Bee Emergency Stranger Than We Thought

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=5981

Bee Emergency Stranger Than We Thought
15-Feb-2007



We're in the middle of a bee emergency. Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live." A mysterious ailment called Colony Collapse Disorder is causing agricultural honeybees nationwide to abandon their hives and disappear. It's a kind of mass suicide in the bee world.
Entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk says, "Individual beekeepers are really taking a beating. A guy down in Oklahoma lost 80% of his 13,000 colonies in the last month. In Florida, there are a whole lot of people facing 40, 60 and 80 percent losses. That?s huge."

With CCD, most adult honeybees abandon a hive and disappear, abandoning the queen and a remnant of younger bees. This is unheard of, since normally a bee colony will do almost anything to protect its queen. Since the tasks done in the hive are very stratified, bees cannot survive on their own.

One of the strongest instincts that bees have is protecting and nurturing the next generation, but with CCD, the cells of young bees in the pupa stage are not covered and protected by their older sisters, probably because most of the adult bees have left. Dead adult bees aren't even found near the hive; they are just gone.

Bromenshenk says, "We don?t want to panic the beekeeper industry because we are not sure it's time to push the panic button yet, but we do know this is real, it's severe and it's widespread."

Field technician and self-professed bee lover Scott Debnam describes visits to the impacted bee yards as "spooky," and says, "Fortunately the sites I've visited have been recovering, but in Georgia I saw a lot of small colonies, a lot of uncapped brood and a lot of early-stage brood. The adults had flown the coop."

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk

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