Death of the honey Bee

I have been reading an awful lot about the danger to all of us in the death of honey bees. I have copied out  a couple of reviews I found on the net, this is scary stuff, think maybe I should buy the book and get a hive.

From

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/20/scienceandnature

 

Buy World Without Bees from the Guardian bookshop

 

A World Without Bees

Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum

Guardian Books £9.99, pp256

 

The Buzz About Bees: Biology of A Superorganism

Jürgen Tautz

Springer £23, pp284

 

Every April, thousands of families gather in the fields of southern Sichuan in China. Each person clutches a bamboo stick with chicken feathers protruding from the end. Then sons, daughters, parents, grandmothers and grandfathers clamber into the blossom-laden branches of their farm's pear trees and begin the delicate task of pollination.

 

It is, as Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum explain in A World Without Bees, a slow, laborious process. 'The farmers must first collect pollen from the trees by scrubbing it off the anthers, the male part of the flowers, into a bowl. They let it dry for two days, before the whole family comes out with their homemade feather dusters, which are dipped in the pollen and applied to the flowers' stigmas, or female parts.' The end result is a thriving harvest of pears, one that provides each family with an average of five tonnes of fruit a year.

 

But why bother? Why do the good people of Sichuan go through their treetop feather duster routines when they could rely, like the rest of the world, on the honeybee? This, after all, is 'a creature perfectly engineered to perform the task, with a body designed to trap pollen and a work ethic that leaves no petal unturned', as the authors neatly put it.

 

The answer to these questions is simple - and worrying. There are no honeybees in Sichuan. Overuse of pesticides eradicated the region's population 20 years ago, leaving farmers to do their own fruit-tree pollination. And what is true for China today could soon become commonplace across the planet, for everywhere you look, honeybees are dying in vast numbers. In the United States, where Apis mellifera pollinates $15bn-worth of crops a year, 800,000 hives were wiped out in 2007 and a further million have suffered the same fate so far this year. Similarly in Britain, Europe, Canada, Asia and South America, hives are dying at an alarming rate.

 

The cause of colony collapse disorder (CCD), as this new wildlife affliction is termed, remains unclear. Beekeepers blame the introduction of nicotine-based pesticides such as imidacloprid, while scientists say a virus is probably responsible. However, neither group has gathered sufficient evidence to support their theories unequivocally.

 

What is not disputed is the impact of continued honeybee destruction. In their absence, human intervention, as practised in Sichuan, would be impossible. The sheer scale of the impending crisis threatens to be overwhelming. Yet without the pollinating presence of bees, cotton plantations, vegetable beds, orchards and fields of forage crops for cattle will wither and die. No bees equals no steak and no bacon - or coffee or fruit (with the exception of bananas and pineapples) or cooking oils (apart from walnut or olive) or, naturally, honey. In such a future, breakfast will consist of a bowl of porridge made with water, and an egg. No fruit juice, no coffee and no milk - not even soya, please note.

 

And if you don't believe the beekeeper or the authors of A World without Bees, consider the words attributed to Albert Einstein: 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.' Hence the claim by Benjamin and McCallum that the disappearance of billions of the world's honeybees suggests we are facing 'an environmental crisis bigger than climate change'.

 

Now I have nothing against a bit of alarmism to spice up a book, but that is taking things too far. Yes, we have a problem on our hands, but given that our current wave of honeybee deaths is only a couple of years old, the authors are premature in writing off a creature that has survived for tens of millions of years. On the other hand, the authors are correct in pinpointing the roots of the crisis. Pollination has become a global business worth £30bn and honeybees are treated more like machines than animals, particularly in the US, where they are shipped round the nation in lorries like honey-making automata 'that are poorly adapted to their living conditions and ill-equipped to fight off disease'. So if you want a story that shows how our species is beginning to walk dangerously out of step with the rest of nature, then you need look no further than this highly enjoyable, polished, well-researched homage to the honeybee.

 

For its part, The Buzz about Bees is more concerned with the minutiae of the honeybee's life, although it manages to be accessible and entertaining as well. As Jürgen Tautz, a professor of behavioural physiology at Wurzburg University, points out, colonies show an eerie collective intelligence and should be treated as highly sensitive entities, a point that is often not understood by those who keep bee colonies and treat them like 'poor migrant workers', transporting them to climates to which they are not adapted while keeping them in cramped conditions in which disease spreads rapidly. As Tautz concludes: 'Is it any wonder that colonies die?'

