To bee or not to bee April 25, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Environment, News, Sustainable Living, bees.1 comment so far
The worldwide Bee Cluedo continues. Honeybees in their billions are mysteriously disappearing from Colorado to Guatemala and from Brazil to Germany. “Colony Collapse Disorder” or CCD is laying waste to commercial hives around the globe and so far, scientists are in the dark as to the causes.
The New York Times puts it thus:
As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.
“Rapture of the bees” - that’s really funny in a tragic sort of way…
At least the cellphone connection seems to be bogus. The researchers who were quoted by The Independent as having shown that radiation from mobile phones may mess with a bee’s sense of direction are trying to set the record straight:
- they were using cordless phones, which work completely differently and have very short range;
- their studies cannot indicate that electromagnetic radiation is a cause of CCD.
According to them,
Ever since The Independent wrote their article, for which they never called or wrote to us, none of us have been able to do any of our work because all our time has been spent in phone calls and e-mails trying to set things straight. This is a horror story for every researcher to have your study reduced to this.
Are cellphones killing honeybees? April 18, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Environment, News, Sustainable Living, bees.3 comments
The other day, I wrote about how genetically engineered crops have been suggested as a possible reason for the massive die-off of honeybees that has been documented around the world recently. I thought that was quite a scary scenario.
It seems, however, that scientists are pretty much in the dark about the actual cause of increased cases of Colony Collapse Disorder (a phenomenon that can occur naturally between late summer and early spring as older bees die, leaving behind the queen and a few immature workers incapable of sustaining their colony).
A new, small-scale German study now claims that “radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets” may be a possible answer to the mystery.
According to The Independent,
[...] a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: “I am convinced the possibility is real.”
while the Telegraph reports that
[t]he researchers placed cordless-phone docking units, which emit electromagnetic radiation, into bee hives.
[...]
In some cases, 70 per cent of bees exposed to radiation failed to find their way back to the hive after searching for pollen and nectar [...].
Until someone comes up with more conclusive evidence, I guess we shouldn’t get taken in by all of these rather speculative, but worrying, stories.
At the moment, this seems to be a case of Bee Cluedo - Dr. Monsanto in the apiary with a Motorola 3116.
Genetically engineered bee killer ? March 30, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Environment, News, Sustainable Living, bees, genetic engineering.3 comments
I came across this really worrying article in Spiegel Online (the virtual version of the reputable German lefty print magazine Der Spiegel) that I though was scary enough to warrant quoting at some length.
For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing [...] [I]n the United States, [...] bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.
[...]
Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, [...] reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that “a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar,” is killing the bees.
[...]
Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.
[...]
Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that’s left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found — neither in nor anywhere close to the hives.
[...]
In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi — a sign, experts say, that the insects’ immune system may have collapsed.
The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. “This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them”.
A massive dying off of bee colonies is obviously a real disaster, but what had me most worried was the possible connection with genetically engineered crops, especially BT corn, which is, of course, grown here in South Africa.
[...] [R]esearchers [at the University of Jena] examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called “Bt corn” on bees. [...] The study concluded that there was no evidence of a “toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations.” But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a “significantly stronger decline in the number of bees” occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.
According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have “altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry — or perhaps it was the other way around. We don’t know.”
I know one small study proves nothing and this sort of thing should not be used to whip people up into an irrational frenzy. This is, however, exactly the kind of scenario many anti-GE people warn us about.
What are the consequences of introducing artificially manufactured life forms (which we understand only to a limited degree) into an exceedingly intricate, but increasingly threatened and fragile natural environment (which we understand very poorly in its overall complexity)?
For all our sakes, let’s hope that the dying of the bees has nothing to do with genetically engineered crops, because if it does, this may only be the first sign of a much larger disaster.
