Thread: Vanishing honeybees mystify scientists

i've read a study, bees will leave their hive, if cell phone is used near it, they won,t come back untill cell phone is gone, somethimes they won,t come back at all.

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross
Published: 15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.

German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."

The case against handsets

Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.

Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.

I could swear I saw a report that said global warming had something to do with it.

Originally Posted by gunnut

I could swear I saw a report that said global warming had something to do with it.

Doubtful, "global warming" has been going on for hundreds of years. As for the Mobile phone theory, I imagine most hives are posted in the middle of fields/orchids well out of the distance of radiation. It's a known fact that they use the Sun for direction and communication. At first I thought that the so called Killer Bees from Brazil have spread a lot further North than usual for they are also known to wipe out hives, but I think something more serious is going on here

Species under threat:
Honey, who shrunk the bee population?
Across America, millions of honey bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving beekeepers facing ruin and US agriculture under threat. And to date, no one knows why. Michael McCarthy reports
Published: 01 March 2007
It has echoes of a murder mystery in polite society. There could hardly be a more sedate and unruffled world than beekeeping, but the beekeepers of the United States have suddenly encountered affliction, calamity and death on a massive scale. And they have not got a clue why it is happening.
Across the country, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, honey bee colonies have started to die off, abruptly and decisively. Millions of bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die (they cannot survive as a colony without the queen, who is always left behind).
Some beekeepers, especially those with big portable apiaries, or bee farms, which are used for large-scale pollination of fruit and vegetable crops, are facing commercial ruin - and there is a growing threat that America's agriculture may be struck a mortal blow by the loss of the pollinators. Yet scientists investigating the problem have no idea what is causing it.
The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.
It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a "tremendous pathogen load", the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.
The condition has been recorded in at least 24 states. It is having a major effect on the mobile apiaries which are transported across the US to pollinate large-scale crops, such as oranges in Florida or almonds in California. Some have lost up to 90 per cent of their bees.
A reliable estimate of the true extent of the problem will not be possible for another month or so, until winter comes to an end and the hibernating bee colonies in the northern American states wake up. But scientists are very worried, not least because, as there is no obvious cause for the disease as yet, there is no way of tackling it.
"We are extremely alarmed," said Diana Cox-Foster, the professor of Entomology at Penn States University and one of the leading members of a specially convened colony-collapse disorder working group.
"It is one of the most alarming insect diseases ever to hit the US and it has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry. In some ways it may be to the insect world what foot-and-mouth disease was to livestock in England."
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera, the honey bee, and the value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6bn (£8bn) annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops - a colony usually being the group of bees in a hive.
California's almond crop, which is the biggest in the world, stretching over more than half a million acres over the state's central valley, now draws more than half of the mobile bee colonies in America at pollinating time - which is now. Some big commercial beekeeping operations which have been hit hard by the current disease have had to import millions of bees from Australia to enable the almond trees to be pollinated.
Some of these mobile apiaries have been losing 60 or 70 per cent of their insects, or even more. "A honey producer in Pennsylvania doing local pollination, Larry Curtis, has gone from 1,000 bee colonies to fewer than eight," said Professor Cox-Foster. The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist.
One was that the bees left the hive and flew away to die elsewhere, over about a week. Another was that the few bees left inside the hive were carrying "a tremendous number of pathogens" - virtually every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees' immune systems were being suppressed in some way.
Professor Cox-Foster went on: "And another unusual symptom that we're are seeing, which makes this very different, is that normally when a bee colony gets weak and its numbers are decreasing, other neighbouring bees will come and steal the resources - they will take away the honey and the pollen.
"Other insects like to take advantage too, such as the wax moth or the hive beetle. But none of this is happening. These insects are not coming in.
"This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them."
The scientists involved in the working group were surveying the dead colonies but did not think the cause of the deaths was anything brought in by beekeepers, such as pesticides, she said.
Another of the researchers studying the collapses, Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the State of Pennsylvania, said it was still difficult to gauge their full extent. It was possible that the bees were fleeing the colonies because they sensed they themselves were diseased or affected in some way, he said. This behaviour has been recorded in other social insects, such as ants.
The introduction of the parasitic bee mite Varroa in 1987 and the invasion of the Africanised honey bee in 1990 have threatened honey bee colonies in the US and in other parts of the world, but although serious, they were easily comprehensible; colony collapse disorder is a deep mystery.
One theory is that the bees may be suffering from stress as beekeepers increasingly transport them around the country, the hives stacked on top of each other on the backs of trucks, to carry out pollination contracts in orchard after orchard, in different states.
Tens of billions of bees are now involved in this "migratory" pollination. An operator might go from pollinating oranges in Florida, to apples in Pennsylvania, to blueberries in Maine, then back to Massachusetts to pollinate cranberries.
The business is so big that pollination is replacing honey-making as the main money earner at the top end of the beekeeping market, not least because in recent years the US has been flooded with cheap honey imports, mainly from Argentina and China.
A typical bee colony, which might be anything from 15,000 to 30,000 bees, would be rented out to a fruit grower for about $135 - a price that is up from $55 only three years ago. To keep the bees' energy up while they are pollinating, beekeepers feed them protein supplements and syrup carried around in large tanks.
It is in these migratory colonies where the biggest losses have been seen. But the stress theory is as much speculation as anything else. At the moment, the disappearance of America's bees is as big a mystery as the disappearance of London's sparrows.
From The Independent
24-04-07

