
Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms - donohoe
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?hp
======
robomartin
Why are all of you commenting out of complete ignorance and near absolute lack
of domain knowledge? Taking sides and making accusations from this frame of
reference is just plain wrong.

It's like watching a bunch of bee-keepers engage in a heated debate about a
memory leak in your iOS app after reading an article and a Wikipedia page
--not one of them being a programmer.

I'd love to hear from bee biologists or someone otherwise scientifically
qualified in the domain. Everything else is just noise.

As an aside, I pass through Bakersfield a few times a year on our way to one
of our camping destinations. It's interesting to learn that all those beehives
are rented and trucked in.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Why do you assume this? Maybe you just sit in your mom's basement reading the
internet, but my life-long ambition has been farming, i just program computers
for the side money. I lease some of my land near Davis to an almond producer,
so I happen to know quite a bit about this topic.

~~~
robomartin
My mom says to tell you "Pretty please, be nice".

Help me understand please. How does owning land and leasing it to an almond
farmer result in knowing quite a bit about this problem? I'll grant you that
you might be seeing bees die and the effect this might have on crops. Not sure
that helps understand the problem.

Are you a biologist? Perhaps a chemist? Virologist? Have you devoted decades
to researching bee biology? Have you performed controlled studies on your land
or lab to isolate potential vectors, contagions, chemicals and observe their
effects over a number of populations and over time? Have you published any
research papers based on your work?

Not taking sides other than to say that this is a complex problem that only
true science can resolve. You could stop all insecticides and chemical
treatments for a few years and see what happens. No need for a PhD on that
one, but you have to be willing to make huge sacrifices in terms of crop
yields.

~~~
anigbrowl
Almond-growing depends heavily on bee pollination, so people farming that
particular crop are at the sharp end of this problem. Also, UC Davis is
academic ground central for research into this problem, and the university
researchers have been working closely with farmers in the area for the last
few years.

I understand and share your desire for scientific rigor in this discussion,
but don't be a prick about it.

------
qeorge
Its not a mystery, its the pesticides. Bayer's been leading the "search for
the real killer" in an effort that would make OJ Simpson proud.

My step-dad is an avid beekeeper, and an organic urban farmer. Its been
"known" for years amongst that community that the collapse is caused by
pesticides. Bayer has done an amazing job keeping this labeled a "mystery".

~~~
abraininavat
So, while the EPA, USDA, European Food Safety Authority, and leagues of
scientists have studied the issue and have not found a single obvious
contributing factor -- and actually instead have found evidence to suggest
that colony collapse may be caused by a conjunction of many different causes
-- you are here announcing to all of us that _Its not a mystery, its the
pesticides_?

Do you have any scientific backing for your claims aside from... your step-dad
"knowing" things?

~~~
harryf
Just picking one of your "sources", here's what the European Food Safety
Authority is saying about bees on their website (
<http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/beehealth.htm> );

> No single cause of declining bee numbers has been identified. However,
> several contributing factors have been suggested, acting in combination or
> separately. _These include the effects of intensive agriculture and
> pesticide use_, starvation and poor bee nutrition, viruses, attacks by
> pathogens and invasive species – such as the Varroa mite (Varroa
> destructor), the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), the small hive beetle
> Aethina tumida and the bee mite Tropilaelaps – genetically modified plants,
> and environmental changes (e.g. habitat fragmentation and loss).

Looks like his step dad is a better source than yours.

