where are the honey bees?

There are a lot of people who work very hard. I've been disabled for 20 years and couldn't hold a job flipping burgers but before I became too ill to work, wound up on Social Security Disability then dropped dead of a heart attack, I worked my ass off. I worked on those days when I wasn't so sick and in pain to get out of bed. I do my best to help my roommate with his business so I don't turn into a mushroom but I'm so frustrated to lack the strength to run up and down ladders as I could when I was in my 50's. Most of the guys I know who own their own service businesses are disabled in one way or another. They work when they can and like I did, find someone in better health to help with the business. There is a whole invisible workforce out there composed of the working disabled who receive no government help. I didn't want to receive any help from government programs but I became too ill to work. It's so frustrating to be unable to be completely self reliant as I once was and it's very difficult for me to depend on anyone else. I spent most of last May in the hospital after dropping dead of a heart attack and was sent home to die while receiving home hospice care. After 6 months, my nurse told me I was being dropped from hospice care because I wasn't dying fast enough. It's because I never gave up and I'm too ornery to give up and die. ^_^

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas
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Oh, yeah. I forgot. I like ice cream, cake, icing, cookies, candy, but I don't really like honey. Too sweet and esp. too sticky.

But I'm sure you'll enjoy your project, so that's good.

If nothing goes wrong, I'll post how many cherries I get this year, and if it's low, I'll try to stay home when it flowers next year (18 days after the peak of the cherries at the DC Cherry Blossom Festival, and about 40 miles north of it) and do them all myself. It's a little tree, half within reach and the other half 2 or 3 feet higher.

Reply to
micky

I'll look around for some small artists.

Reply to
micky

Relax, Micky. Adults? Here in AHR? Are you feeding me straight lines again?

It was a homage to a former English professor of mine, James Dickey. Some will remember him as the author who penned "Deliverance" but he also wrote about how farmboys will put their organs of generation in anything they can:

The Sheep Boy

Farm boys wild to couple With anything with soft-wooded trees With mounds of earth. . . .

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It's really a remarkable poem and 100% Dickey who was by all means larger than life. He wrote another interesting poem calling "Falling" based on an actual event. He had heard a stewardess had fallen out of a plane and wrote about what she might have been thinking on the long, long way down to her death (she undresses - which is a far more common reaction to hyper-stressful situations than people might think - a doctor friend says it's because when people have serious breathing troubles they feel that their clothes, particularly shirts, jackets, etc are too tight and keeping them from breathing - who knows for sure?)

I think that entomologists tag them with a little plastic numbered plaques and a dab of crazy glue. They might object to any award, though. (-:

Glad I could help. Be sure to let us know if it worked. I suspect from what I've read you'll still have cherries but not nearly as many as you might with a health population of bees. FWIW, I was outside working and I saw no shortage of big fat bumblebees working over the Roses of Charon. So it's not only the honeybees out there facilitating fruit tree sex. Soon, you too will be artificial inseminating cherries. Reminds me of an Ag Fair I once covered where this lovely young blonde that looked a lot like Tiger Wood's ex donned this super long plastic glove that looked like a clear opera glove, slicked it with goo and just rammed it right up a cow's rump. What was even more amazing was that the cow was so used to it, it didn't even twitch.

As for those poor honeybees - they get trucked all over the country, exposed to more and different threats than they ever would as a fixed colony. That's why I really suspect neonictinoids as the culprit. The EU ban will precede ours so if their colonies recover and ours are still in collapse we'll have our smoking gun.

Be thankful bee medical research isn't done like human research. The dead bees are scooped up, blended into a puree and the centrifuged out to find out what should be there, what's not, etc.

"Grandpa just died and they're putting him in the NIH cement mixer to see what was wrong with him."

Reply to
Robert Green

Toulouse-Lautrec has been dead for a long time. Good luck.

Reply to
rbowman

You must be a real genius to figure out what all the scientists working on the problem haven't be able to. If it were related to new pesticides used by farmers, then you'd expect to see colony collapse disorder in areas with lots of farming that uses those pesticides and not in similar areas with little or no farming and in areas where they don't use those new pesticides at all. AFAIK, there is no such correlation . As of now, no one knows that the cause is, if there is a single cause, if there are multiple causes, etc. Everything from pesticides, to viruses, and electromagnetic waves are on the list.

Reply to
trader_4

I would not be convinced that chemicals don't have something to do with c.c. More importantly, with bee hives being hauled around the country to pollenate commercial crops, I think they likely get disoriented/stressed. For commercial pollenating, they would likely encounter higher doses of chemicals. In nature, they build a hive and stay there, travelling to the yummiest pollen/nectar in the near area.

The last time I saw a lot of honey bees around was about 1970, when we had a yard full of clover....got my first bee sting then. In gardening in Florida, I would see one or two, now and then; very infrequently. Now, with a new home and newly installed flower/hedge beds, I began seeing a lot of them last year on my sedum plants; succulents with flat, fuzzy reddish or pink blooms. The odd thing about these is that they spend warm, daylight hours moving around on the plant; they don't seem to travel back and forth to a hive.

Reply to
Norminn

You're disgusting.

Reply to
micky

te:

Yes, but the problem with that is that it's also happening to native bees, bees in areas where they aren't near farming that's using the new pesticides that are possible suspects. And if it's older pesticides, then the folks who supplied hives to farmers for decades would have had dead bees for decades, being at ground zero. If it's pesticide, you'd expect those bees taken to farms to be heavily impacted, while native bees in remote areas would not be impacted at all. Yet it appears to be happening everywhere.