A lot of theories...and a lot of worry!

Originally Posted by gunnut

I could swear I saw a report that said global warming had something to do with it.

Beat me to it, dang you.

Bracing for a famine caused by rats

By Subir Bhaumik
BBC News, Aizawl, Mizoram

Tribesmen in India's far eastern state of Mizoram, bordering Burma and Bangladesh, are shuddering at the sight of the heavy flowering of the ubiquitous bamboo.

Rat in Mizoram
The rat plague is expected twice a century

It attracts hordes of rats, a phenomenon known locally as Mautam, the Mizos' worst nightmare.

Not only do the rats thrive on the bamboo flowers, they also then go on to destroy the farmers' crops.

Mizo oral tradition suggests this deadly ecological cycle is repeated every 48 years.

Most Mizo farmers are now not even sowing rice or corn, so worried are they by the rats.

"It is no use planting anything. The hordes of rats have already destroyed the standing crop in some areas and will destroy all the rest," says Thangthiauva of Pangzawl village.



Plant Protection Officer James Lalsiamliana says the Mautam, that struck the Mizo Hills in 1910-11 and again in 1958-59 is back with a vengeance.

"It will affect more than 30% of Mizoram's land area and much of the area under some crop or other. It cannot be stopped, we can only do damage control," said Mr Lalsiamliana.

He told the BBC that some parts of Champhai, Aizawl and Serchhip districts had already witnessed crop destruction by hordes of rats in the winter of 2006-2007.

"But the worse is still to come."

Shortfall

A report by India's forest and environment ministry predicts that at least 5,100 sq km of Mizoram's forest area (out of a total of 6,446 sq km of forest) will be affected by the Mautam in 2007.



Gathering the rat tails together - each one is worth one rupee

More than half of Mizoram's population of nearly 900,000 are farmers.

The Mizoram agriculture department anticipates a crop shortfall of at least 75% in 2007-2008 because of farmers not planting.

Desperate to control the rising rat population, the state government announced a reward of one rupee for every rat killed.

During 2006 alone more than 221,636 rats were killed. The killing continues but the rats keep coming in hordes.

It was in October 2005 that the initial heavy flowering of the bamboo was first noticed at Chawngtlai bamboo forest in the southern district of Champhai.

It then spread rapidly in 2006.

Fuelling revolt

As it continues to spread, tribal elders in Mizoram remember the deadly Mautam of 1958-59, that led to a widespread famine in the Mizo Hills, then a part of Assam.

Farmers
Many farmers have not planted their seeds this year

"The rats would wipe out three to four hectares of paddy cropland in one night. We would see our crop standing the night before but next day it would all be gone, eaten away by the rats," said Chaltanga.

Another local, Bualhranga, explains how he ended up becoming a leading figure in the separatist Mizo National Front (MNF).

"Our elders knew from oral traditions that Mautam was coming but the Assam government paid no heed," Bualhranga says.

"When it happened, our people just starved and hundreds of angry young Mizos like me picked up weapons to fight a government that showed no concern for us."

The MNF started as the Mizo National Famine Front to provide relief to the starving people but then the word "Famine" was dropped and its leaders declared their intention to fight for freedom from India.

The MNF guerrillas engaged Indian security forces in a bloody insurgency for 20 years until an agreement in 1986 brought the fighting to an end. Since then, peace has held in Mizoram.

The MNF now governs Mizoram having won the state's last two assembly elections.

"We are taking all measures to fight the impending Mautam. We are encouraging people to kill rats, we are telling farmers what to do and we are asking Delhi to rush huge additional supplies of food grains to feed our people when the crop shortfalls happens," Mizoram's Chief Minister Zoramthanga said recently.

As a former rebel leader who fed on the anger of his starving people, Zoramthanga knows well the risks of ignoring the Mautam.

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Unlike the bees, I'm not sure what these rats are useful for. May be prey to Eagles, vultures, Snakes, etc?