Solving The Mystery Of The Disappearing Honey Bee 02

  New pesticides are another possible explanation for Colony Collapse Disorder. A new class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids, have been found to be highly toxic to various insects, including bees. In fact, research has found that the level of the insecticide found in pollen has had a delirious effect on honeybees. A team of scientists led by the National Institute of Beekeeping in Bologna, Italy, found that polluted pollen may be one of the main causes of honeybee colony collapse. Bees fed with 500 or 1 000 ppb (parts per billion) of insecticide in sucrose solutions failed to return to the hive and disappeared altogether, while bees that had imbibed 100 ppb solutions were delayed by twenty four hours in their return. Signs of colony collapse disorder were first reported in the United States in 2004, the same year American beekeepers started importing bees from Australia. It has subsequently been discovered by Hebrew University researchers that these Australian bees were carrying a virus.

  The virus identified in the otherwise healthy Australian bees has been named Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) after the researchers responsible for the discovery. Although worker bees in Colony Collapse Disorder vanish, bees infected with the IAPV virus die close to the hive. Scientists used genetic analyses of bees collected over the past three years and found that IAPV was present in bees that had come from Colony Collapse Disorder bee hives 96 percent of the time. Scientific research continues concerning the disappearing honey bee and IAPV.According to the United States Department of Agriculture, "The number of managed honey bee colonies has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today. At the same time, the need for bee hives to supply pollination services has continued to climb.

  This means honey bee colonies are trucked farther and more often than ever before". Consider that the beekeeper of today, who is involved in crop pollination, must transport their bee colonies from one state to another several times each season. Therefore, tens of billions of bees are transported across the United States, in the backs of trucks, to pollinate crops every year. Researchers have suggested that this process is putting a high, abnormal level of stress on bees. This frequent change of hive location is known to stress and weaken bee colonies and it increases the threat of parasites and diseases among bees used in commercial pollination elsewhere in the country.It should be noted that nobody in the organic beekeeping world is reporting Colony Collapse Disorder as a problem.

  Most people think beekeeping is all natural, but in commercial operations the bees are used for pollinating profit without much government oversight. So, it may be safe to assume that the current process of commercial beekeeping for industrial agriculture may well be creating the conditions of stress necessary for CCD to occur. Mites, pesticides, virus, and stress are the four areas of primary focus among researchers trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing honey bee. It is fast becoming a scientific race against time to find a solution to a problem that threatens United States agriculture and the national and international food supply. Albert Einstein once predicted that if bees were to disappear, man would follow only a few years later. Indeed, researchers need to find a solution to this worldwide bee problem very soon to insure that his theory is not put to a test.