What's causing the honeybees to die? Here's an argument from Discover saying that in the name of industrial efficiency, we've turned them into weak-chinned inbreds. Excerpt:
The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today's honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. "We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an explosion of natural diversity. While most bees preferred a specific type of plant, honeybees were equal-opportunity pollinators--"pollen pigs," beekeepers called them. The most socially complex of the bees, they thrived in colonies led by the egg-laying queen, who ensured the genetic fitness of her progeny by breeding with multiple male drones from other colonies.
All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.
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The truth is that no one really knows WHY all our honeybees are dying - all we know is that they are. Until there is more research, there is not much we can do on a commercial scale. But locally, one way to make areal difference is to keep bees ourselves - in the backyard, on the roof, on the balcony even! More and more people are keeping these fascinating creatures as a hobby, nd this can only be good.
I agree with BestBeekeeping, make a difference be a backyard beekeeper! This is my first year and keeping bees has been truly a amazing experience.
The honeybees living in a hollow tree on my property seem to be doing well. It has been a hoot to watch them fly in and out of the tree going about their bee business.
In the last 10 years, feral honeybees, mason bees, and the like have been decimated by the varroa & tracheal mites, fungal diseases, a loss of the earths magnetic power and a variety of climate change. All native pollinators, including bats are dying out due to CCD.
We have to remember that honeybees are not native to the Americas. The native peoples used to call them the 'white man's flies.' They have been in the Americas for less than 200 years. That's not a very long time.
There's no question that there's been pressure on bee populations due to commercial beekeeping. Yet, the solutions only come when we work together, talk to each other about what we experience and look toward the future.
Honeybees have been around longer than alligators. There are at least 3 other times that honeybees have died off in droves. Each time, the bees have recreated themselves.
Responsible beekeepers, including commercial beekeepers, are working on survivor hives. Pointing the finger at one set of beekeepers or another is stupid. We are all in this together.
I agree with this beekeeping ideas here. It is very important to know on how to keep bees successfully. Thanks for sharing this topic here. Found more helpful for beginners in beekeeping.
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