"Honey bee depopulation syndrom"?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

This is really creepy.Considering that bees are responsible at 90 % of plants reproduction, I think we're pretty screwed. Think about it, if plants stop reproducing, then we can forget about all the plants we eat and our vegetables. If we can't grow any vegetables, then what will our livestock eat?

Any thoughts on what's happening to these bees?

My guess is that Autism Speaks as something to do with that...

No, the bees are aliens going back to their home planet.

Maybe they're engaging in some sort of bee-cannibalism? I don't know but we can definitely tell that there's a lack of bees in our area. Normally the flowering trees would be swarming with bees, but there are very few or none.

I've been following Wired Magazine articles about this for the last few years. I think for awhile they were thinking it was a fungus, but last I heard the theory was that it wasn't due to just one cause. Multifactorial.

Honey bee loss is a big problem in the US, but remember that honey bees are also European imports, just like a lot of other things. Agriculture and horticulture had a very long history in the Americas without them -- 10,000 years, for some plant varieties. Other pollinators -- moths, wasps, indigenous bees -- do exist and are quite active. Would the imported European and Asian plants that we rely upon be hit hard by the loss of honeybees? Yes, but this may just force us to rely more upon American native foods -- corn, amaranth, quinoa, etc.

Links:

Early Squash Seeds in Mesoamerica
Early Cultigens in Eastern N. America

I just found this frightening article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... s-collapse

"Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter."

Terminal decline doesn't sound good.

Lots of things could be to blame.

1. Electromagnetics that insects are sensitive to but other animals are not.

2. Pesticides with a cumulative effect on insect populations.

3. Pollution.

Pick one (or several).

This was brought up 4 years ago, for about a month, then it was never talked about again...Go figure.

6. - Lazy bees wanting to playing Xbox all day!

Sharma and Kuma just added to the proposition that mobile phone radiation disrupts bee colonies (http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25may2010/1376.pdf), although it was a tiny study (2 hives with and 2 without a mobile) and had other problems:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology ... ps-no-one/

If it was true, then we would be royally in the stew, having saturated the entire environment in continuous microwave radiation 24 hours per day, every day.

If the bees all die, then we'll probably all die too, so I don't see a problem.

I don't understand why people aren't more upset about this. Michael Jackson dies and it's all anyone talks about for weeks, but massive die offs of a sentinel species don't even make the front page?

Here is a list of plants that rely upon pollinators to produce fruit. Please note that for the crops for which pollinators are either greatly necessary or essential, honeybees are either not on the list of pollinators at all or are only one of several.

Pollinators

Would loss of honeybees be catastrophic for some species of crops? Yes. Apples, for instance, rely heavily on domesticated hives. However, the number of species that rely heavily on honeybees is actually quite small. Beans and cereals, major food sources all over the world, rely on them very little. The major bean species, P. vulgaris, doensn't rely on honeybee pollination at all. All that would happen for humans is what has happened throughout humanity's history when a food source dried up -- we would move on to other sources.

Insect Pollination of Cultivated Crop Plants