If the die-off continues, it would be disastrous for U.S. crop yields. By Sandy Bauers Inquirer Staff Writer
Honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of U.S. crops, including Pennsylvania's apple harvest and New Jersey's cranberries and blueberries. Something is killing the nation's honeybees.
Dave Hackenberg of central Pennsylvania had 3,000 hives and figures he has lost all but about 800 of them.
In labs at Pennsylvania State University, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and elsewhere in the nation, researchers have been stunned by the number of calls about the mysterious losses.
"Every day, you hear of another operator," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. "It's just causing so much death so quickly that it's startling."
At stake is the work the honeybees do, pollinating more than $15 billion worth of U.S. crops, including Pennsylvania's apple harvest, the fourth-largest in the nation, worth $45 million, and New Jersey's cranberries and blueberries.
While a few crops, such as corn and wheat, are pollinated by the wind, most need bees. Without these insects, crop yields would fall dramatically. Agronomists estimate Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees.
The problem caps 20 years of honeybee woes, including two mites that killed the valuable insect and a predatory beetle that attacked the honeycombs of weak or dead colonies.
"This is by far the most alarming," said Maryann Frazier, an apiculture - or beekeeping - expert at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
One of the first to notice the latest die-off was Hackenberg, who lives in Lewisburg, north of Harrisburg in Union County.
He and his son truck about 3,000 hives up and down the East Coast every year as part of a large but little-known cross-continental migratory bee industry.
Hackenberg's bees pollinate oranges in Florida, apples, cherries and pumpkins in Pennsylvania, and blueberries in Maine. Come summer, they are buzzing along the Canadian border, making honey.
This season, Hackenberg hauled his hives to Florida by Oct. 10, just as he has done for 40 years. By November, some hives were empty; others had just sickly remains.
He made some calls and found out a beekeeper in Georgia had seen the same thing.
Since then, with concern mounting, experts have been investigating. A few months ago, they were referring to the die-off as "fall dwindle disease." Now, they have ratcheted up to "colony collapse disorder."
Last weekend, apiarist vanEngelsdorp and other researchers headed to central California, where hundreds of acres of almond trees - the source of 80 percent of the world's almond harvest - are about to blossom.
Last fall, workers transported managed hives - about 450 per tractor-trailer - to California from colder areas such as the Great Lakes and the Dakotas. Now, hives are coming from Texas, Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In all, about half the country's managed hives are needed for the mass pollination.
As workers openthe hives to check them, "the picture's not so good," said Jeffrey S. Pettis, a leader in bee research at a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Beltsville, Md.
Pettis said bees often had some winter loss, but this level of death was unprecedented.
As dead or dying insects are collected, dissected and tested, several possibilities are emerging.
The most recent mite problem - the varroa mite - compromises a bee's immune system, so a virus might be the new culprit, Frazier said. Or it could be a new fungal pathogen.
Frazier said researchers also were looking at a new group of pesticides that might impair the bees' ability to orient to their hives. So maybe they are dying only because they cannot find their way back home.
Honeybees are not natives. The country already had about 3,500 species of pollinating bees before Europeans brought honeybees in the 1600s. But because honeybees produce honey and can be managed so easily, they have become a mainstay of U.S. agriculture.
"Part of the problem is that today we develop these big monocultures of corn or peas or cabbage," Frazier said. "They wipe out the diversity of nectar sources and reduce nesting sites for wild bees. And we use, unfortunately, a lot of pesticides to keep the insects we don't want from eating these crops, which also works to eliminate the pollinators."
So a Pennsylvania orchard manager, say, will bring in bees for the two weeks the apple trees bloom, then take them out so he can apply substances to control other insects.
Neither entomologists nor growers can say what will happen when the 2007 growing season for most of the country's crops starts. "We're coming up onto the season where people are really going to be worried," Frazier said.
Although research suggests the stress of moving bees long distances might be a factor in the die-offs, smaller beekeepers with stationary hives worry the problem will extend to their colonies as well.
Already, Janet Katz, a beekeeper in Chester, N.J., thinks three of her 21 hives are failing.
And the bees are stressed already, she said. "The weather last season was not cooperative," she said. "Over the course of the season it was too wet, too dry, too hot and too cold, all at the wrong times."
Bees store honey every autumn - a hive needs 60 pounds to survive the winter - but with this year's warm weather, they ate a lot, and beekeepers had to supplement with sugar syrup.
Now, the bees have sealed themselves inside the hives to stay warm, and the keepers can't open the structures until spring.
"Are we going to see this same thing, this collapsing disorder, in these bees? We don't know," Frazier said. "It's very possible this may extend to our nonmigratory population. We just won't know until spring." ###
Re: Uh oh! Mystery Killer Silencing Honeybees « Reply #1 on Feb 12, 2007, 12:38pm »
Here is an update to the story of our bees........SCARY we need our bees......
It seems they are flying off somewhere to die.....maybe they know they are infected and don't want to infect the rest of the hive.....just like us humans becoming isolated because we don't want to infect our family members either.....