Just out of interest, are you paid troll? Shame to see this kind of BS on HN

~~~
rafcavallaro
Just picking another, the researchers did in situ replication of pesticide
doses known to be prevalent in working hives, along with control colonies that
were untreated. Whats happening is that in the last decade beekeepers largely
switched to feeding their colonies High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated
with neonicotinoid pesticides. Their results:

"15 of 16 imidacloprid- treated hives (94%) were dead across 4 apiaries 23
weeks post imidacloprid dosing. Dead hives were remarkably empty except for
stores of food and some pollen left, a resemblance of CCD."

While none of the control hives died.

Their conclusion:

"Data from this in situ study provide convincing evidence that exposure to
sub-lethal levels of imidacloprid in HFCS causes honey bees to exhibit
symptoms consistent to CCD 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. The survival of
the control hives managed alongside with the pesticide-treated hives
unequivocally augments this conclusion. The observed delayed mortality in
honey bees caused by imidacloprid in HFCS is a novel and plausible mechanism
for CCD, and should be validated in future studies."

------
asynchronous13
In 2004, The U.S. relaxed restrictions on pesticides, including specific
pesticides that were already associated with adverse bee health. Within two
years, the reported incidence of CCD rose dramatically. Of course, we all know
that correlation is not necessarily causation.

It is nearly impossible for researchers to make a definitive case. Colonies
that suffer from CCD have consistently higher concentrations of pesticides
than their healthy counterparts. But it's a mix of up to 200 distinct
pesticides. If anyone wants to believe that pesticides are not the cause, it's
easy to view the available data and say, "see, that's not proof".

In my opinion, one day we'll look back and figure out that bees and bats were
our canaries in the coal mine.

~~~
amalag
It's a good thing Monsanto has purchased Beeologics. They can help us find the
real killer since they are showing it is cannot be the pesticides.

Without sarcasm, I am amazed the burden of proof is on studies to show
pesticides are UNSAFE. If there is colony collapse disorder and we know they
are feeding on pesticide laced fields, shouldn't they have to prove they are
not causing it. It is not that the pesticides kill the bees outright, it
affects them subtly including their navigation.

------
sasvari
Doesn't the _independent_ scientific community agree on the neonicotinoids
playing a _significant_ role here [0]? Denying that this is (edit: no _not_ )
true on part of the pesticide manufacturers is a pretty big gamble, IMO.

Let's see if the European Commission enforces the ban on this neonicotinoids
and what the results of such a ban will be.

