Back in 2007, Wired Magazine mused:
It’s only slightly less ridiculous than the other bee killing theory that year – cell phones.
I published a story about the loony idea that was proposed by some researcher in Europe about “cell phone radiation may be killing bees”. I pointed out that it was garbage then, as it is now.
In 2012, I published a post saying global warming is off the hook for the issue, due to the discovery of a phorid fly parasite that had been spreading through colonies due in part to the commercial trucking of bees on demand.
Now in a new set of data from USDA, publicized in a story from the Washington Post today, it turns out bee colonies are now at a 20 year high, and that beekeepers have basically solved the problem on their own.
Call off the bee-pocalypse: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious die-offs. It was soon christened “colony collapse disorder,” and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.
The math says that if you lose 30 percent of your bee colonies every year for a few years, you rapidly end up with close to 0 colonies left. But get a load of this data on the number of active bee colonies in the U.S. since 1987. Pay particular attention to the period after 2006, when CCD was first documented.
As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA. The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies — that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers — is now the highest it’s been in 20 years.
So if CCD is wiping out close to a third of all honeybee colonies a year, how are their numbers rising? One word: Beekeepers.
A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping: they report that before CCD, American beekeepers would typically lose 14 percent of their colonies a year, on average.
So beekeepers have devised two main ways to replenish their stock. The first method involves splitting one healthy colony into two separate colonies: put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives.
The other method involves simply buying a bunch of bees to replace the ones you lost. You can buy 3 pounds of “packaged” bees, plus a queen, for about $100 or so.
Beekeepers have been doing this sort of thing since the advent of commercial beekeeping.
Full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/
End of a crisis that never was. Case closed, and climate was never to blame.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hide the decline in the above graph and it will all work out just fine.
It wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t find bees around wind turbines due to their low frequency noise.
http://pindanpost.com/?s=bees%2C+turbines
Bees are bred for making money, not honey. I would think queen bee and worker bee breeders are doing very well at present. CCD has been varroa good for beezness.
It is endlessly interesting that of all the bad things alarmists and models predict as consequences of global warming, none have actually been found in the field. With a 100% debunk success rate how much longer can the game continue (code word for “remain funded”)?
What do the tree rings say?
@Menicholas
February 17, 2016 at 7:17 pm; Sorry, Menicholas, but that is just green (and in particular, EU) propaganda. My Plant Pathology colleagues have not found this to be so. Neonicotinoids are not the problem so far as we know. Several very cold winters plus parasites certainly are part of it however.
Brett,
I was just reporting what I had heard and some of what I know from using these insecticides.
But as others have noted, lots of things seem to have been implicated.
And as I noted, just about every insecticide is toxic to bees.
Seems likely that the whole thing was just more alarmism.
Some time ago a friend of mine explained to me how he and other bee keepers/owners solved the bee parasite problem. They introduced slits through which the worker bees had to go through to enter and leave the hive The slits were sized so the bee had to squeeze to pass through and parasite was wiped off the bees’ back when these squeezed thought them.
I’ve never kept Bees but I have kept fish for a decade or more.
The same problem exists, farming and trading.
Not only do they help spread disease but also accumulate defects in the creatures by breeding the same stock over and over. Any genetic defects will be retained in the population and they accumulate over time. Eventually you end up with sickly inbred stock that you ship all over the world.
There is much warmist alarm over temperate change for wildlife, but they seldom if EVER admit that almost all have a temperature range they are comfortable with.
The idiots believe everything is fixed.
They believe dogs get depressed by GISS’ Global Average Temp.. 😀 Well, we all do, but not because of temp 😀
Seems more likely that dogs are depressed by the programming they are exposed to on television. It depresses me. No reason it shouldn’t depress them.
Wouldn’t bother with it unless you want honey. Wild bees take care of most of the pollinating work..leaf cutter, mason and bumble bees. There are about 240 different species of wild bee and they don’t get f*cked up by keepers! Don’t want your beer either.
Assuming CCD is real, who restocks the wild colony queens?
Wild bees are mostly solitary bees so there is no queen as with hive/swarm bees. There are some small companies who rear the bees and sell them as cocoons in the USA and to a minor extent in UK. Some info here:
I thought the cell phone claims were to do with bee navigation rather than radiation killing them?
Well, then. It would seem that bees shouldn’t carry cell phones.