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http://cte.jhu.edu/techacademy/fellows/elrod/beequest/ceindex.html]

 

The Buzz about Bees is a web quest about honey bees

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1552024-1,00.html

 

We don't give bees much thought unless they're terrorizing us at a picnic, but they're exquisitely complex creatures. Nature and Science reported last week that the genome of the honeybee has been mapped, making it only the fourth bug to be so sequenced. Researchers have already begun studying that genetic blueprint, providing new insights into our most valuable insect--and new strategies to save it from extinction.

Why bees are in danger

Over the past 50 years, the honeybee population in the U.S. has been cut in half. Here are some reasons:

1 THE VARROA MITE A tiny killer first detected in the U.S. in 1987, the mite attacks honeybee adults and larvae, wiping out a generation of young bees before they hatch

2 TRACHEAL MITES First spotted in the U.S. in 1984, tracheal mites attack the respiratory system of adult bees and can kill an entire hive in a matter of hours

3 PESTICIDES The wax in beehives is a natural sink for airborne toxins, and the relatively weak bee immune system is no match for such concentrations of man-made poisons

What we stand to lose

Honeybees are responsible for up to 30%* of food in the U.S. diet that relies on pollination--and that includes alfalfa-fed beef •ORANGES 17.8 billion lbs. •GRAPES 15.7 billion lbs. •APPLES 9.9 billion lbs. •WATERMELONS 3.8 billion lbs. •CUCUMBERS 2.2 billion lbs. •ALMONDS 915 million lbs. •SQUASH 815 million lbs. •CHERRIES (sweet)  502 million lbs. •HONEY 175 million lbs. *2005 production

Inside the honeybee

It's not easy to build a bee, as new insights into its genes and anatomy are revealing

Brain Smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, the bee brain owes its versatility to perhaps 200 polypeptides that drive behavior. At least 36 genes produce those chemicals

Pathogen resistance The bee's genes do not give it a very powerful immune system, surprising in so communal a species. The bee has yet undiscovered ways of staying healthy

Royal jelly Adult bees secrete this protein mix, and all young bees are fed a portion of it. But an exclusive diet of royal jelly can transform an ordinary bee into an egg-laying queen

Outer body The exterior of the bee is not particularly thick, a genetic adaptation that probably arose as a result of hive living, which keeps bees safer than other, more solitary insects

Dull taste Bees are poorly equipped with taste genes, another likely result of the hive, since anything one bee eats has probably been proved safe by another

Stinger When deployed, it is left in the victim; the bee dies soon after, but the sac pumps poison for up to 20 min.

Sharp smell The new genome studies have located the genes that give the bee its acute sense of smell. Smell is vital in an insect that uses pheromones both to communicate locations and to indicate rank

Pollen As bees collect pollen for food, they also act as sex workers, scattering stray grains among male and female flower parts, allowing the plants to reproduce Compound eyes (2) Simple eyes (3) Antennae THORAX HEAD ABDOMEN Wax secretion Nerve center Poison sac Hindgut Pollen basket Honey stomach Midgut Heart

 

The social bug

Inside a hive is a well-developed society, governed mainly by scent molecules, or pheromones. Each hive has one queen, about 500 male drones and up to 50,000 sterile female workers

DRONES Live about six weeks Born to a soft life, the stingerless male bees' sole purpose is to conserve their energy and mate with a queen

WORKERS Live about six weeks Literally worked to death, they care for young, clean and protect the hive, forage for food and die when their wings wear out

QUEEN Lives one to two years Lays up to 2,000 eggs a day or 400,000 a year. Each colony can have only one queen, so she seeks out and destroys any rivals Wax walls Nectar transformed into honey Hatchlings

Communication [This article consists of an illustration. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] The waggle dance, an elaborate figure-eight performance, tells nearby worker bees the distance to food and its direction in relation to the sun The number of waggles, or shakes, and the bee's pulsing sounds indicate to others how far to fly