Up To 90% Colony Loss Rate For Bees In Ontario's Niagara Region - Toronto Star

[hatrack]

The sudden unexplained loss of millions of bees in the Niagara region – up to 90 per cent in some commercial colonies – has prompted Ontario beekeepers to ask experts at the University of Guelph to investigate.

The move comes amid the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees in the U.S., in a phenomenon so unusual that it has spawned a new phrase – "Colony Collapse Disorder."

In Canada, the problem seems to be confined so far to the Niagara region but is still early days for beekeepers in the West, who won't know the extent of the damage until they unwrap their hives later this month. "About 80 or 90 per cent of the beekeepers in the Niagara region have had substantial losses," George Dubanow, president of the Niagara Beekeepers Association, said in an interview yesterday. "This number is unparalleled. A typical winter loss is between 10 and 20 per cent."

That has some Niagara region fruit growers worried in the weeks leading up to the May pollination period because bees don't just make honey. They also play a vital role in pollinating everything from cherries to pear trees in Ontario, hybrid canola in Western Canada and blueberries in New Brunswick.

EDIT

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/203818

[demo dutch]

1. Co-incides with report about cellphone and bees, and problems in Great Britain

Probably a combination of global warming, cellphones, pesticides, weather allcoming together at the same time.
Well, start worrying because this is really frightening!!!.
Einstein apparently said “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

[damntexdem]

12. Yeah, it started when the bees got cell phones.

I guess they were too busy talking to look for nectar. ;-)

Or more seriously, what we're doing to our environment may do us in (in this case by collapse of much of agriculture) before rising sea levels ever get to us.

[demo dutch]

13. I suspect you're joking if not read this link

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

[Heywood J]

21. The thing is, Niagara isn't a hotbed of cell towers.

Aside from the few towns and cities of major size (clustered along the QEW), the rest of the region is comparatively rural. There's a lot of fruit growing and the population is concentrated. There just isn't really that large of a cell tower population there.

Perhaps it's a problem elsewhere, I'm not going to dismiss that possibility, but I doubt it's the case in Niagara.

[Gregorian]

2. This is the most worrisome news I've ever read.

And 24 states reporting major losses.


My nonexpert opinion is that this is not going to be a permanent loss. But it may be the symptom of looming sustained loss.


This is not like global warming, or population growth. This is near instantaneous disaster. This could be the last year we see pollination, ever. I doubt it. But the thought is pretty dramatic.

[GliderGuider]

3. This phenomenon is too widespread for comfort.

I'm not inclined towards the cell-phone theory, because predators leave the derelict hives alone, implying that there's something noxious in there. GMOs? Pesticides? Who knows. You're right about the time frame, though. A continental collapse of pollinated food crops over a couple of years would be pretty apocalyptic.

[Gregorian]

7. My first thought is it isn't cell phones. But upon thinking further...

If that were the case, I would suspect electrical power transmission lines to play a role. And they've been around a long time. They aren't high frequency, but they are magnitudes greater in energy density. But cellphones are high frequency. And it's not the cell phone that is doing the transmitting. It's between the "repeaters", if one can call them that. So upon further (and greatly uninformed) thinking, perhaps cellphone transmission could be the problem. The country is virtually carpeted with cell phone transmissions. And now that I think of it, power transmission is confined to narrow corridors. So I'm open to what the professional engineers and the studies will have to say.

It could also be a lot of things in combination. I suspect that by combusting fuel and running the atmosphere through engines, we're asking for a hell of a lot of trouble. Not to mention the interruption of lifecycles that roads impinge upon. It's a lot of stuff. It could even be genetically modified plants. Who the hell knows. We're all speculating. But the bottom line is we are living outside of nature's equilibrium. That's always my fallback position. And it works for just about everything. Too many people, in other words.

[demo dutch]

14. It's probably a combination of things. This article sounds bad too

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

[phantom power]

4. My guess is a microbe or parasite, enabled by climate change.

[kestrel91316]

5. The beehive in the base of my dying, termite-riddled apricot tree

in the back yard is doing just fine........

[GliderGuider]

6. My GF just wondered about the status of wild colonies

I wonder if the key phrase here is "commercial colonies"?

Did you know that bees suffer from monoculture, too? Apparently there are only 500 queen bees who produce all the baby queen bees used in American commercial hives.

[mike_c]

8. the honey bee is one of the most closely bred domestic animals on earth....

We've known that's a disaster waiting to happen for many years.

[hatrack]

9. Wild colonies are in pretty bad shape, thanks to varroa

Their collapse over the past 15 years or so has been comparable to commercial mortality more recently with CCD.