Seriously, cell phone wavelengths are on the order of 30cm or longer. It’s pretty hard to transfer substantial energy to anything much shorter than a quarter wavelength. It’s perhaps possible that cellphones actually do some damage to humans because our cranial cavities are big and the phones are really close to them. Although personally, I think that cell phone addicts were probably always that way and that it’s unlikely they have any brains to damage even if damage were theoretically possible. But bees? Seems pretty unlikely.
Its normal life shht … Bees become subject to a parasite – population drops. Surviving Bees develop defences against the invasion and eventually become immune, parasite jumps ship and goes and bothers something else.
I had an organic mixed farm in the 1970s and 80s – vegetables, oats, corn, hay, dairy cow, about 50 sheep, 300 chickens, dozen pigs, ducks, geese, rabbits and a horse. Although I didn’t have bees, a local beekeeper put some hives near our fence line because he liked the type of farm and I toyed with the idea of bees.
My neighbor told me few beekeepers winter over their colonies those days (early 80s) because of an epidemic of what he called “foul brood” that wiped out whole colonies (he may have been referring to Canadian beekeepers because it is a comparatively tougher proposition in Canada to winter over bees and losses were high anyway). They simply killed the bees in the fall and bought whole colonies by mail each spring. Presumably, this is still the practice in Canada.
AFB (American foul brood) is aptly named. You have to purge it with fire, literally, destroying the colony, hive, and all equipment.
Buying new nucs every spring is not an economic option. They run at about $250-$300 each and it takes about a year to fully establish the colony to full productiveness. Even in Canada we just overwinter the bees. If they’re well-fed and healthy in the fall, they’ll overwinter fine with the biggest threat being hungry bears coming out of hibernation in the spring.
As a high school student, I captured a couple of honey bee swarms and tended two hives in the back yard. A year later it was time to harvest the honey, so I asked my girl friend if she would like to help. She said she would and she worked alongside my mother, cutting the comb from the frames and collecting the honey. They had to battle several bees that got into the house with the comb, but my girl friend was a great help and a good sport. SOLD We have been married 50 years now.
Oh, and apparently bee and wasp stings are a preventitive for arthritis and, I’m told, along with snake bite, a therapy for multiple sclerosis. Just found a link:
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-972-BEE%20VENOM.aspx?activeIngredientId=972&activeIngredientName=BEE%20VENOM
Honeybees, and any other domestic livestock, have never been threatened. The beekeeping industry has been thriving for thousands of years and shows no sign of weakness. It’s always been a strawman.
The serious problems are with the native bee populations, and mostly due to diseases introduced through domestic livestock and honey imported from other continents (although there is some evidence the misuse of pesticides may be partially to blame, to which the usual caveats about propaganda from big agra and extreme green apply). Climate change has not really been proposed as a serious contributor to the declining native bee populations because if anything, it would cause populations to rise.
Full disclosure, I keep honeybees.
“End of a crisis that never was.”
Colony counts is just one indicator, and in fact says nothing about the health of individual colonies. Also, if the colony mortality rate was 50% per year, and all beekeepers split their remaining hives, then the colony count would stay constant – but nobody would call that a healthy situation.
Based on a survey of 6,000 beekeepers, representing 15% of all colonies, total annual colony losses were 42% for the year 2014-2015. With the exception of Hawaii at 14%, state mortality figures ranged from 25% to more than 60%. That is far above historical rates of 14%, and above the acceptable rate of 18%. In addition to the cost of replacing colonies, the die offs are reducing genetic diversity.
https://beeinformed.org/results/colony-loss-2014-2015-preliminary-results/
But there are the calls to ban the neocontinoids because they are killing off bees ……..?
This isn’t a good article. I’m not writing this as an expert, nor someone who has done any research on the matter. My problem about the article is the guy puts 100% reliance on buying new bees, as if they are some kind of inexhaustible resource that comes out of thin air. Yes, there are lots of bees out there, and yes maybe their populations are improving, but it isn’t because the beekeepers bought more. I’ve got a couple ideas of whats really going on off the top of my head:
1.) Today there is generally more awareness to the need for limiting use of pesticides and herbicides. Homeowners are likely starting to heed this advice and are limiting the use of products like Seven. More importantly, those products seem to be getting harder to get in the first place, meaning someone with influence over the market has exerted some force to rectify the issue of excessive damaging chemicals. Such a change probably wouldn’t take long to realize benefits.
