I’ve had my mouth engaged about this since last winter, but my mind is only starting to catch up. Bee mites have been a problem for years so when I heard about Colony Collapse Disorder I conflated the two issues. The Varroa mite has been troubling bee keepers since the eighties, but the current rash of Colony Collapse Disorder was first reported in late 2024, according to The Economist.
My first hypothesis was market concentration of commercial hives. With only a few vendors supplying most of the bees in the country, it doesn’t take much to mess up the supply chain. But last night I had a conversation that was running toward Bayer and Gaucho. The implication was that the agrichem industry has so fucked up the environment that the bees don’t want to live here anymore. I can’t find a substantiating study, but I can look out my window and see brown fields where every weed is dead and the April rains are moistening sterile soil in preparation for a crop of “Round-up ready Soybeans.”
So I don’t have the answer right now, but all the -cides out there — herbicides and insecticides — point to a world that is increasingly unsafe for bees and other living things. Let’s keep our eyes open and be ready to shut down the bee killers when we figure out who they are.
[tags]apiaries, death by poison, bees knees[/tags]
I have just written a brief article about the Honeybee crisis which you might find of interest http://insects.suite101.com/article.cfm/bee_crisis
Dude. Frank.
I’ve been having like, anxiety attacks over the state of bees lately. I have a strong affinity for them (I love social insects, and may become a member of the Amateur Entomologists’ Society or International Union for the Study of Social Insects in the year…) and the fact that so many of them are getting ill…
Oh it chills me to the bone. Somebody actually snapped at me for ranting about the bees earlier. The gall (Gaul)!
Jmo. Dudette. There’s a good comment by Dave at Shelley’s that brings us full circle to the Varroa mite as the root cause. That would seem to be backed up by the UCSF research that finds iflaviral remnants in the ground up dead bees they studied.
But I still think it is all tied to the ecocide we wreak on huge tracts of cropland in order to improve crop yields.