[0] <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547>

~~~
pyre

      > Denying that this is not true
    

They're openly admitting to it!

------
bennyg
Interesting post by a redditor about the bee collapse:

\---------------

Ok, beekeeper, non-vegan here. I've got no horse in the vegan race, but I do
know my bees and here is the sad truth: beekeeping is responsible for the
decline of world-wide bee population for the last (roughly) 150 years, and for
the precipitous decline since 1947.

Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth
hive has been bad for bees. This is mostly because the hive design has movable
frames and opens from the top. These innovations led to highly interventionist
beekeeping, and copious fucking with the bees.

The movable frame allows the beekeeper to easily remove, inspect, replace, and
swap comb, and led to migratory beekeeping. Bees are now trucked by the tens
of thousands of hives across the country with the seasons for the pollination
business (which is a bigger than the honey business). The results is that
diseases and bee pests move too. The biggest colony killer in the US right now
is the Varroa mite, introduced from Asia by humans in 1988, and spread by
humans to hives across the country.

The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained
nestduftwarmebingdung, the nest atmosphere. Bees maintain a anti-microbial
sauna inside the hive, at a contant tempurature with a complex scent. They can
go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off infection. The scent helps
maintain communication and defenses. Opening the hive destroys the atmosphere.
It takes the bees days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they
need for foraging, building, and preparing for winter. This weakens the bees,
compromising their immune system and leaving them susceptible to infection and
invaders.

Then there's honey. Bees spend all season making honey stores so that they can
survive the winter. The beekeeper comes along and takes it, then feeds the
bees sugar syrup in the winter. This also weakens the bees. Honey is a
complex, nutritious bee food. Sugar water is a simple, inadequate food. This
is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter.
You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready
for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your
food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies,
but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the bees with
sugar, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)

In the pursuit of larger honey harvest, beekeepers have been artificially
increasing the size if the bee's comb cell for about 100 years, by using comb
foundation. Bigger cells is thought to mean more honey. So the bees you see
today (with some exceptions) are "large-cell" bees, bigger than nature made
them. Bigger cells means the workers are too big and the drones are too small
(bees left on their own will make different sized cells for each type of bee).
This weakens the bees. Some bees bred generations on foundation have lost
their ability to create comb on their own.

These weak, immuno-compromised bees are then protected by the beekeepers with
pesticides and anti-biotics placed in the hive to deal with the disease and
pests that the bees can no longer fight off. This poisons the honey (yum!) and
the bees, and breeds resistant pests.

Beekeeping is also dominated by artificial breeding of queens, which
eliminates the Darwinian battle of the queens which nature uses to find the
strongest queen. This weakens the genetics of the bees, for thousands of
generations. Most, in fact almost all, beekeeping is industrial farming,
equivalent to factory farming chickens or cattle. And it has devastated the
bees.

There are exceptions: look into vertical top bar hives (which open from the
bottom except once a year); chemical-free beekeeping; and spring-harvest honey
(taken from the surplus after winter is over).

A note about honey: most of the honey you buy at the grocery store is not. It
is heated and filtered and pollen-free, removing the extraordinary health
benefits of honey, cut eith corn syrup, beet syrup or other sweeteners, and
laced with pesticides and anti-biotics. If you want honey, buy unfiltered,
unheated honey, from a beekeeper you know. If you want honey and are concerned
about the bees, buy from a beekeeper using Warré topbar hives, doing a surplus
harvest. __A note about Colony Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is
often reported. CCD is caused by industrial farming pesticides, which destroy
bees' navigational abilities, and they can't find their way back to the hive.
The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the chemical companies,
primarily Bayer. But in the context of bees weakened by generations of
industrial beekeeping, trying to forage on thousands of acres of monoculture
crops, having been trucked thousands of miles from their home territory, it is
an easy lie to sell.

\---------------

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midni...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midnight_when_everyone_is_already_drunk_we/c5g8v4d)

~~~
Lagged2Death
_Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the
Langstroth hive [circa 1852] has been bad for bees ... The opening from the
top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung..._

This may all be true, but none of it addresses the huge, sudden, new losses
that are being reported in this story:

 _Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for
beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the
losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to
ensure their health._

And even though this poster points out that boutique chemical-free beekeeping
exists, he doesn't say that such beekeepers have been spared this blight. I
don't know if they have in fact suffered less or not, but you'd think that if
they had, that would be both something worth mentioning and kind of a huge
clue into whatever degree of mystery the collapse disorder really represents.

~~~
mmanfrin
Adding to your statements: my family has a hive. We harvested it once in 6
months and the colony died about 4 months later. We have put absolutely
nothing in the way of chemicals or pesticides in there, we haven't replaced
their honey with sugar water (we harvested in summer, gave them ample time to
rebuild honey reserves). We never moved them.

And the colony died, randomly. Also happened to some friends' hive. The
beekeeper we bought the supplies from hypothesized it was the cold, but we
didn't have an unnaturally cold winter and we live in the bay area (not really
known for being freezing).