Here is a clip from the updated story on our bees.....
Although the bodies of dead bees often are littered around a hive, sometimes carried out of the hive by worker bees, no bee remains are typically found around colonies struck by the mystery ailment. Scientists assume these bees have flown away from the hive before dying.
• From the outside, a stricken colony may appear normal, with bees leaving and entering. But when beekeepers look inside the hive box, they find few mature bees taking care of the younger, developing bees.
• Normally, a weakened bee colony would be immediately overrun by bees from other colonies or by pests going after the hive's honey. That's not the case with the stricken colonies, which might not be touched for at least two weeks, said Diana Cox-Foster, a Penn State entomology professor investigating the problem.
"That is a real abnormality," Hackenberg said.
Cox-Foster said an analysis of dissected bees turned up an alarmingly high number of foreign fungi, bacteria and other organisms and weakened immune systems.
In the meantime, beekeepers are wondering if bee deaths over the last couple of years that had been blamed on mites or poor management might actually have resulted from the mystery ailment.
Re: Uh oh! Mystery Killer Silencing Honeybees « Reply #2 on Feb 12, 2007, 4:45pm »
found a beetle on the floor dead today. Picked it up and looked at it under my magnifying glass, saw a shard coming out of its back, poor creature, the shard was half the size of its back.
I think it would be interesting if all that read this, give your thoughts on the possibilities that it is indeed Morgellons, I personally believe this is so. If anyone out there knows of labs the bee keepers can send specimens, labs that know and if they find will confirm nano, i.e. MORGELLONS.
Other than Hildegarde Staninger and Rahim Karjoo, you folks are the experts, after reading this last article I posted, please post your opinion, be as specific as you can, Thank You.
Re: The Bee Wants To Be Heard « Reply #7 on Feb 20, 2007, 6:28pm »
Hi Sho
It's absolutely okay to send on anything I share. And, I always put my e-mail address on just in case people want to respond. Thanks for taking the time to share this post with others. The bee has come into my life in a big way. When opportunities present themselves, we are here to speak for those who want to be heard. I love the synchronicity in life.
Sending love, Sharon 444
====================================
From Sharon Pacione Wdestiny44@aol.com February 20, 2007
Now we hear that "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."
Albert Einstein said "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live."
There is a very strong possibility that what is happening to the bee (and who knows how many other lifeforms) is caused by genetically engineered crops, and that the honey being produced by the bees from these crops and the effects of pesticides is causing the honey produced by the bees to be toxic to them (and perhaps to all who eat honey)?
Here are some links to check out about bees and genetically engineered food. Also, included are book and DVD recommendations on these subjects. I have also included a couple of links on the hexagon which is the geometric shape of the honeycomb (and the geometric shape of water). There's even a Beehive Cluster in the Universe (see links below).
Please pass this information along to others who care about the environment and what humanity's choices are doing to our beautiful planet.
Hazards of Genetically Engineered Foods and Crops Why We Need A Global Moratorium by Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association http://www.purefood.org/GEFacts.htm
Re: Uh oh! Mystery Killer Silencing Honeybees « Reply #9 on Feb 21, 2007, 12:27pm »
This is from raiders, bees they have invented to do whatever, I was just thinking how important are these invented bees going to be if we loose the Honey bee and our food supply, it is pointless isn't it.
Re: Uh oh! Mystery Killer Silencing Honeybees « Reply #10 on Feb 23, 2007, 9:29pm »
Just pulled this from rumormill, beginning of thread first states something about the bees, than the rats, and then the ants. The fifth arm and nano is mentioned.
as I have said, I think we are looking at several things spliced into one. Why do I think that, I have no degrees, but I had the sense to experiment on myself with things that worked and found the vitamin well max from biochem country life which if you read the makeup of this vitamin you will find it has many of the same ingredients as the natural doctor recomended on the chemtrail video from 2005, I have been taking this vitamin since the late 1980's.
When I first contracted Morgellons, I found what Cliff found, you would treat with a fungus cream and it would get worse in one way, you would treat with an antibiotic and it would get worse in another, hence what they have done is to combine these agents so that fighting them would be nigh impossible. Genious, mad, insane, demonic genious, that was the maker of Morgellons.
We, being the morgellons sufferes were the first to scream about the affects of the electromagnetic energy that we are being doused with, they did not hear. The bees are now screaming with their silence, will they hear?
More information to where in this report....seems that they are really noticing the disappearance of the bees in
Texas a loss of 70 per cent California a loss of 30-60 per cent All along the Eastern Coastline
Same places Morgellons cases are higher too......
Here is a few clips from the article
"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently
The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.
It MIGHT be the BEES of all things that finally shed light on MORGELLONS.....the BEES
Excellent find, sickandtired, the larger population may not notice the morgellons individuals falling by the way side in their illness, until those numbers increase. Yet, when the bees go and the dinner plates are empty of the foods they were a part of sustaining, they will have to notice.
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