#colony collapse

[terminalghost]

THE FUTURE DOESN'T NEED US

[spilladabalia]

[Haus Arafna] - Colony Collapse

[mytwistedspaces]

All that you can see beneath the sun what is made by human now must be undone

[wonderbluth]

[tilbageidanmark]

Shrimp lip balm

[notwiselybuttoowell]

‘Could become a death spiral’: scientists discover what’s driving record die-offs of US honeybees

Experts scrambling to understand losses in hives across the country are finally identifying the culprits. And the damage to farmed bees is a

Last December, [Bret Adee's] bees were wintering in California when the weather turned cold. Bees grouped on top of hives trying to keep warm. “Every time I went out to the beehive there were less and less,” says Adee. “Then a week later, there’d be more dead ones to pick up … every week there is attrition, just continually going down.”

Adee went on to lose 75% of his bees. “It’s almost depressingly sad,” he says. “If we have a similar situation this year – I sure hope we don’t – then we’re in a death spiral.”

It developed into the largest US honeybee die-off on record, with beekeepers losing on average 60% of their colonies.

Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.

Varroa mites – equivalent in size to a dinner plate on a human body – crawl and jump between worker bees. If there are no infections present, they do not typically damage the bee. But if diseases are present, they quickly spread them.

While varroa typically infects honeybees, not wild bees, the diseases that they spread can kill other pollinators – research has shown that the viral outbreaks among honeybees often spill over to wild colonies, with potential knock-on effects on biodiversity.

All beekeepers in the USDA screening used amitraz, a pesticide widely used in the sector to get rid of mites. But the research showed all mites tested were resistant to it: after years of heavy use, amitraz no longer appears to be effective. This discovery underscores “the urgent need for new control strategies for this parasite”, researchers say.

Mite numbers have increased to high levels in recent surveys, according to the researchers, who collected hundreds of samples from dead and living hives from 113 colonies. “When mites become uncontrolled, virulent viruses are more likely to take over,” researchers say.

Since the 1980s, varroa mites globally have developed resistance to at least four leading miticides – pesticides specifically formulated to control mites that are challenging to develop.

But the discovery of amitraz-resistant mites in hives does not mean they alone were responsible for all of last year’s record die-offs. A combination of factors is likely to be causing successive colony deaths among US bees, including the changing climate, exposure to pesticides, and less food in the form of pollen and nectar as monocrop farming proliferates. Many US beekeepers now expect to lose 30% of their colony or more every year.

These wider combined factors are also devastating for wild pollinators and native bee species – and honeybees, which are closely monitored by their keepers, may be acting as a canary in the coalmine for pressures affecting insects more generally.

Paul Hetherington, of the charity Buglife, says honeybees are in effect “a farmed animal as opposed to wild bees, but they will be suffering from the same stresses as their wild cousins, in particular loss of good habitat, climate stress, chemical stress, light.

Adee says: “We had mites for 20 years, and we never had over 3% losses.” He believes there is a “combination of things” that makes the bees more stressed and the mites more deadly.

He cites the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the US, which harm bees’ nervous system, paralysing and ultimately killing them. Some researchers have warned of neonicotinoids causing another “silent spring”, referring to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book on the effects of the insecticide DDT on bird populations.

Due to government staffing cuts, the USDA team were unable to analyse pesticides in the hives and asked bee experts at Cornell University to carry out the research, with the results still to be published.

Experts are concerned that successive loss of honeybee colonies could affect food security as the insects pollinate more than 100 commercial crops across North America. Reports of new losses this year came through before the California almond blossom season, which is the largest pollination event in the world, requiring the services of 70% of US honeybees.

[stylistic-nightmare]

Misery Index - Colony Collapse

[unfuckablebogtroll]

I've never been afraid of bees, or wasps for that matter, but I have multiple beekeepers in my family line so maybe it's genetic.

For a while I had a nest of yellow jackets that left me alone so I left them alone, but they would go after any male that came near. I miss my attack wasps.

I mainly hope the episode doesn't stir up bee panic like the news did when Killer Bees started migrating north, but I doubt it's going to focus on climate change, the overuse of pesticides and the save the bee campaign.

Well, see, my parents told me my whole life I was allergic to bees? Because I’d had a bad reaction when I was real little. So I grew up being theoretically reasonably alarmed about them! Only to later find out as an adult that I’m actually not allergic to bees at all 🤷‍♀️. But by then it was too late to counteract 20+ years of habit lol.

911 is not exactly subtle or restrained, so it might not be the most responsible portrayal of bees, lol, but we can probably at least count on Buck giving some lip service to colony collapse.