~~~
adventured
I wonder if the colony would have died if you had not harvested it.

~~~
mmanfrin
Colony died well after the harvest, though. We harvested about a month after
the die-off and got about 8lb of honey (it's a small hive, that was a decent
amount).

------
thrownaway2424
The NYTimes has left out interesting details. First of all, the California
almond crop is almost pathological in its demand for pollination. The entire
800k+ acres must be pollinated pretty much on the same week, or the trees
don't set fruit. So, that's weird, and it contributes to hive stress as the
bee companies transport literally every beehive on the continent to California
at once.

Secondly, California's acres in bearing almonds has more than doubled in ten
years. It's a classic agribusiness gold rush, where for some reason the
growers are unable to restrain themselves from overproducing a single crop.
Almond prices actually peaked in 2005. It takes 5 years for an almond orchard
to bear fruit, so all the bonanza-chasers who planted after 2005 are just
coming online. This will increase the stress placed on honeybee colonies by
increasing the demand for pollination services.

Third. It is an established fact that almond pollination works better in the
presence of wild pollinators, which for California almond orchards means
native honey bees and bumblebees. These pollinators are also capable of
pollinating the crop by themselves, without Apis, except the growers have
systematically poisoned them with pesticides and herbicides. Growers of
organic almonds (which, by the way, market for 2-3x the price of conventional
almonds) will eventually win this game by not poisoning their native
pollinators, and because they maintain inter-row habitats for beneficial
insects instead of the toxic bare soil that stands between the rows in a
conventional orchard.

------
negativity
Gee, seems like there's a lot of rabble rabble rabble going on here.

I have an inclination to disagree with the "No one knows why" part. I was
given the firm impression way back in 2011(?) that colony collapse disorder
was understood to be linked to neonicotinoid pesticides pretty firmly, albeit
through a slightly byzantine mechanism.

Here's an article from early 2012 in wired:
[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-
bee...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-bee-
collapse/)

The long and short of it is:

1\. Farmers grow CORN, and treat the corn with this class of relatively new
pesticides.

2\. The corn is used to create corn syrup.

3\. The corn syrup, being produced on an industrial scale, retains trace
amounts of the pesticides, given the slightly imperfect production processes,
with loose tolerances that allow for impurities.

4\. The corn syrup is fed to the bees, as part of a normal commercial
practice, whereby the bees, being transported to unfamiliar territories need a
familiar food source while they acclimate to their surroundings and locate
reliable local sources of their normal food (flower nectar, etc, etc).

5\. The corn farming is not organic, and the bee keeping is not organic. No
one cares how the corn is grown because they're feeding it to bees, not
humans. Bees don't read labels, and don't sue for damages.

6\. Given that the contaminant is a pesticide, specifically designed to
inflict death upon insects, bees are uniquely affected by even trace amounts
of the toxin, in ways that humans are not. This is not unlike the unintended
side-effect DDT has on ospreys.

7\. The side-effect has been described loosely as "getting bees so 'drunk'
that they get lost, and wander far away from the hive, aimlessly, and fail to
return alive."

8\. An individual bee inflicted with the trace quantities is capable of
recovering to normal health, when the toxin is administered under direct
observation, and can be reintroduced to the hive without noticable effects.
So, while the dosage is not immediately lethal to the bee, when applied to
many or all in a hive, the effect is disruptive to their cooperative behavior.
This would explain why the populations dwindle over time, and the bees don't
just drop dead.

That's my amateur understanding. Makes sense to me?

Here's another reasonable article: [http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-
collapse-disorder-linked-c...](http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-collapse-
disorder-linked-corn-insecticide-425812)

~~~
maxerickson
Corn syrup on an industrial scale is cheap enough that I don't see much room
for it to be cheaper to make a segregated product that is less regulated than
the stuff humans end up consuming.

~~~
negativity
You're totally right. #5 isn't a precise enough statement. Thus the natural
conclusion is that corn syrup across the board is simply prone to being a
little bit dirty in general. Enough that the bees notice the poison which they
are acutely affected by. What I'm driving at, is that the bee keepers are
motivated to buy the cheapest corn syrup they can find. Cheaper might imply
lower quality, expired, or whatever. The point is, the bee keepers probably
aren't performing a taste test, and wouldn't notice the difference by eating
it themselves anyway.

Then it just comes down to which growers actually use these new pesticides on
corn? And then which corn syrup companies source their corn from these
farmers?

Anyway, here's a research paper that purports some evidence:
[http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/chensheng-lu/files/2012/10/in-
si...](http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/chensheng-lu/files/2012/10/in-situ-
replication-of-honey-bee-colony-collapse-disorder.pdf)

Interestingly enough, it looks like I got my bee biology, and bee keeping
practices completely wrong in #4. I completely misunderstood the whole honey
production/cold winter/hive temperature principle, and the honey harvest/corn
syrup substitution thing.

It's outlined in the paper. The hive temperature thing plays a key role, in
that the bees feed on the corn syrup while it's cold, during periods when they
would normally feed on honey, and stay inside to keep the hive warm. The bees
that are intoxicated abandon the hive, and fail to assist in providing the
elevated temperature of the hive, leading to the hive's failure.

There's probably more to it than that, but like I said, that's my amateur
understanding. I am not a bee keeper.