2.) You have found a large colony in your house. . . what do you do? You call a company to take care of the problem. 30 years ago they may have just killed the colony: problem solved. Today? They charge you, the homeowner, a fee to remove the bees, then sell them to a beekeeper. Each time that happens it is a colony which didn’t die and was able to pollinate elsewhere. In my 7 years of homeownership I have saved 3 colonies by either calling an expert to remove or simply making them want to move themselves (stick the hose into an in-ground bumblebee hive enough days in a row and they’ll go somewhere else). Think about how many millions of homeowners there are out there who likely did the same thing as myself. In the end it is a massive difference by moving colonies instead of killing them.
Those two differences likely add up to a lot, but aren’t mentioned in the article. That needs to change.
“(stick the hose into an in-ground bumblebee hive enough days in a row and they’ll go somewhere else)”
Do not try that with paper wasps. They will surely take it as a declaration of war.
@Don: Duly noted. I probably would have called a professional if it were anything other than bumble bees. I’ve had them come out before and it was only $60, which is a small price to pay to not be attacked.
I was a beekeeper for many years. I think the untold story about CCD is that even in areas that have or had Varroa mites, beekeepers had been actively being asked to NOT treat their bees with pesticides by the greens for years. Menthol was an often mentioned homeopathy cure that usually failed.
Under this pressure, some beekeepers would only treat a hive every other year, or only treat a hive that shows mites. I treated every hive with Apistan strips every year (you hang them in the hive for one week), but was told–wrongly, I think–that my honey products had to be labeled as containing pesticides even if testing indicated no detectable traces.
It is fine to be protective of natural products, but if the cure is worse than the disease, you have to be willing to re-evaluate your no-pesticide stance. Since beekeepers took a more forceful stance in favor of treating the varroa mites, there have been fewer cases of CCD each year.
For the last ~10 years there has been constantly declining number of wild bees in my backyard flowering plants/shrubs in northeast Massachusetts. Before then, on a calm day, you could easily hear ~dozens of mostly bumble bees busy on every blooming rhododendron I have. Last summer was alarming, I never saw more than a few per plant. While it is a good thing that commercial bee keepers are finding ways to fight back, the problem is definitely not over in these parts.
During the summer I watched a bumble bee hive that had been formed close to my deck. 20 years ago I would have killed it being so close to the back door, but given their low numbers now I even make it a point to avoid them when mowing the lawn. Eventually the hive died off by itself in August anyway. Before then I noticed many bees were returning to it way later than normal, well into dusk. Even in daylight some would arrive several feet from the entrance, land then crawl around taking a long time to find the entrance. It’s as though they were confused or not seeing very well. I think either condition would also account for the ones not arriving back until it’s nearly dark.
Have neonicotinoids been ruled out?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/9173586/Pesticides-harming-bee-populations-researchers-suggest.html
I watched a documentary a couple years ago about bee colony collapse. The scientist working for the pesticide company that makes neonics for the agriculture industry came across as honest and full of integrity. His job was to make sure the pesticides were safe for bees. To that end, he and other scientists studied and studied and studied and studied neonics and their effects on bees, and found they were safe. They found that bees carried back a small amount of neonic to the hive, but it was determined, after years and years of study, the amount (in ppm or ppb, i forget), was too small to cause any harm. The “hero activist scientist”, found the minute amount of neonics in the hives as well. That was proof enough for him that neonics were the problem. Thats not science. The pesticide company scientists were right, neonics were not the problem; what pesticide company in their right mind would want to harm bees?
Which federal agency imported the parasite laden bees? And which federal agency imported African bees to South America? And which federal agency ships live anthrax faster than Amazon? see a pattern here
We have had a beehive in northern Vermont for ten years. The first year 70mph straight line winds blew the hive apart in early March killing all of the bees with cold. In following years the bees thrive and then are killed in the years when the bitter cold wipes them out. This happened last year where successive cold snaps prevented them from reaching the food supplies on the outer frames resulting in cluster breakup. In another year an invasion of bees from another hive overran our hive. This year being as warm as it has been they are doing just fine, even with a four-day cold snap of -10 to -20F temperatures last week. We treat for parasites and have not lost any.