooth but honey lasts a long time. |
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Saul Mine
Penny Collector Member
USA
335 Posts |
Posted - 04/20/2008 : 19:15:09
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| I don't know much about honey, but I am told that the killer bee thing only applied to poorly managed hives. Anybody who requeens the hive and performs other chores considered normal in the USA has no such problem. |
A penny sorted is a penny earned!
Please use tinyurl.com to post links. Long links make posts hard to read. |
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knibloe
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
537 Posts |
Posted - 04/20/2008 : 19:24:56
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| The reason honey is so cheap is that much of it is brought in from China. If a jar of honey says "product of USA" the only thing that you know for sure is that it was packaged into the jar in the US. It does not mean that the honey was from the US. The Chinese were sanctioned a few year back for illegal antibiotics in the honey. Argentina was sanctioned as well. The best thing that you can do is find a local bee keeper and buy from them. You may pay a little more, but you will know where it came from. |
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NotABigDeal
1000+ Penny Miser Member
USA
1848 Posts |
Posted - 04/21/2008 : 06:21:02
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I only buy honey from local bee keepers. No China honey with a possible lead/honey mix....
Deal |
I'm so sick over pennies....I frequently trade a dime or two for the whole "take-a-penny" container if sufficient coppers exist. That will get you some odd looks. |
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mickeyman
Penny Pincher Member
Canada
198 Posts |
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Beekeeping and Colony Collapse Disorder