~~~
maxerickson
That low levels of pesticides are bad for bees is entirely believable.

That beekeepers are good enough at and persistent enough about shopping for
the relative quality of the syrup they are buying to be relevant is entirely
unbelievable.

If pesticide contamination of feed syrup does end up being a big factor,
that's great, other types of sugar or not robbing the honey are easy ways to
have pollinators.

~~~
negativity
> That beekeepers are good enough at and persistent enough about shopping for
> the relative quality of the syrup they are buying to be relevant is entirely
> unbelievable.

I'm going to paraphrase that statement a bit: "It's entirely unbelievable that
a beekeeper's decisions in corn syrup selection could be relevant to colony
collapse disorder."

That seems to operate on the assumption that every 5 gallon bucket of corn
syrup is perfectly identical, no matter the supplier.

But I'll shoot down my own assumption that every bee keeper, who has
experienced colony collapse disorder affecting their hives, has actually even
used corn syrup explicitly as bee feed for their bees. I'm only taking that
technique from the premise of the research I read about.

~~~
maxerickson
It isn't so much that it must be identical, it is more that it is not easily
differentiable. If most buyers are more concerned with "clean enough" than
they are with "cleanest", the prices will reflect that.

------
ryguytilidie
tl;dr for comments: Half the people strongly believe bees are dying because of
pesticides and that chemical companies are doing a good job covering this up.
The other half strongly believe that there is no evidence of pesticides being
the problem, and at the same time seem completely unable to believe that a
company would cover up facts that would lose them billions of dollars in
profits.

Everyone is very passionate, and has at least 1-2 anecdotes, though no real
evidence.

~~~
antiterra
> The other half strongly believe that there is no evidence of pesticides
> being the problem,

No. The protest to the "we already know, it's pesticides" camp is the concern
that colony collapse may be more complicated than a single factor. That
doesn't mean that those people believe there couldn't be a corporate cover up
or bias in research, but that they are cautious about evidence and the
scientific method.

I haven't found a single comment here that says "no, pesticides aren't the
problem." Instead, there are plenty of comments saying it's just not clear how
significant of a problem it is in relation to colony collapse.

Not only that, but of the people who say "no there is no mystery," not
everyone agrees on what this incredibly obvious conclusion is. Is it
susceptibility to parasites from neonics, or is it that neonics cause them to
lose their sense of direction (the latter seems much less likely from the
research I've perused.) Is it just a pervasive environmental effect, is it
from bees foraging in Bt-corn, is it from neonic treated corn syrup? Or is it
from pesticides that are totally different than neonics?

Do you really think we should stop research into parasites like Apocephalus
borealis or Varroa or electromagnetic interference? If not, then it's nowhere
near a foregone conclusion, perhaps even a 'mystery.'

~~~
pohl
_colony collapse may be more complicated than a single factor_

If that's the concern, then changing a single factor would be a good idea. We
could ban neonicotinoid pesticides and measure the results.

~~~
antiterra
It's a nice idea, in theory. Trying to implement it could be a total
economic/political nightmare, especially if it was something along the lines
of 'hey, we've got a pretty good hunch, revamp your entire method of producing
corn/honey/whatever for _n_ years, and let's see. maybe you can have it back
afterward.'

------
eterpstra
It's inevitable that some enterprising beekeeping conglomerate will eventually
produce a pesticide/neonic resistant bee. This will be great, until the entire
US is covered in one giant honeycomb.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-
us-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-food-
crisis)

~~~
pessimizer
This is now my Terrifying Alternate Future of the Week.

