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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 15 2015, @03:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the bee-in-a-bonnet dept.

The bees keep dying:

Beekeepers across the United States lost more than 40 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2014 to April 2015, according to the latest results of an annual nationwide survey. While winter loss rates improved slightly compared to last year, summer losses--and consequently, total annual losses--were more severe. Commercial beekeepers were hit particularly hard by the high rate of summer losses, which outstripped winter losses for the first time in five years, stoking concerns over the long-term trend of poor health in honey bee colonies.

The survey, which asks both commercial and small-scale beekeepers to track the health and survival rates of their honey bee colonies, is conducted each year by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A summary of the 2014-2015 results is available upon request prior to May 13, 2015; thereafter the results will be added to previous years' results publicly available on the Bee Informed website.

Of course, thanks to the good Doctor we know bees are actually disappearing in anticipation of the Earth being stolen from space by Davros.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2015, @06:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2015, @06:30AM (#183252)

    Are you sure you understand the problem here?

    If you want to help, find out what is killing the bees.
    Otherwise, you are only going to make bees to watch them beeee killed.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by MuadDib on Friday May 15 2015, @07:59AM

    by MuadDib (4439) on Friday May 15 2015, @07:59AM (#183274)

    The cause is largely known. It's almost certainly correlated with the use of neonicotinoids. See http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118748, [plos.org] http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/20153038697.html. [cabdirect.org] Anyway, honey is bad for you. See http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007(14)00282-2/abstract [nutritionjrnl.com]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Friday May 15 2015, @09:25AM

      by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Friday May 15 2015, @09:25AM (#183288) Journal

      Neonics seem to be pose the main threat to bee populations, although Bayer, one of the largest producers of those pesticides, comes with it's own studies [bayer.com] to deny it (of course). From my own experience with beekeeping (mainly from watching other people / helping them do it), I guess there are a few more things to consider:

      - Varroa destructor [wikipedia.org]: I saw a whole bee hive succumbing to those bastards. There's not much you can do that does not also harm the bees
      - Modern bees are bred to be non-aggressive, which makes the apiarists job safer but also means they are pretty defenseless against predators like wasps or hornets.
      - The breeding also means that the biodervisity of bees suffers. Like in monocultures deseases can spread quickly, e.g. American foulbrood (AFB) [wikipedia.org]. In Germany every hive has to be tested by the Veterinary Office, and if the AFB is discovered, whole districts can be declared as no-beekeeping zones
      - Last but not least, I read that for urban beekeeping neighbors pose a major threat. There are a lot of cases where someone poisoned or even burned beehives because of irrational fear (as I mentioned before, "modern" bees do not pose a big threat - they hardly ever sting, and when they do it does only hurt a little bit. Of course there are people who react allergic, but they seem not to be the usual bee killers)

      @GGP: Go ahead, find a nice spot to start, but I highly recommend connecting to other people who are experienced, but be aware that they all will contradict each other :) Personally I know four apiarists and no matter what topic, they all have their own truth regarding it.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday May 15 2015, @01:06PM

        by bradley13 (3053) on Friday May 15 2015, @01:06PM (#183322) Homepage Journal

        Dead on. From what I've read, and also saw on a lengthy documentary some months ago, these are the two big problems. In order to get the passivity of honey bees, so that they are easier to keep, they have been pretty massively inbred. What a surprise: inbreeding causes problems.

        The whole industry of trucking bees around from one field to another: If you had to design a way to spread disease fast, that's the kind of thing you might come up with. Monoculture bees fertilizing monoculture agriculture: truly, a perfect match.

        Those horrible "killer bees" coming into the US from Mexico? That's just the behavior of wild bees. They apparently make honey just fine, but they disagree with people taking it away. Not being inbred, they are also much more resistant to all the diseases that plague the domestic bees.

        --
        Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 15 2015, @01:57PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday May 15 2015, @01:57PM (#183333) Journal

        Do you have a sense for how viable it is to keep bees in a suburban setting? I mostly see hives in rural settings, but wonder if we could start a hive at our house in the suburbs.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Friday May 15 2015, @02:45PM

          by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Friday May 15 2015, @02:45PM (#183351) Journal

          Please take everything I write with a grain of salt, I only started helping out last year and do so only every two or three weeks.
          The bees we keep are in the middle of Berlin (3.4M people), and this year they gather pollen like crazy.
          Bees search for pollen within a circle of a mean radius of 3km around the hive, up to five. If there's a lot of trees or fields in that area, they should be fine. The main thing to consider is, as I pointed out above, the neighbors. You should definetly talk to those living next door, because a lot of people are afraid of bees. You can control the flight path by aligning the beehive to point away from frequented areas like sidewalks or other gardens. Give them a few meters of open room in front of the hive, so the swarm can scatter a bit. Other than that, be prepared to spend a few hundred bucks of equipment in the beginning, also bees get aggressive when you smell of alcohol and never wear black clothes - they'll mistake you for a bear (seriously, that's what the expert on the television said!)
          Here's a link to a magazine called Apidologie [springer.com] with a more scientific approach. While the magazine is from a collaboration of French and German scientists, it's articles are mainly in English (so I've heard)