4 Years Left for Mankind

[Christina]

Bee Emergency Stranger Than We Thought14-Feb-2007 We're in the middle of a bee emergency. Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live." A mysterious ailment called Colony Collapse Disorder is causing agricultural honeybees nationwide to abandon their hives and disappear. It's a kind of mass suicide in the bee world. Entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk says, "Individual beekeepers are really taking a beating. A guy down in Oklahoma lost 80% of his 13,000 colonies in the last month. In Florida, there are a whole lot of people facing 40, 60 and 80 percent losses. That’s huge." With CCD, most adult honeybees abandon a hive and disappear, abandoning the queen and a remnant of younger bees. This is unheard of, since normally a bee colony will do almost anything to protect its queen. Since the tasks done in the hive are very stratified, bees cannot survive on their own. One of the strongest instincts that bees have is protecting and nurturing the next generation, but with CCD, the cells of young bees in the pupa stage are not covered and protected by their older sisters, probably because most of the adult bees have left. Dead adult bees aren't even found near the hive; they are just gone. Bromenshenk says, "We don’t want to panic the beekeeper industry because we are not sure it's time to push the panic button yet, but we do know this is real, it's severe and it's widespread." Field technician and self-professed bee lover Scott Debnam describes visits to the impacted bee yards as "spooky," and says, "Fortunately the sites I've visited have been recovering, but in Georgia I saw a lot of small colonies, a lot of uncapped brood and a lot of early-stage brood. The adults had flown the coop.................................................................................................Heres the story I posted last week:Honey bee die-off alarms beekeepersUNIVERSITY PARK —An alarming die-off of honey bees has beekeepers fighting for commercial survival and crop growers wondering whether bees will be available to pollinate their crops this spring and summer.Researchers are scrambling to find answers to what's causing an affliction recently named Colony Collapse Disorder, which has decimated commercial beekeeping operations in Pennsylvania and across the country.“During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States,” says Maryann Frazier, apiculture extension associate in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.“Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses.“This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States,” she says. ‘Because the number of managed honey bee colonies is less than half of what it was 25 years ago, states such as Pennsylvania can ill afford these heavy losses.”__________________