------
eterpstra
“If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of
July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every
night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”

Obviously this beekeeper is not from Tennessee.

~~~
jusben1369
Yeah I could see his point but saw his analogy break down. It was probably
better to say "You can have one shot a night and live a long time but if you
have one shot on the hour....."

------
mratzloff
So try something. Ban neonicotinoids in some state like Washington. Monitor
progress closely.

The current situation is like having a bug that only shows up in production.
At first it wasn't so bad, but we're in day 8 and now half the data is
disappearing.

You can't identify the cause without getting in there and trying things.
Change. Monitor. Repeat. With a solid lead (and we have one with CCD), it is
the quickest way to solve this problem.

~~~
abrahamsen
Neonicotinoids were banned in Germany in 2008, so we already have a (rather
large) control group.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_imp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_impact)

~~~
aerique
Unfortunately not much info yet about any results on that page.

------
Lagged2Death
_Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned
environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to
wonder whether they had a point._

That's encouraging and frustrating at the same time. Encouraging to see that
minds can change; discouraging to see another illustration that it so often
requires being screwed over personally to change it.

------
omd
Stinging rebuke for bee conservers

Since neonicotinoid pesticides were introduced in 1992, 10 million honey-bee
colonies have died globally.

Bumblebee and bird populations have crashed in every country where "neonics"
are used. Researchers at Stirling University fed bumblebees minute doses of
neonicotinoids. The colonies produced 85% fewer queens than usual. Professor
Dave Goulson said: " Only queens survive the winter, so reducing their number
by 85% means far fewer colonies next year - the long-term effects are likely
to be profound."

The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust recently appointed Professor Michael Usher
as its chairman. Horticulture Week reported: "Professor Usher said that
neonicotinoids, implicated in bee deaths, should continue to be used as
insecticides. The former SNH chief scientist argued that neonicotinoids have a
place in crop protection, despite damning research released this spring from
Stirling University."

Prof Usher was quoted as saying: "We need pollinators but we need our crops
too."

The Trust itself seems confused; the pesticide issue is not mentioned on its
website, even though Prof Goulson was the trust's founder. The impact of
neonicotinoids on bees, birds and wildlife is catastrophic; we are facing
ecological Armageddon. Usher must resign, or be sacked; if not, the Trust will
be dismissed as mere "greenwash". The trustees must encourage staff to
actively campaign against these pesticides. If they don't, the Trust may find
its membership sliding to extinction faster than the bumblebees.

Graham White, Friends of the Bees

Philip Chandler, Friends of the Bees

Dr Rosemary Mason, life member, BBCT

Palle Uhd Jepsen, past adviser on nature conservation to the Danish Government
and life member, BBCT

[http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-
rebuk...](http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuke-for-
bee-conservers.18271148)

------
aethertap
While I'm greatly concerned about honey bees and CCD (I raise bees mostly as
an effort to help keep them alive), I don't think it's the apocalypse that
it's widely made out to be. Mason bees [1] are phenomenal pollinators, and are
easily kept. The site linked below is actually dedicated to getting people to
keep mason bees as an insurance policy against increasing honey bee
fatalities.

They don't make harvestable honey, so they aren't a 100% replacement for the
current model. However, they might be able to fill the gap for commercial
pollination. They are also not colony insects in the same sense as honey bees,
so it's possible that they might be more resistant to large-scale die-offs.

[1] [http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-
crownbees/bees-...](http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-
crownbees/bees-purpose/)

------
macu
My own hypothesis comes from an experience I had walking down the street one
hot summer afternoon. It was a low-traffic country street and yet all along
it, every few feet it seemed, there were dead and dying bees. It struck me as
a tragedy.

I figured the bees are flying low across the street, because they fly near the
ground following their memories and searching for food, and passing back and
forth countless times over the street they were bound to get struck.

