

Mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder is probably solved - dfranke
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=saving-the-honeybee&print=true

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stratomorph
It's refreshing to see such care taken to avoid conflating correlation with
causation. Even when faced with such a complex system, you can chip away at
the mystery if you apply some discipline.

Although I am a little curious about some of the less-mainstream theories:
"Other hypotheses were untestable at best, such as claims that the bees were
being abducted by aliens." With our pride, we always _assumed_ the aliens
would _naturally_ want to abduct us!

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habibur
If you don't want to read through 5 pages of article here is the relevent
portion: "But one bee virus stood out, as it had never been identified in the
U.S.: the Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV. This pathogen was first
described in 2004 by Ilan Sela of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the
course of an effort to find out why bees were dying with paralytic seizures.
In our initial sampling, IAPV was found in almost all though not all colonies
with CCD symptoms and in only one operation that was not suffering from CCD."

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Retric
The most interesting part IMO was:

 _One of the strains most likely arrived in colonies flown in from Australia
in 2005 after the U.S. government lifted a ban on honeybee importation that
had been in effect since 1922. (The almond industry lobbied to lift the ban to
prevent a critical shortage of pollinators at blossom time.) The other strain
probably showed up earlier and is quite different._

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icey
A completely unscientific observation is that in the Phoenix area, there seems
to have been far fewer discussions about Africanized bee hives forming over
the past few years.

As far as I can tell, plants are still being adequately pollinated here. I
wonder if CCD affected Africanized bees in an equally strong fashion? (The
article only mentions European strains of the honey bee.)

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rjurney
There is a large variance in reporting on the importance of honeybees. I've
seen estimates as extreme as "without the bees most crops will fail," and "its
not a big deal, other insects pollinate everything bees do," and everything in
between.

Is this the result of sensationalist reporting or disagreement in the field?

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gamache
Commercially, honeybees are essential. There are no other insects which can be
so easily harnessed for huge-scale pollination. Without bees, crops would
still be pollinated by other insects, but not nearly in the amount needed to
sustain current levels of production (and therefore human life).

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blasdel
Not "human life", post-WWII American human life.

~~~
gamache
(Current levels of) human life.

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ars
Interesting the IAPV was the first proposed reason I heard of - two years ago
I think. Seems like the initial thought was the right one.

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pfaux
"research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before
reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse"

Where would a beekeeper gain access to a gamma source?

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Tichy
Maybe at the beekeeper's store? (I don't know, just guessing).

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mechanical_fish
Yep. Why not?

Or someone will go into business as a door-to-door gamma irradiation service:
The truck with the lead-lined box arrives at the appointed time, you hand them
the frames along with $x per frame, they irradiate them for you and hand them
back.

If it's more efficient to truck the frames to the source... well, that works
too. A lot of these industrial beekeepers routinely truck entire flatbeds full
of hundreds and hundreds of beehives to farms around the country. Occasional
stops at the cities where the hive irradiators are available might not be such
a big deal.

~~~
jimbokun
But doesn't this introduce this risk of a nerdy teenager being stung by one of
these irradiated bees and manifesting all the traits of a bee, except
magnified to human scale?

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mildweed
Identifying the cause of CCD is far from identifying the solution.

~~~
ars
There are things that can't be solved even if you know the cause, but the
majority of the time identifying the cause solves the problem.

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palish
I don't have a lot of time this afternoon -- if anyone else does, would you
kindly post a succinct explanation of the real reason why the honeybees were
disappearing, where they were disappearing to, and how the problem being
prevented? I'd appreciate it. :)

~~~
jibiki
Mostly it seems to be a virus, called IAPV, which attacks colonies weakened by
poor nutrition, stress, and (possibly) pesticides. But it's actually much more
complicated than that, you'd have to RTFA...

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collint
"beekeepers have had some success at preventing colony loss by redoubling
their efforts at improving their colonies' diets, keeping infections and
parasites such as varroa and nosema in check, and practicing good hygiene"

... uh no shit.

It's quite pathetic that we've come so far that BEEKEEPERS don't KEEP their
BEES.

Between things like this and the financial catastrophe I have very little
trust for money. What a shitty measure of success.

~~~
azanar
It is not so much money itself, as money combined with hyperbolic discounting
-- some money now is much better than a lot more money later. Sometimes this
is a valid decision; if you are going to starve tomorrow, a couple of dollars
today is likely far more valuable than twenty thousand dollars next year.
After that point, it is a matter of degrees; how much short-term constriction
of lifestyle would you be willing to accept for the sake of longer-term
reward, or how much long-term pain would you be willing to tolerate for a
short-term lifestyle boost? A number of biases and beliefs come into play at
this point including: whether you think yourself, or any of us, will be around
for the long-term; whether you think that creating a prosperous image for
yourself in the short-term will increase your long-term prosperity by playing
other peoples' biases about image; whether you think you can gain enough in a
short enough time-frame by taking shortcuts and being destructive than the
ramifications of your actions will manifest _after_ you get rich, and will
manifest in low enough severity that get to stay rich.

The commonality between this and the financial catastrophe is that these
people doubled-down on the short-term. In the financial world, they played hot
potato with ticking financial "assets". In the bee-keeping world, they
deferred basic hive maintenance as long as was possible and still have bees to
keep. Some people get rich, some people -- sometimes a lot -- get hosed, and
there is a lot of collateral damage. You might argue it is an unethical as all
hell, but ethics doesn't enter into it. I get the feeling these people were
going to be unethical however we measured productivity; give them a metric and
they'll game it for their own ends.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
bravo. the misunderstanding of economic latency combined with our natural
hyperbolic discounting seems to lead to the majority of misunderstandings
about economics (besides the basic fallacies and terminology).

It seems that everyone has been infected with short-term thinking and
forgotten how to run a regular business. In short-term thinking you don't care
about whether or not you're going to do business with anyone again, because
you're unsure whether they will be around to do business with. This kind of
reasoning is infectious. What we wound up with was a "race to the bottom" in
terms of who could make the riskiest highest leverage moves.

~~~
randallsquared
It's a natural consequence of uncertainty about the future. The idea that
everything could change within a few years or a decade is now so prevalent
that it affects everyone's medium-term planning, and heavily reinforces the
future discount.

