The 4-Year Hunt for the Honey Bee Killer

(CBS)  Among beekeepers, the buzz this spring is about more colonies of honeybees dying.

CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports researcher Jerry Bromenshenk has been tracking the bee die-off for four years. This year ranks with the worst.

The die off, known as "Colony Collapse Disorder," has killed about 30 percent of the hives in the United States over the past four winters. That's a total of three to four million hives gone, with a loss of billions of bees. Each hive can be home to 30,000 bees or more.

Watch a CBS News story on Colony Collapse Disorder

"In any small bee yard that you drive by when you're going down the road, there are more bees in that bee yard than there are people in L.A.," says Bromenshenk.

What's killing all those bees remains a mystery. At a scientific conference in San Francisco Thursday, researchers reported finding traces of 121 different pesticides in bee hives.

"That's a cause for concern," says USDA researcher Jeff Pettis.

Watch the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees

Pettis says the pesticides his group found may combine with other threats to bees.

"We're looking at pesticides just like we're looking at poor nutrition or parasitic mites as contributing to the overall decline in bee health," he says.

Being a bee has never been easy, with colonies frequently attacked by parasites and viruses. Until recent years, bees usually managed to cope with all that.

What's Killing The Honeybees?

Finding out why bees are no longer coping is getting urgent. Without bees to pollinate crops, we'd lose about a third of the food we eat.

"If you like something more than oatmeal for breakfast, if you like fruits and vegetables, things like that, that's the things bees contribute to our diet," says Pettis.

While its not unusual for people to be afraid of bees, perhaps what we should really fear is that one day we won't have them at all.

[TheTexasLady]

http://www.naturalnews.com/031091_USDA_pesticide.html

Could it be neonicotinoids?

[TomColt]

Fortunately, honeybees are not necessary for America's number one irrigated crop - lawn grass. As long as we have plenty of clean drinking water to put on our lawns we will "bee" okay.

[KeithDrippingSprings]

80% of the total production of harmfull chimecals used in the US are applied by homeowners.

The other 20 % are applied by trained and licensed farmers and landscapers.

[PeterPainter]

I would argue that the die off of bees is analogous to the die off of ocean life along the edge of the coastline in the American Northwest. Vast areas of the oceans have become mysterious 'dead zones', devoid of life. And even though scientists can't seem to find a specific cause, it would be easy to argue that it is due to the profligate use of chemical fertilizers and the runoffs into the ocean.

In a similar way, I have no doubts that the profligate use of fertilizers, insecticides and the general industrial demands for overproduction of food lie at the root of the honey bee die off.

The fact that hives are trucked thousands of miles for year round production... combined with the endless subjection of bees to insecticides, all done in the industrial mono-culture of intensive use production would seem to be one factor involved.

In conclusion I'd offer that both of these arguments are presented from a generalist point of view. No doubt science is looking for just 1 single virus or culprit to place the blame on. If indeed we need just 1 culprit to blame, I'd just say look in the mirror.

Every time you go past a hardware box store or drug store with stacks of pesticides piled up high ask yourself if society really ought to allow all of that to go into the water runoff system? Do we really need golf course lawns that badly?

I imagine agricultural pesticides and fertilizer are also sorely in need of a Rachel Carson 'Silent Spring' sort of moment of truth. It's not rocket science...

Give Nature a chance... that's what I say.

[rf35]

Too many people, too few bees. Which problem do you think we are able to solve? Humans may have the distinction of being the only species ever to breed itself into extinction.

[tmittelstaed]

Last year a compelling study was published on this:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/21/0906970106

They found no marker indicating cause by pesticide use.

[porcine_aviator]

That's not exactly true. Varroa parasites may have been the agent, but the susceptibility to varroa is greatly enhanced by co-exposures to pesticides.

[IndiasWorstTechSupport]

You wanna know the real truth. US outsourced them to China because it was cheaper to pollinate crops over there and then have it shipped over here after being genetically engineered with minute trace amount of lead.

[rf35]

Don't forget about the melamine.

[book_of_wally]

I believe they added MSG as well.

[rwsmith29456]

The solution is to tax beehives so that the government can protect them.

[bobnjersey]

[The solution is to tax beehives so that the government can protect them. ]

actually ... in that vein ... if you give them their honey back ... that will surely 'trickle down' and create other honey opportunities for the other bees.

[erasmus111]

"What's killing all those bees remains a mystery. At a scientific conference in San Francisco Thursday, researchers reported finding traces of 121 different pesticides in bee hives."


The answer to the first sentence is in the second. How stupid are we? Pesticides are killing us. It make take years to happen for humans, but it would take no time at all for bees. We keep spraying everything with poisons and expect there will be no consequences?

I'm thinking that all those pesticides and chemicals that are on and in are food are starting to affect our brains.

[hateisafourletterword]

I agree. Look at D.C. and CA legislatures today. It is affecting our brains.

[liebestode]

As a biologist and beekeeper who has worked on this problem from the start let me assure you it is NOT: cell phone towers, nor chemical trails by the government, nor the coming rapture, the cause has a rational basis like any other disorder. There is no doubt within the beekeeping/scientific community that factors such as viruses, bacteria, parasitic mites all play a role. In my own case and many others, agricultural chemicals , namely the neonicotoids[synthetic nicotine] used as seed treatments cause immediate death of bees within a few days from the
emergence of the corn plant. A discussion of this and more can be seeb in the new documentary, "Nicotine Bees", by Kevin Hansen.

Even more alarming is the loss of wild pollinators from the same cause, as well as many other insect species. This problem is big and will become bigger in subsequent years and Americans would be advised to give it some serious study and thought.

[rwsmith29456]

If we stock up on groceries how long can we stand up to a very severe and protracted famine?

[bobnjersey]

[Being a bee has never been easy ...]

i'll bet that some bees have it easier than others ... and that there's a small percentage of bees that have it really easy ... with the other bees doing everything for them.

[liebestode]

Yes! I have a hive of those Socialist bees....they just sit on their little bee-hinds and wait for me to deliver a new can of sugar syrup..

[bobnjersey]

[Yes! I have a hive of those Socialist bees....they just sit on their little bee-hinds and wait for me to deliver a new can of sugar syrup.. ]

wow ... you have a one track mind ... huh?

i was describing the capitalist structure of the honey bee world ... not the socialist one.