~~~
Blahah
It could equally have been due to a disease infecting the colony. In our
department several labs work with bees, and I spend a fair bit of time in the
bee colony room. Sometimes a colony will come in that is just infested with
mites or some other parasite, and they start dropping (excuse the pun) like
flies.

~~~
macu
Yes possibly, although I wouldn't expect so many to drop on the road by
coincidence when the fields are far more vast. The particular case could be
interpreted from many angles, all speculation without testing the bees.
Perhaps it was the sheer heat of the pavement under the sun that chocked them.
In any case, the startling number of bees in the grille of my car doesn't call
for any thought about disease, mites, or pesticides.

Of course I'm not saying cars are the primary cause, but I believe getting
struck by motor vehicles may have a major impact on the population.
Considering the number of deer-vehicle collisions and similar, it is at least
worth considering.

------
Terretta
You'd think with 30% to 50% dying each year, at some point we should start to
see some fitness selected.

------
NoPiece
It reminds me of a lot of complex systems where you really want it to be one
thing, that can be easily fixed, but it end up being a lot of different things
all need to be addressed.

Like when your site is going down and you hope it is just that you need more
memory in your web serverSo you add it and then you run out of DB connections
so you fire up some slaves but then you start having disk i/o problems so you
go SSD then the network ports are saturated..

------
brador
With the new news that they communicate using electrical signals through their
wings, could it be EM "noise" from cell towers and wifi?

~~~
L0j1k
Bees are like condors or something, very susceptible to environmental
influences. It's tremendously unfortunate (for the understatement of the
century) that they are critical to a large part our food supply.

~~~
andreasvc
That's backwards. It's unfortunate that (apparently) our modern farming
methods disrupt the natural order of things, in this case pollination.

~~~
Gravityloss
One could say it's not a case of "fortune". It's like throwing a rock into a
crowd and being surprised if someone gets hurt badly.

------
mhen28605
I don't see one shred of science behind the idea of more beekeepers being bad
for bees. What's bad for bees is simple... varroa mites, virus, pesticides,
hive beetles, wax moths and diseases like American Foul Brood. Lack of good
forage, clean water, stuff like that. Beekeepers bad for bees? What a bunch of
horse hockey..

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Charlesmigli
Here is an short summary of the article for those who want to catch up the
discussion [http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-
de...](http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-deaths-
in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady-nytimes-com)

------
equalsione
The documentary Colony [1] is worth watching. It doesn't offer any answers but
does offer a good insight into the way the bee pollination business works, and
the rather scary impact of CCD.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480655/>

