Filed under: bees
By Ngoc Nguyen, Sacramento Bee, Jan 10.
Of the 2.4 million bee colonies in the United States, the almond crop in California alone requires more than half, according to federal farm officials. Amid this need, what’s called CCD – colony collapse disorder – has resulted in a loss of 50 percent to 90 percent of beehives in the United States.
At the forefront of everyone’s mind this week is the “health of bees,” said Jackie Park-Burris, a queen bee breeder from Palo Cedro and president of the California State Beekeepers Association.
The evidence today is pointing to the effects of a complex chain of factors: pesticides, viruses and fungi and parasites such as mites.
Filed under: bees
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, September 7.
Scientists yesterday identified a virus as one of the likely causes of the recent wave of honeybee colony collapses across the country.
The study, co-authored by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, Columbia University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several other institutions, suggests that the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) helps trigger the mysterious condition known as colony collapse disorder, which destroyed about 23 percent of U.S. beehives last winter. The paper is being published today in the journal Science.
Beekeepers, scientists and public officials have been searching for the cause of the disorder, which surfaced in 2004 and was formally recognized last year. Unlike other diseases that strike hives, the collapse disorder leaves a colony without most of its worker bees despite the presence of plentiful food, a queen and other adult bees. It has devastated an industry that produces honey and pollinates lucrative crops such as almonds, oranges and apples.
Filed under: bees
By Amy Ellis Nutt, Newhouse News Service
Bees are among the most sensitive and hardest-working creatures in nature.
A mysterious ailment, however, is causing the great pollinators to lose their way home. The disorder, called “colony collapse,” has resulted in the deaths of millions of honeybees worldwide and up to half of the 2.5 million colonies in the United States.
The chief suspect, say many scientists, is the most commonly used insecticide on the planet: imidacloprid.
Launched in 1994 by Bayer, the German health care and chemical company, imidacloprid is used to combat insects such as aphids that attack more than 140 crops, including fruits and vegetables, cotton, alfalfa and hops. Sold under various brand names, such as Admire, Advantage, Gaucho, Merit, Premise and Provado, imidacloprid also is manufactured for use on flowers, lawns, trees, golf courses and even pets in the form of flea collars.
read more (Newhouse News Service)
Filed under: bees
By Sharon Labchuk
