To Bee or not to Bee?

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Sorry in advance if I upset anyone with this but I seem to be having lots of mini meltdowns lately and try as I might to supress them I really feel an need to express some of my weird thoughts.

This is a little out there (like alot of my recent thoughts) but for some obscure reason I felt a need to explore Einsteins prophecies, he being a fellow Aspie and all and I was struck by how many overlaps there appear to be Mayan texts and how close his predictions appear to be to the present time

Albert Einstein reportedly said, "If the bees should die, humankind would have but four more years to live." So key is the honeybee in pollination that its extinction would severely disrupt the food chain.

World wide bee colonies are collapsing at an unprecidented rate - its being attributed to cell pghones, global warming etc

Could Colony Collapse Disorder—the recent massive die-off of entire bee colonies—be an eerie harbinger of Einstein's prophecy?

It also ties in with this as well Revelation 6:6
Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"

Although the Bible plainly speaks of great famine in the last days, the prophetic words of Revelation 6:6 states that the olive and grape harvest will not be damaged.

In general grape growers have assumed that grapes were either completely self- fertilizing or were cross-pollinated by wind, so that in either case insects were considered of no value. The grape harvest will not be affected by the missing bee population.

Bees and other insects play a minor role in olive pollination; wind moves most of the pollen from tree to tree. Most olive varieties are self-fertile, but increased production often results from cross pollination. And neither will the olive harvest be affected by CCD.

Humankind thrived for 25,000 years in North America before honeybees were brought over from Europe. For all we know, honeybees could be a detriment that we'd be better off without.

Ummm.

Current thought is that Colony Collapse Disorder has more to do with poor beekeeping practices than biblical prophecy.

If you really want me to, I'll dig up some legitimate links as reference.

I heard that there is a bee epidemic of something.
I'm not sure if bees dying out would make humans die out too though.

Animals and humans alike can adapt to environmental changes...and as something as small as bees dying out started to wipe out the human population, I would be surprised.

I may not be expressing myself clearly - the Einstein reference means that without pollen which bees naturallyspread the food chain would be severly disrupted as their would be no natural cross fertilizarion of plants and as we are on the top of that chain so we are dependent to a large extent on the stability of those below us- even the knock on effect of famine resulting in the starvation and spread of disease by wild animals would affect us to an extent

Last edited by ArcAngel06 on 16 Oct 2007, 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My wording must suck, I am not saying CCD is caused by biblical/Einsteins prophecy - I am saying I think its somewhat amazing that these peices fit together.

CCD is occuring in wild bee colonies as well, its not related to bee keeping practises. Most scientists are linking it to mobile phone radiation and global warming but if you know otherwise please post I am really interested

Albert Einstein speculated that "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."
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. The Independent

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.

This is fascinating and, uh, distressing. I miss the honeybees but I have been amazed at the variety of bumblebees that have replaced them. And my dad has always housed thousands of mason bees who seem to be out longer now.

When something seems to fulfill scripture or prophecy, I, as a Christian, take a wait and see position. The Scripture is always true, but our understanding isn't.

If the lack of honeybees meant that there wouldn't be any cross fertilization of plants, how is it that so much of it occurred in North America before the arrival of the honeybee? As for a "knock on effect of famine", you are reading something that I neither wrote nor implied.

I guess Einstein did not know about the native bees, the bumblebees, the syrphid flies, or even the moths and butterflies that did the pollination before the arrival of the honeybee.

Unfortunately bumblebees are also facing a similar plight to honey bees.
I must confess I must be really stupid because personally I think the impact of the extinction of bees would be catastrophic even though I am no scientist I dont think that the elimination of a species that cross pollenates another could be anything less.
Its not a headline anywhere so maybe I am wrong.

My yard is filled with hundreds of bumblebees. They like to sleep on the raspberry leaves for some reason. So I'm not a aware of them having a problem. Can you give me a source to look that up?

I have seen this theme played out in other areas of our economic life.

The bees that are being talked about are an unnatural expansion of the bee population, driven by humans.
The amount of food we try to put on the shelves of our stores is way beyond what the people in the first-world countries need to live healthy lives. With the bulk of it being junk food.

I personally do not believe in the 'catastrophic' nature of this story.
What it might do, if things were to really get 'bad', is to push us to rethink agriculture as a food producer and as an economic influence.

But then, the way things seem to go, too many scientists/business people/government people, will hunt for a way to maintain the status quo instead of resolving the problem of over-production and the problems that creates.
They will work to find a way or another insect to 'domesticate' in order to keep pollinating all those crops.

REMEMBER! MORE IS BETTER!

This sort of reminds about the logging debate here locally where I live.

A major logging company was bought out by a single investor. This new owner decided to end the logging policies the family-owned business maintained for quite a long time. These old policies did not include clear-cutting as a major method of resource management.