[GliderGuider]

10. Shit. Thank you SO much...

[Mojambo]

11. This is really starting to freak me out. n/t

[earth mom]

15. OMFG. This is the worst news about the bees so far.

:scared:

:cry:

[Dead_Parrot]

16. After the fuck-up with the pet food...

...I have to wonder what's in the winter feed a lot of keepers use. Varroa's been decimating wild populations, but it's been doing so over years, even decades - CCD seems to have hit almost everywhere at once. I can't imagine any biological agent spreading that fast...

[CGowen]

17. I don't think it's cell phones

Fly away and die

Pesticides are designed to kill bugs and other pests on crops without causing harm to humans or the environment. But in a never-ending biological arms race, miscreant insects develop resistance to new pesticides nearly as fast as chemists can create them. In this tit-for-tat exchange, scant attention is paid to effects that new pesticides have on beneficial insects like honey bees.

While many pesticides are downright lethal to bees, some new studies have pointed to other strange effects found at low doses. For example, low doses of new compounds called neonicotinoids might be interfering with bee minds. Potentially, this prevents them from remembering their colony's location and causes them to get lost and never return.

According to Pennsylvania State University entomologist Diane Cox-Foster, another possibility is that neonicotinoids are another factor impairing bee immunity.

Yet another hypothesis is that sick adult bees may be self-sacrificing: flying away to die in order to protect the hive from further infection.

When the Working Group first examined samples of CCD-killed bees from across the country, one factor they found in common was fungal growth in the bees' guts. The fungi may be from the genus Aspergillus, a group of fungi that produce toxins which can kill young adult bees. Studies published in the past have reported that bees infected with the fungus fly away from the colony to die.

Not that Aspergillus is the only possibility. "We're asking if there is anything new that may have been brought in accidentally," says Cox-Foster. "We know that there are a couple of potential routes for introduction of new pathogens."

Hands off the hive

When a colony is weakened other bees or insects usually move in to take advantage of the gap and score a free lunch in the form of honey. Not so in CCD-killed hives; wax moths and other predators stay away, at least for much longer than they would normally.

According to Cox-Foster, it could be that insects' keen sense of smell may be keeping them away from dangerous chemicals present in the dead hive. "We know that insects are very good at detecting chemicals in their environment. There are studies that have taken caterpillars and shown that they'll actually feed around a droplet of pesticide on a leaf because they can detect it"

"One of our hypotheses is that the fungus itself is producing toxins that are being detected by the other insects. Likewise, it could be one of these environmental contaminants ," she says.

That's as far as the research detectives have gotten to date. Are bees, under stress from many sources, succumbing to pressure from new pathogens or chemicals? Between mites, viruses, fungi, stress and new pesticides, the insects are under threat like never before.

Fully one-third of fruits, vegetables, and nuts consumed in America are dependent on pollinators - overwhelmingly honey bees. The net value of all this produce to the U.S. economy is roughly US$15 billion per year. And across America experts are scrambling to find answers to the mystery before it turns into an even bigger economic and agricultural disaster.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1087?page=3

[IDemo]

18. There may be one way of investigating the cell phone link

There are facilities which are used for the testing of electronics products to make sure they comply with FCC rules regarding radio frequency interference. These facilities are built to completely block out any outside influences, such as cell towers or broadcast frequencies, for instance. If a hive could be placed inside one of these and then the behavior of the bees observed over the course of days/weeks/months(?) with no radio frequencies present, and then the same or different hive subjected to cellphone wavelengths for further study, it may be possible to confirm or eliminate cell phones as the problem.

[ArmchairMeme]

19. GMO

I had also read a while ago that Monsanto was developing and deploying sterile seeds. These seeds would germinate the first time but any plants created would then be sterile. Then farmers who used these seeds would have to go back to Monsanto to buy new seeds each year after that.

Would bees be capable of distinguishing between fertile and sterile plants?

It looks like humans have a very small window in which to figure this out.

Garbage In Garbage Out

[GliderGuider]

20. I've been wondering about Terminator seeds too.

As well as plants that have been genetically engineered to produce powerful endogenous pesticides. There's also the possibility that engineered herbicide-resistance has permitted the use of more and more powerful herbicides on crops visited by the bees, and that some sort of threshold has been passed.

There is way too much opportunity for unintended consequences when you're talking about genetic modifications to entire crops. I suspect the root cause is hubris.

[alfredo]

22. Herbicides? Maybe the altered genes also alters the nectar,

changing it into a poison.