Reply to
trader_4

Google-groper trader_4 double-spaced and unnecessaryly full-quoted:

Are you sure, or are you simply extrapolating from news reports that stake-holders (bee keepers) are seeing declines, and you are just supposing the declines are also happening in urban areas, as reported by backyard gardeners or casual observers?

The bees that get trucked around to polinate cash crops *are* being heavily impacted.

Are there media reports where ecologists have measured bee populations "everywhere" - in all possible settings, or just the ones that matter to humans and are easily accessible?

Reply to
HomeGuy

I think think this sentence contradicts itself. If there are reports by backyard gardeners or casaual observers, he' s not "just supposing".

He might not have enough evidence to convince you but just supposing means no evidence at all.

And who else is going to report on cities?

Probably not -- you've set the bar incredibly high "everywhere... all possible settings" -- . but otoh, the problem with bees is at least 10 years old and lots of people are looking into it, full time even, not just industry employees (although there are several industries involved, not just pesticides but farmers and agricultural suppliers, and colleges in the farm belt (and the farm belt extends to 48 or 49 states) and most of Canada and also Mexico if they are having bee problems, and I'll bet they've checked a wide variety of settings and every possible cause they could think of. Yet they have no answer.

I know what you mean. The "news" is often driven by press releases by one corporation or one industry group, that only considers how it is affecting them. And the "news" often does no more reseach. Often not even on more controversial issues than this, where there is another side even with its own press release

Reply to
micky

On Wednesday, May 7, 2014 8:50:50 AM UTC-4, HomeGuy wrote :

Researchers have been all over this for years now. You think they haven't done one of the most obvious things? One of the first things you'd check is if it has correlation to areas where pesticide is being used and where it's not. It's impacting bees all over, which is why they can't figure out what the cause is. And it also suddenly popped up within a year or so, it's not been a long gradual decline. And it's happened occasionally with bees apparently going back 100+ years, and similarly they couldn't figure out a cause.

Reply to
trader_4

Exactly. Scientists aren't stupid. One of the first things they'd do is gather data on where it is happening and where it isn't, to what extent, etc. If there was a strong correlation to pesticides, a particular pesticide, etc, they would have found the cause. It's kind of hard for me to believe that pesticides suddenly caused this CCD phenomen to pop up. You would expect it to ramp up gradually over decades.

This is like AIDS in the early 80's. That disease sure behaved like a new pathogen, but you had some scientists postulating that it was from recreational drug use, immune systems collapsing from having had too many prior diseases, etc. and not a new virus. There are even some loons that deny HIV is the cause of AIDS today.

Reply to
trader_4

Several years ago, Florida started eradicating all honey bee hives on residential property or where they were bothersome because it was safe to assume almost all were Africanized. Hell, if it warms more up here in the midwest, then we can look forward to Africanized bees, fire ants and ? I'm not a doomsdayist, but I certainly have noticed the rarity of honey bees over the last 30 or so years.

Reply to
Norminn

Pesticides and herbicides could impact them in a few ways, either by direct chemical effect or by changing their food sources. With people so anxious to kill everything that crawls in their yard, I'd be hard to convince that chemicals don't have an impact.

AIDS didn't matter at all when it was a gay men's disease. When it hit the blood supply and started getting hemophiliac children, it began to matter. I still remember (I'm a nurse) the first patient with AIDS that I diagnosed myself because nobody would talk about it or write it in a medical record.....we weren't even using gloves all the time then, IIRC. But AIDS is a good example of one condition making sufferers subject to other conditions. Plain old stress in humans weakens the immunity systems.

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Reply to
Norminn

Here in NJ it was very sudden, maybe 5 years ago. Prior to that they were plentiful, then went to zero. The suddeness would strongly suggest to me that it's most likely some pathogen.

Reply to
trader_4

From the USDA's Ag. Research Service:

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While historical records seem to imply the CCD has occurred in the past, there's no way to determine the actual similarity to today's CCD problems because back then no one had ever even heard of DNA.

It reminds me a little of thalidomide, a drug whose ability to cause birth defects was strongly denied by 1,000's of doctors who had successfully prescribed it to pregnant women without incident. Eventually it turned out that the US, which had not approved the drug, had very few cases but countries that had approved had many.

That eventually led to the discovery that a certain dosage level taken at a critical time (I think 60th day) led to the formation of flippers instead of arms and legs. That's why I think the EU ban will either make or break the connection to neonicotinoids. If they experience far fewer CCD incidents after the ban, then we'll finally have a real smoking gun even if we still don't understand the mechanism.

I was surprised to see a report that implied that CCD might be related to cell and cordless phone use. The media came to that result based on a small German study that implied close-by radio signals can disrupt bee's direction-finding capabilities. Needless to say, it was quickly disproved since CCD occurs in places with virtually no EMI.

--

Bobby G.
Reply to
Robert Green

And I think you'll similarly find that CCD occurs in remote places with virtually no pesticides and for sure no imidacloprid.

Reply to
trader_4

clipped

In a place with no agriculture and no pesticide/herbicide use, there prolly isn't anyone there paying attention to honey bees ;o)

Reply to
Norminn

You think? Wow, conclusive evidence!

One beekeeper in AZ does professional killer bee removal. He then relocates the bees to the desert and sets up hives where the bees can pollinate natural desert plants. Results: a plentitude of organic honey and no CCD.

nb

Reply to
notbob

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