From the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Researchers have found that the spread of an exotic honey bee parasite -now found worldwide – is linked not only to its superior competitive ability, but also to climate, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The team of researchers, including Myrsini Natsopoulou from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, who co-led the research alongside Dr. Dino McMahon from Queen’s University Belfast, believes that the parasite could become more prevalent in the UK in the future and their findings demonstrate the importance of both parasite competition and climate change in the spread of this emerging disease.
Myrsini Natsopoulou said: “Our results reveal not only that the exotic parasite is a better competitor than its original close relative, but that its widespread distribution and patterns of prevalence in nature depend on climatic conditions too”.
The research compared pathogen growth in honey bees that were infected with both the exotic parasite, Nosema ceranae and its original native relative, Nosema apis.
Experiments showed that, while both parasites inhibit each other’s growth, the exotic Nosema ceranae has a much greater negative impact on the native Nosema apis than vice versa. By integrating the effects of competition and climate into a simple mathematical model, the researchers were better able to predict the relative occurrence of both parasite species in nature: Nosema ceranae is common in Southern Europe but rare in Northern Europe.
Coauthor of the study, Prof. Robert Paxton of Queen’s University Belfast, added: “This emerging parasite is more susceptible to cold than its original close relative, possibly reflecting its presumed origin in east Asia. In the face of rising global temperatures, our findings suggest that it will increase in prevalence and potentially lead to increased honey bee colony losses in Britain.”
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This study was funded by the Insect Pollinators Initiative, a joint venture of the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defra, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust, managed under the auspices of the Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership.
Let’s look at the bright side. The demise of exotic – now global – parasites is linked not only to their deteriorating competitive ability, but also to this exceptional period of climate non-change. This should be good news also for the bees.
Darn. it’s just one damn thing after another from these guys, these days. Let’s hope that Global Warming wipes them out soon.
/s
What rising temperatures?
I thought they were not supposed to say “warming” any more, but rather “extreme weather.” Or maybe you’re still allowed to say “warming” when worrying about the future?
All that gibberish from them means is, “if we don’t bankrupt the west soon, we’re doomed!”.
As long as I can continue to buy bee vomit (honey) I’m happy.
Meanwhile in China, some people extol the virtues of pillows stuffed with silkworm poop. Perhaps someone can get a grant to model the effects of climate change on poop pillows for Chinese babies? The effects could be devastating.
Don’t call me honey ;~>
I contacted a national apiculture group to suggest that global cooling was responsible for colony collapse, but got no traction. I did so after reading that iron molecules in the bee’s gut enable the workers to navigate back to the hive. Since Svesnmark has emphasized the importance of magnetic fields and the geomagnetic field on GCR infiltration, and strange things have been happening lately in those areas, it seemed likely a connection could be drawn…
It wont cause a collapse, it’s a normal and natural thing that bees, wasps and other insects do. their eggs are very well protected from the elements as long as they’re not disturbed. That’s another issue. What’s lucky for man, thanks to his ingenuity, we can and do pollinate and fertilize our own crops systematically. We can even genetically modify them to be resistant against pests and improve their adaptation to environmental conditions.
Political science sucks balls..
“Researchers have found that the spread of an exotic honey bee parasite -now found worldwide – is linked not only to its superior competitive ability, but also to climate, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”
Of course they did!
It’s just another one of many “daily” reasons on any given day to indoctrinate others into subscribing to the fraud.
I don’t think the realization that so many of their peers that are realigning themselves with reality has hit home.
The collapse of the global warming fraud is being brought about by their own “science”.
Persistent little buggars they are.
And, this is because bees didn’t survive the last interglacial, which was warmer than the present one?
I love the term exotic parasite. It conveys more alarm like some sort of lab experiment gone off the rails compelling us to “Act Now!!!” Before we lose containment.
Will this crap ever stop?
Well it started with the shaman of some primitive tribe thumping his walking stick on the ground at some unusual incident and proclaiming “gods angry, must appease, bring much food and treasure for sacrifice… store in my tent…”
So based on the last few thousand years trend…. this crap will, sadly, never stop.
hey, It beats working for a living. give me all your money and you will be saved.
Why do the bees not starve when we take their honey? I never did understand that.
Domestic honey bee.
Good evening, John – If you take too much honey too late in the year, the colony will starve. The art is in guessing how much is too much. Here in NorthEast Ohio, we need 80-90 lbs on the colony in November for them to make it through the average winter. Any excess can be taken by the beekeeper (and will actually get in the way of the bees if you don’t harvest it.)
An inexperienced beekeeper will sometimes take too much (or take it from the wrong place) too late in the year for the bees to replace those stores and the bees will die – usually in March. And if you have an unusually harsh winter, some of even the best beekeepers’ bees will die – they are a tropical species, after all.
By the way, honeybees are NOT domesticated.
Given global temperatures aren’t rising what’s the problem? Question is: given temperatures where bees currently reside are far in excess of postulated average global temperatures why isn’t the parasite doing its worst currently? Answer: it’s a natural occurrence and man should stay out of it.
Hives go into prolonged hibernation when temperature drops. Dishonesty doesn’t apparently! 😉
In the mid 1960s, I was a geologist with the Geological Survey of Nigeria. At the HQ compound in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, was a large tree with a hole in it about a foot and a half high and foot wide (45cm x 30cm) issuing into a hollow in the centre of the tree. It was full of honey bees (I don’t know the type) but there was so much honey in it that an amber stripe of honey traced down the bark to the foot of the tree and the bees seemed to be still busy. So much for the famous lazy killer African bees that was the big scare, what, 30 years ago. I thought about the productive Nigerian bees at the time thinking another scary hoax in the making. Now researchers have found that the tag was not deserved after all, and the ”Africanized” bees are actually great honey producers and the European bees, favored in Latin America by comparison are fat and lazy.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bee-researchers-make-friends-africanized-killer/
Global warming should replace these fat, lazy Euro bees by real producers from the south, the way-down-south, all by itself, unless some real bee researchers over there come to the idea of bringing these little beauties up to Africanize their stock earlier. Some how Social Democrats have even got the bees on the dole.
