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The world faces a future with little meat and no cotton because of a catastrophic collapse in bee colonies, experts have warned. Many vital crops are dependent on pollination by honeybees, but latest figures show a third failed to survive the winter in the U.S.

More than three million colonies in America and billions of bees worldwide have died since 2006.

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Pesticides are believed to be a key cause of a crisis known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CDD), damaging bee health and making them more susceptible to disease. But scientists do not know for certain and are at a loss how to prevent the disaster. Other potential factors include bloodsucking parasites and infections.

Some experts believe bees are heading for extinction.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. fell by 34 per cent last winter, according to a survey by the country’s Agricultural Research Service, and some commercial beekeepers have reported losses of more than 60 per cent over a year. In Britain, the latest report into the fate of the estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies is expected this month after losses of up to a third in the last two winters.

Bees are a critical part of the food chain because flowering plants depend on insects for pollination and the honeybee is the most effective. {Bees} pollinate 90 commercial crops worldwide, including most fruit and vegetables – from apples to carrots – alfalfa for cattle feed, nuts, oil-seed rape and cotton. A world without honeybees would mean a largely meatless diet of rice and cereals, no cotton for textiles, no orchards or wildflowers and decimation among wild birds and animals in the bee food chain.

Bees are worth £26 billion to the global economy, and £200 million in Britain.

'Bees contribute to global food security and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster,' said Bernard Vallat of the World Organisation for Animal Health.

U.S. scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, increasing fears that pesticides are a key problem. The wipe-out of so many colonies has been dubbed ‘Marie Celeste’ syndrome because many hives have been found empty, with no sign of dead bees. The British government’s National Bee Unit denies the existence of CDD over here, blaming the bloodsucking varroa mite and rainy summers that have stopped bees foraging for food.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
But if a high-volume pesticide is at fault that would be a real problem, as Monsanto, Dow, Bayer or whoever is fault, would push back hard.

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oil-seed rape

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The pesticides aren't new

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Lord, there goes Johnny Appleseed
He might pass by in the hour of need
There's a lot of souls
Ain't drinking from no well; they're locked in a factory

Hey - look there goes
Hey - look there goes
If you're after getting the honey - hey
Then you don't go killing all the bees...

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Flying off

Diana Cox-Foster, professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University College of Agricultural Sciences, which received $150,000 from Häagen-Dazs, believes researchers have identified a major cause of CCD.

Her team has recently given the mite-transmitted Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) to healthy bee colonies and has seen rapid die-off??. As it is winter those tests took place in greenhouses so the researchers are waiting for the weather to improve to verify the results with bees in their normal environments.

The mysterious and unique aspect of CCD is that the bees are not being found dead near their colonies. They are flying off; just abandoning their life's work, leaving behind the queen and a few younger bees.

Professor Cox-Foster believes that there are other factors together with IAPV are the cause of CCD, such as other viruses, the use of chemicals near colonies and whether the bees are receiving enough nutrition.

To beekeepers pesticides are definitely part of the problem, says Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation. "A lot of beekeepers blame neonicotinoid insecticides. These are safer for humans and other mammals but they affect the neurological systems of bees. They don't kill the bees outright but they cause to act in ways different to the norm."

The beekeepers believe these insecticides, which in fact have been partially banned in France, weaken the immune system of the bees thereby allowing viruses such as IAPV to strike.

Beekeepers that have their hives in the forest or grasslands and not near cultivated crops are doing well, so there is anecdotal evidence that the pesticides and insecticides are part of the problem, said Fore.

Australia on the attack

But not everyone agrees that IAPV is a cause of CCD. Australian government scientists miffed that the Penn State team suggested in a paper published in Science that IAPV arrived in the US in imports of live bees from Australia pointed out in a follow-up letter that there were several CCD colonies free of IAPV and the "shivering phenotype", and the death of bees close to the hive associated with IAPV in Israel.

The assertion that IAPV came from Australian bees was also refuted by the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, which said that IAPV was found in the country back in 2002, two years before the importation of Australian bees was instituted to replenish colonies.

The Australians, which see their $5m a year live bee exporting industry endangered by such allegations, have demanded that Penn State withdraw its conclusions. They also point out that neither CCD nor large-scale, unexplained mortality events have occurred in the Australian bee industry.

The first description of IAPV came from Israel in 2002 and since then there have been die-outs of bees across the globe, some definitely attributable to the virus.

British beekeepers too are worried that CCD may come to these shores and they have called on the government to back a five-year, £8m research programme designed to save the insect.

Back in America all eyes are nowadays on California's almond trees, which represent a $2.5bn industry. The pink and white blossoms have started to appear and the concern is whether there are the tens of thousands bees needed to pollinate the crop.

"The almonds are in bloom right now in California and we are hearing there are some significant die-offs. It's worrisome," said professor Cox-Foster.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
if you have map data...

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
worker bees fly away when the pesticides described are supposed to paralyze (as I understand it).

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If a bee realises it is sick it will instinctively know to avoid the hive to protect it from the illness.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Anything that causes any disease or plague would cause CCD, even if it didn't kill everyone. Humans would not do this, but that bees would makes them the more evolved, more successful species.

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