New survey shows almost a third of bee colonies in the US died last winter

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 by Common Dreams
Buzz! Buzz! Silence
by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Results of a new survey released Tuesday paint another dire picture of the population of bees in the United States.

Nearly a third of managed honey bee colonies were lost this past winter, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Bee Informed Partnership and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) found, a 42% increase in loss over the previous winter.

But USDA bee expert Dr. Jeff Pettis, who worked on the study, also noted that "the 31 percent figure likely under-represents the losses, as we saw many weak colonies that were not actually dead."

Rather than showing evidence of colony collapse disorder (CCD), Pettis said most colonies "dwindled away rather than suffering from the sudden onset of CCD."

70% of the survey respondents reported a loss over 15% — a loss percentage deemed "acceptable."

The 6 year average total loss is also far above that "acceptable" level, averaging 30.5%.

The analysis was done by a team of 11 researchers led by Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and director of the Bee Informed Partnership.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster.”

Dr. Jeff PettisVanEngelsdorp pointed to the Midwest's drought as being one of the possible factors, as the bees may have been forced to look to flowering crops for nectar rather than wildflowers, and those crops may have had "unusually high" levels of pesticides.

Also a potential factor, stated vanEngelsdorp, is the fact that high corn prices lead to cornfields replacing some prairie and shrubs.

In a separate report released last week by the USDA and EPA on honey bee health, multiple factors were cited as responsible for the declining bee population, including pesticides.

The study highlighted the need for bees for the nation's food security. With bee populations declining year after year, Pettis said, “We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster.”

Following the study, Paul Towers, media director with the Pesticide Action Network, told IPS that the EPA/USDA study shows that action does need to happen, and fast:

“The report makes a compelling case that multiple factors are at play and that we do need to take action, but this needs to be done far more quickly,” Paul Towers, media director with the Pesticide Action Network, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The five-to-ten-year timeframe these agencies are now saying they will follow is not fast enough. In fact, there is great imperative here: bees are a clear indicator of the overall health of our agricultural system, so if we’re unable to protect the pollinators we’ll put our entire agricultural system at risk.”

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If this trend continues, we are clearly seeing our own extinction event, unraveling in slow motion. 5 years after most of the bees are dead, we will die. Humanity ceases to exist because it killed the bees.--jef

Deadly Human-Made 'Cocktail' Threatening World’s Insect Pollinators (mostly Bees)

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
Decline of 'unsung heroes' will have drastic impacts on world's ecosystems, food supply
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer


A "cocktail" of human-made "pressures" are threatening insect pollinators across the world, whose decline will have "profound environmental, human health and economic consequences," according to a new report released Monday by the Insect Pollinators Initiative.

Insect pollinators such as bees provide pollination for up to 75% of crops and enable reproduction in up to 94% of wild flowering plants, meaning their current decline greatly "threatens human food supplies and ecosystem function" around the world, the group urges.

According to the study Threats to an Ecosystem Service: Pressures on Pollinators, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the steady disappearance of these essential creatures cannot be tied to one factor, but to a multitude of anthropogenic reasons such as "the loss of food resources in intensively-farmed landscapes," pesticides, climate change, and "the spread of alien species and diseases."

Dr. Adam Vanbergen from the UK’s Center for Ecology & Hydrology and science coordinator of the IPI led the review and stated:

There is no single smoking gun behind pollinator declines, instead there is a cocktail of multiple pressures that can combine to threaten these insects. For example, the loss of food resources in intensively-farmed landscapes, pesticides and diseases are individually important threats, but are also likely to combine and exacerbate the negative impacts on pollinators.

“Pollinators are the unsung heroes of the insect world and ensure our crops are properly pollinated so we have a secure supply of nutritious food in our shops," said co-author Professor Simon Potts from the University of Reading. "The costs of taking action now to tackle the multiple threats to pollinators is much smaller than the long-term costs to our food security and ecosystem stability. Failure by governments to take decisive steps now only sets us up for bigger problems in the future.”

Bee Catastrophe

At certain points over the last couple of years, I have remarked to a few people that if there is a catastrophic end to humanity, it won't come from an asteroid, super volcano, global warming, or nuclear annihilation--it will come in the form of a tiny space that no longer contains a bee, or the hives which no longer contain bee colonies. When there is no pollination, everything green will die. The domino effect will reach us very quickly.

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1/3 of Colonies Died This Winter, Worries Grow About Terminal Decline
By Alison Benjamin, The Observer UK
May 3, 2010

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. "Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers," he said, adding that a solution may be years away. "Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms."

In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain's estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers' Association, said: "Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none." Results from a survey of the association's 15,000 members are expected this month.

John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers' Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. "There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances," he said. "We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them."

Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the "alarming" decline of honeybees.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be "ring-fenced" for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.

WHY BEES MATTER

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colorless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.