------
raphinou
Am I the only one to think it is crazy to integrate pesticides in the plants
that end up in our food?

~~~
zenon
I don't think it's crazy in principle. The average person eats 1-2 _grams_ of
naturally occurring plant pesticides every day. They've always been in our
food, and our bodies are pretty good at dealing with them (if anything, we're
getting less of them now than historical norms, since we tend to breed low-
toxin plants).

In practice, it may be difficult to test the safety of any particular
integrated pesticide, for example because of political pressure on the
researchers [1].

(But then again, people are allowed to sell foods containing evolutionary
novel toxins like gluten, peanut agglutinin, and canavanine, with no safety
testing.)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair>

------
andrewhyde
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Wachq3IQo> is a good watch related to a good
point / counterpoint.

------
lo_fye
The film "resonance: beings of frequency" says it is from RF noise like
cellular & wi-fi. We can't hear it, but it is there, and if you put a 2.4Ghz
phone beside a hive, the bees vacate. Perhaps higher intensities kill them?

------
FollowSteph3
Always follow the money trail...

------
omd
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-
bee-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-
in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?hp&_r=0#h\[\])

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

Jim Wilson/The New York Times A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s
beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady
called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year
was particularly bad. By MICHAEL WINES Published: March 28, 2013 101 Comments
FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS

¶ BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en
masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year,
commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the
hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment
Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives
used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif. Readers’ Comments Share
your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » ¶ A conclusive
explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony
collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and
some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of
pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves,
could be an important factor.

¶ The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they
are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

¶ “They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky
Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of
September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been
doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

¶ In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its
acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical
experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

¶ In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an
endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were
losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far
greater losses.

¶ The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May.
But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research
laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be
“much higher than it’s ever been.”

¶ Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and
dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination
season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy
blow.

¶ Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms
of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.

¶ “We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to
pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here
this week.

¶ “They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they
started falling apart, when it got cold.”

¶ Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31
tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start
of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.

¶ Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for
beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the
losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to
ensure their health.

¶ Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a
quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to
onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests
and higher food prices.

¶ Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here,
and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to
California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two
hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.

¶ This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to
guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had
planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and
left survivors weakened.

¶ “But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that
they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two
truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.

Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought
in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite
excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become
increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses. Enlarge This
Image

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big
Sky Honey.

Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment
Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bill Dahle, the owner, described a startling
loss of honeybees last year. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a
Comment » Read All Comments (101) » But many beekeepers suspect the biggest
culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are
used to control pests.

While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their
combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied
the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European
regulators implicate in bee deaths.

The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising
bee deaths.

Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older
pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the
plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they
quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for
weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of
contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose
of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.

“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this
systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on
Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any
difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s
gone. It’s the same thing.”

Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are
safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health
concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The
group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.

He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with
science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever
direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.

A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the
E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving
some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their
impact on bees and other wildlife.

The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees.
Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs
in Germany and France.

Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has
grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that
are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say
some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from
maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.

Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said
analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered
from beehives.

“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a
sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the
consequences?”

Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned
environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to
wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if
you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme
— a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe
they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

------
L0j1k
"No one knows why" because Monsanto is killing them. Seriously, how many
scientists have to declare that bees are being slowly killed by pesticides
before we can move ahead in solving this problem? This country is causing me
to lose faith in humanity very quickly.

~~~
balanceiskey15
Could you elaborate on this a bit? This is the first time I've heard an
accusation against Monsanto in relation to bee death. If you've got some good
articles I'd like to read up.

~~~
lazyjones
GM crops are being blamed by many scientists:
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-
colonie...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonies-are-
gm-crops-killing-bees-a-473166.html)

Monsanto is the biggest player in that field (by far, I think).

~~~
robbiep
But GM crops aren't bee pollinated, they're wind pollinated.

There is so much GM hate by people who have only read or heard soundbites. My
experience with GM crops has been that they have resulted in massively reduced
levels of pesticide spraying (from an agricultural background) with the side
Benicia thet the farmer saves money and insects are spared

~~~
antiterra
> But GM crops aren't bee pollinated, they're wind pollinated.

Bees forage in corn. That means they are exposed to and possibly affected by
GMO Bt-Corn pollen endotoxins and the neonics they treat the corn with.

~~~
rafcavallaro
Bees are fed High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid
pesticides and that low exposure, over time is killing hives:
<http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf>

------
youngerdryas
Every day exotic new compounds are created, used in various products and
disposed of by being burned or deposited in landfills with little or no safety
testing when we know very well lots of substances are biologically active at a
few parts per billion. This scares me much more than climate change.

------
andyl
I have two hives in my back yard (Palo Alto CA). They are doing great! IMHO,
the decline of bees is all related to 'industrial bees', wherein vendors
stress their bees by trucking them around the country, and expose their bees
to pesticides.

I know for a fact that pesticides are super-deadly to bees. Twice I've had
colonies wiped out by poison spread by one of my neighbors - it is really sad
to watch the dead bees pile up in a mass die-off.

------
artuk
To bee or not to bee, that is the question!