Africanized bees! I remember that scare, it was around the height of solar activity for the 80-90s! I remember this because I took a month long trip to Germany with a few friends and my late brother one summer and it was hot.. we camped out in a ‘plumb orchard’ for a week in Schorndorf and seen how big wasps grew and how amazing the thunderstorms were.
The fireflies were an amazing sight.. and Stuttgart zoo was another place to be on the planet that year… just saying.. Now lets move forward to the present day, the summers have been cold in comparison and solar activity is down, and bees and wasps are going into prolonged hibernation. there is no anti correlation.
Maybe they don’t like global warming in the northern hemisphere, in the countries that are cooler now than they were just decades ago.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bee-researchers-make-friends-africanized-killer/
Great article. Liked this quote. Reminds me of “who moved my cheese”. Rather than whine and complain, adapt. Because change is the normal state of affairs, and trying to stop change is the path to ruin. here is the quote:
Rather than lamenting the loss of the fat and lazy European bee or fighting the scary African one, scientists are trying to breed new varieties of Mexican bees. “They think this is the best thing that ever happened to them in Brazil,” says Jose Luis Uribe Rubio, a lead researcher in the project who works out of the northern state of Querétaro. “In biological terms it is a superorganism. In terms of competition it’s better than the European bees.”
and this quote. says a lot about how to approach climate change:
“We need to come to the resolution and acceptance that this is the kind of bee we have now,” Guzman says. “That’s it. Period. Let’s work with it—let’s do the best we can do now.”
Test. Fat and lazy Euro bees.
Mathematical model predicts bee apocalypse. ….. details at 11. Probably the same model that predicts AGW.
if the model predicted bees will do better, it would have been modified until such time as it gave the desired result. torture the model long enough and it will confess to anything.
What model predicted life?
There are fossils of bees very like modern honey bees which date back around 40 million years. There are also fossils of bee-like insects dated back to the early Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
To bee or not to bee
Our brown ground bees and the wild hive of honeys are thriving quite nicely. Perhaps they should look into the traveling bee circus because everywhere this parasite has become a problem is along the routes the bees for hire folks travel.
Must tell my Scots relatives that there tax bucks are being p*ssed up against a wall on this stuff.
And the solitary bees? Difficult to measure their game I suspect.
“In the face of rising global temperatures, our findings suggest that it will increase in prevalence and potentially lead to increased honey bee colony losses in Britain.”
And now I paid homage to ‘the cause’ I can look forward to many more fat grant cheques whatever having to worry about if this claim has any value at all.
As mentioned before, Australia is the only country that has a mite free bee population, and exports bee for pollenation purposes. Bee colonies are imploding. Varroa bee mite is spreading. Only a matter of time before the whole population is infected. However, bees are not the only pollenator, animals are too, just less efficient, and of course we don’t get honey.
I once transported ~90,000 bees, in 3 hives, for friends of mine back in 1994 for their farm in Cornwall, UK. Interesting couple of hundred mile ride. The aftermath where bees in the tranported hive ejected dead bees, and bees that died in battle with local populations. I probably would not do anything like that again, but the battle for “supremacy” was within the same specice of bee.
Seems like the parasites & other issues indicate honeybee inbreeding is taking a toll, like inbreed dogs & cats. “Climate change” isn’t the issue.
Heard at some point Japanese honeybees can chew off some of the mites from each other. Wonder if the Africanized honeybees suffer from the mites?
http://perc.org/articles/everyone-calm-down-there-no-bee-pocalypse
“US honey bee colony numbers are stable, and they have been since before CCD hit the scene in 2006. In fact, colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999. How can this be? Commercial beekeepers, far from being passive victims, have actively rebuilt their colonies in response to increased mortality from CCD. Although average winter mortality rates have increased from around 15% before 2006 to more than 30%, beekeepers have been able to adapt to these changes and maintain colony numbers”
EEEEEK! CLIMATE ISN’T STATIC! EEEEK!!
(sorry for the caps, but I had to emulate the chicken littles)
There was a “surprise” in a bee lab study. IIRC it was in Germany. They found that the presence of GMO corn pollen caused a dramatic increase in parasite infestation. The bee is supposed to be unaffected by the BT Toxin engineered into the corn; but the real effect looks to be a (modest?) suppression of resistance or reduction of vigor. That opens the door for the parasite to cause hive collapse. I saw this report about a decade back. Then it was somewhat speculative, but I have no idea what’s happened on that front since.
We had loads of bees in Central Valley California ( highest I personally remember there was 117 F so not cold in summer) and their was (is?) a significant Africanized (killer) Bee problem in Phoenix Arizona (highest I personally remember there was 126 F when the airport tarmac melted while we were in town). The notion that bees get sick and die in heat is just Climate Grubering.
You may have read an anti GMO paper. In large commercial apiaries in Ontario, Canada, they kill the bees in fall and order new bees in the spring. They arrive by mail!!!
the bees in Africa and India are doing fine. seems the heat doesn’t bother them at all. but then they aren’t signatories to any warming bs like Kyoto, Copenhagen or Rio.