The new owner had to hire lots of new employees to accommodate the new clear-cut policy designed to maximize short-term profits.

Once things got hard on the company, they started letting go of these new employees (several years later).

For those people who refused to remember the history of the company, they only saw the layoffs as sign that the company was being broken and how 'hard' times were getting.
They don't seem to think about the fact that the company did NOT need to implement these new policies and hire all those new employees to sustain the positive life/growth of the company before the take-over.

This may seem like a bad tangential course in my thinking here... sorry...

Basically, when I look at how our farmer's farm, it makes no sense to me.

Correct me if you know I am wrong, but...

-You start out with a small farm (for some farmer's this may have been generations ago), work it until you believe you 'need' more land to increase production and profits (or perhaps just to satisfy the desire for owning large tracts of land)

-Perhaps you start out by leasing more property. Perhaps you actually mortgage the family farm to buy more property.

-Now you need more/bigger/modern equipment, which costs in the thousands/tens-of-thousands/hundreds-of-thousands of dollars.
Time to mortgage more or find a lender who will lend you more through some other means, or get the various government agencies to help prop up you business.

Everything escalates because of the desire for more... more money, more land, more equipment, more crops.
Good for the economy... as long as money is actually moving in circular flow.

BUT

Some farmer's can't keep up, either financially, or because their children do not want to take over the business, or because their fertilization practices have gradually made the ground unfit for certain crops or perhaps any crops that are of any value.

Anyway, sounds like the same thing with the bees.
Sounds as though everything written here is talking about domesticated honey bees which are 'mass produced' in order to fit the never ending expansion of our bloated agriculture.

We probably won't have too many folks talking about how we should re-think our ag practices and perhaps decrease the amount/size of farms.
After all, the cry is out to save the family farms... which, like the little logging company that went too big too fast, have a history of not being the little family farms they once were, whether or not they are still owned by the families or have been bought out by large ag firms.

OOh Whee! this is getting too much even for me!
Think I'll stop here

I thought this was going to be about Bee Movie!

Saturday, 5 May, 2001, 07:46 GMT 08:46 UK
Bumblebees could face extinction
Bumblebee
Bumblebees' normal habitats are dwindling
By the BBC's Graham Satchell

Bumblebees are disappearing at such an alarming rate in Britain that scientists are warning they could be wiped out within a few years.

DNA experts are now investigating ways to stop the insect's decline.

They are using genetic technology to build up the first accurate picture of the diversity and health of remaining bee populations.

Three of the 19 UK species are already extinct and a further nine are on the critically endangered list.


If bumblebees were to die out, it would be a tragedy and an environmental disaster

Dr Dave Goulson
Their numbers have been falling in recent years, largely due to intensive farming practices.

Dr Dave Goulson, a senior lecturer at the University of Southampton, says the picture is serious.

"The last 50 years have seen hedgerows ripped up, and most of the flower-rich grasslands once used for grazing have been reseeded with rye grass.

"If bumblebees were to die out, it would be a tragedy and an environmental disaster. They are major pollinators of wild flowers.

"If the bees disappear, the plants will set fewer seeds and may themselves vanish."

Economic impact

In Chichester, less than 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Southampton, Gerry Hayman inspects a vast glasshouse of tomato plants.

Box hive of bees in Gerry Hayman's greenhouse
Bees are used to pollinate commercially-grown tomatoes
Over a site covering nine hectares (23 acres) more than 1,000 tonnes of the fruit are growing here at any one time.

The humble bumblebee plays a critical role. In all, 8,000 buzz around - pollinating the whole crop.

"None of our bees are taken from the wild, they're bred and imported from Holland. We use them to pollinate the plants," says Mr Hayman, chief scientific officer for the British Tomato Growers' Association.

"Years ago, the job was done by hand - growers would tap each plant individually to loosen the pollen. It was a laborious and time-consuming job.

"If numbers were to decline it could have a serious economic impact on the industry."

Genetic fingerprint

Because the insects' colonies are largely underground and hard to find, conservationists have problems assessing the state of the various species.

Dr Goulson has developed a technique to catch the bees and conduct a DNA analysis.

Bee blood is sampled at Southampton University
Can genetic technology save the bumblebee?
They are trapped in nets and a miniature hypodermic needle is used to remove a tiny amount of the bee's equivalent of blood, which carries a genetic fingerprint.

''Individuals from different nests are not visually distinguishable, but the DNA analysis allows us to tell them apart," says Dr Goulson.

"By identifying which bees are sisters - and therefore from the same nest - it should be possible to determine just how many separate nests there are in an area.

"If we know in which parts of the country they still have strongholds, we can determine what types of land-use suit them best."

The future of a whole host of crops from oil seed rape, strawberries and apples as well as wild flowers could depend on the research and the plight of the bumblebee.