Are Bee Populations Recovering?

[Big Orange]

OK, this Summer I still saw a few healthy bees earlier this week doing their rounds and pollinating the flowers, even though in recent years there has been much talk about Colony Collapse, a phenomena that is said to be comparable to the shrinking ice caps. I guess the industrial scaled and run bee hives in North America had nothing to do with it. Bees are bred to produce as much honey as possible and with that heavily specialized breeding over decades leading to lack of genetic diversity (not unlike the fiasco with the Irish potato).

[General Zod]

Seeing a few bees here and there hardly seems to be a good sample size to judge whether or not they're properly recovering.

[Big Phil]

A friend of mine is a beekeeper, and his (anecdotal) comment on the bee decline is that it was just a bad few years and the problem was hyped out of proportion. As he put it, each year you can expect a certain proportion of your hives to die, even if you do everything right. In his opinion bees just had a bad few years due to overharvesting, competition for scarcer resources, (i.e., many commercial bee hives are trucked across the country to follow the best weather, and native bees were losing out on that competition), etc. I know too little about bees to judge his take on it, but it was a different take on the issue.

[avatarxprime]

I was actually reading a Times article on this a few weeks back, they said that cases of sudden hive collapse have been decreasing lately, but they wouldn't go so far as to say they are safe and in recovery just yet.

[Ted C]

I'm no expert, but I suspected that the problem was a combination of malnutrition (corn syrup being inferior to the honey robbed from the hives), stress (from being trucked around to pollinate crops), and opportunistic parasites/infections. If beekeepers have let up on some of the stress factors, the bees might well have started recovering.

[HamsterViking]

Recently I took my step son the the museum I loved to go to when I was a kid. He loved it too, but I was disappointed when I took him to the place where there's always been a thin glass beehive sticking out of the wall and you can watch all the bees in there. Instead of a beehive, there was an empty thin glass case and a poster about sudden hive collapse. Not long after that, we got a beehive in our apartment complex. The beehive has been poisoned more than once and the bees just won't die! I have no idea what to make of this all.

[KrauserKrauser]

Obviously due to the downturn in the economy, the museum had to up the bee's rent and the bee's defaulted and were promptly kicked out.

Luckily they have found a pleasant place to squat in your house and you get free honey!

Win! Win!

[Commander 598]

I have a beehive in a tree in my backyard and I suspect that there may be another a few miles away given how I've seen bees swarming all over blooming trees at someone else's place.

[montypython]

OK, this Summer I still saw a few healthy bees earlier this week doing their rounds and pollinating the flowers, even though in recent years there has been much talk about Colony Collapse, a phenomena that is said to be comparable to the shrinking ice caps. I guess the industrial scaled and run bee hives in North America had nothing to do with it. Bees are bred to produce as much honey as possible and with that heavily specialized breeding over decades leading to lack of genetic diversity (not unlike the fiasco with the Irish potato).

Colony collapse mainly affects European honey bees; African and Africanized bees as well as bumblebees for instance are healthy, so it may be more of an issue with environmental circumstances like commercial hives being moved around.

[Erik von Nein]

It's a combination of factors, honestly. I saw a talk about it a while back given by the head of the bee keeping department of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo at a biological society meeting. He mentioned that something they kept finding in bees dying from colony collapse were a large amount of fungus inside their stomachs, preventing them from absorbing nutrients. This was thought to be the primary cause of death, though stress from poor practices or parasites allowed infection to happen easier than normal. Treatment for the fungus has apparently met with some success.

As far as colony collapse being blown out of proportion, what was this based on? The talk given mentioned that bee queens were constantly needing to be trucked in from (primarily) Australia, since they weren't as heavily affected by it. Were colony collapse to get worse (which it isn't really getting better), professional bee keepers and almond farmers (almonds needing bees for fertilization) in California were considering using africanized honey bees in a few years, since they're almost impossible to kill and aren't affected by colony collapse. That they were even considering using them should be a sign of colony collapse's severity.

[Ted C]

I thought they would be using Asian honey bees rather than Africanized-European honey bees. The Asian bees aren't badly affected, either, and they're not nearly as aggressive.

[Eleas]

SciAm had an article on this, as I recall. While they noted the presence of a range of infections and various malaises, no single common cause could be isolated. The opinion of the authors was that whatever caused Colony Collapse was likely a combination of factors that caused a syndrome similar to HIV, weakening the bees and leaving them vulnerable to things that ordinarily wouldn't be able to hurt them. One of the things they pointed out was the dangers of plant monoculture; agricultural uniformity meant the bees would likely suffer a deficiency of certain nutrients.

[General Zod]

Recently I took my step son the the museum I loved to go to when I was a kid. He loved it too, but I was disappointed when I took him to the place where there's always been a thin glass beehive sticking out of the wall and you can watch all the bees in there. Instead of a beehive, there was an empty thin glass case and a poster about sudden hive collapse. Not long after that, we got a beehive in our apartment complex. The beehive has been poisoned more than once and the bees just won't die! I have no idea what to make of this all.

If the hive isn't taken down or otherwise destroyed after spraying it there's nothing to prevent the bees from moving back in since the poison will eventually dissipate. We had to deal with wasps nests a lot when I was growing up and we always physically destroyed the nests once they got sprayed/smoked.

[montypython]

I thought they would be using Asian honey bees rather than Africanized-European honey bees. The Asian bees aren't badly affected, either, and they're not nearly as aggressive.

The Brazilians have breeded Africanized honeybees to the point that they are more productive and less aggressive, so much so that they are now the dominant type of honeybee used there by beekeepers, so there is a good precedent.