B.E.E. Heroes

Is the topic historically a problem? Why or why not?

 

Yes.

 

CCD has been around for a long time, but there isn't a lot of documentation until 1869. Beekeepers have always experienced big losses of their bees, but they didn’t know why.

 

 

When did the issue become a problem?

 

In their paper, Colony Collapse Disorder - Have we seen this before? by Robyn M. Underwood and Dennis Van Engelsdorp, they researched the history and found that it is similar to what beekeepers are seeing now. The earliest record they could find was from 1869, by an anonymous author.The report talked about the loss of bees which left behind hives with plenty of honey. It was speculated that the death was due to a lack of pollen, poisonous honey, or a hot summer.

 

The next reports they found described bee losses in Colorado in 1891 and 1896 where large numbers disappeared with queens in May, so they called it “May disease”. Investigations at the time identified various fungi with the hive collapses. A scientist was able to isolate, culture, and reproduce symptoms very similar to CCD with a strain of Aspergillus fungi.

 

In three epidemics between 1905 and 1919, 90% of the honey bee colonies on the Island of Wight in the United Kingdom died. Bees afflicted with a disorder could not fly, but crawled from the entrance. Researchers disagreed as to the cause.

 

In Australia in 1910, 59% of colonies were lost and many more were severely weakened. In his paper, Bee Mortality, in the Journal of the Department of Agriculture of Victoria, R. Beuhne concluded that honey made from Eucalyptus leucoxylon was too high in moisture, so they thought it fermented, and it  was not suitable for consumption by the bees. The author also mentioned that reliable accounts of severe losses from as far back as 1872 have been noted “at intervals of some years”

      Beuhne, R., 1910. Bee mortality. Journal of the Department of Agriculture of Victoria 7:149-151.

 

Huge losses were also reported in 1915 in Portland, Oregon and from Florida to California in that same year, but these losses were not well documented.

 

In 1917, widespread losses were reported in New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Canada. This time, an overabundance of pollen was blamed and bees were found dead in front of the hives.

 

15. Root, A.I., and E.R. Root, 1923. The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. The A. I. Root Company,Medina, Ohio. 959 pp.20. Tew, J.R., 2002.

 

Bee Culture’s beeyard: Disappearing disease - An urban myth? Is this adisease? How can you tell? Bee Culture .21. Carr, E.G., 1918.

 

An unusual disease of honey bees. Journal of Economic Entomology 11:347-351.

 

In the winter of 2006, a strange phenomenon fell upon honeybee hives across the country. Without a trace, millions of bees vanished from their hives. Since bees are an important pollinator of fruits and vegetables, the disappearing bees left billions of dollars of crops at risk and threatened our food supply. The epidemic set researchers scrambling to discover why honeybees were dying in record numbers — and to stop the epidemic in its tracks before it spread further.  That is when Scientists began looking at pesticides as the cause for CCD.

 

 

How has the problem changed over the years? Has it gotten worse? Improved?

 

In 2010, the USDA reported that data on overall honey bee losses for the year indicate an estimated 34% loss, which is statistically similar to losses reported in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In 2011, the loss was 30%. In 2012–2013, CCD was blamed for the loss of about half of the US honeybee hives, far more than the 33% losses observed on average over previous years. The latest data, from the 2012-2013 winter, indicate an average loss of 45.1% of hives across all U.S. beekeepers, up 78.2% from the previous winter, and a total loss of 31.1% of commercial hives, on par with the last six years. Most keepers now consider a 15% loss "acceptable."

 

History of Beekeeping

Nneonicotinoid insecticides might not be a direct cause because they are relatively new things. The first thing you need to realize when reading up on this subject is that humans have been keeping bees for a long time. About 15,000 years ago, some enterprising caveman discovered that bees stockpiled delicious honey and we began braving sheer cliffs and angry insects to collect this honey.

 

Later, another enterprising individual discovered that you could build boxes to keep bees in and by about 5,000 years ago the very basic foundations of modern beekeeping were laid out. If one of those ancient beekeepers were kidnapped by The Doctor and transported to a modern apairy, they probably wouldn’t be completely lost. The materials have changed, but the methods of beekeeping haven’t really changed all that much.

 

For as long as people have been keeping good records, they’ve recorded losses. One of the articles announcing the Colony Collapse problem appeared in PLOS Biology in 2007, and described these ancient losses in quite a bit of detail:Some winter losses are normal, and because the proportion of colonies dying varies enormously from year to year, it is difficult to say when a crisis is occurring and when losses are part of the normal continuum. What is clear is that about one year in ten, apiarists suffer unusually heavy colony losses. This has been going on for a long time. In Ireland, there was a “great mortality of bees” in 950, and again in 992 and 1443.

 

One of the most famous events was in the spring of 1906, when most beekeepers on the Isle of Wight (United Kingdom) lost all of their colonies.

 

American beekeepers also suffer heavy losses periodically. In 1903, in the Cache valley of Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to a mysterious “disappearing disease” following a “hard winter and cold spring”. More recently, there was an incident in 1995 in which Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53% of colonies. Often terms such as “disappearing disease” or “spring dwindling” are used to describe the syndrome in which large numbers of colonies die in spring due to a lack of adult bees.

 

However in 2007, some beekeepers experienced 80–100% losses. This is certainly the extreme end of a continuum, so perhaps there is indeed some new factor in play. Furthermore, the original USDA action plan reviews some other serious threats to beekeeping that happened at the same time. While worrying is a legitimate reaction, not everyone is convinced that this is a new phenomenon. It’s entirely possible that similar things have happened before. However, there are a few more confounding factors which prevent us from being able to say that the same problems are coming around again. There are new things around, like neonicotinoids and pyrethroids (specifically fluvalinate) which weren’t around then and could be contributing today. There are also other new things, like a shrinking environment, constant travel and increased global spread of disease organisms, which are probably contributing factors.

 

However, given the fact that similar things have happened in the past it’s unlikely that we’re dealing with a completely new phenomenon.

 

http://www.biofortified.org/2013/03/colony-collapse-disorder-an-introduction/