Pesticide usage causing decline in Bee Populations…
A friend of mine asked me to comment on this article regarding pesticide use being a primary cause of the decline of bees.
http://action.sumofus.org/a/home-depot-lowes-bees-neonicotinoids/11/2/?sub=fb
Here is my reply:
Well, I’m not too sure about this article. It doesn’t seem authoritative to me with no citations of the people and studies involved or any way to correlate it with the research its based on. It actually sounds more like an opinion piece meant to advertise something to me. The decline of bees in North America is primarily due to a thing called CCD…Colony Collapse Disorder. For decades scientists have been watching, studying, and inspecting dead and dying colonies for clues as to the origin of the problem. The best they have come up with thus far, to the best of my knowledge, is that its a mixture of elements including excess moisture inside of weak colonies (due to artificial hive layouts and unnatural forced cell sizes), population farming, pesticide and antibiotic usage (specific to bee populations to control other issues), and a yet to be identified fungal or bacterial process. Though it is true that pesticides sometimes negatively impact wild animal populations, bees included, there is presently no evidence that it is to blame for any significant decline in a local population. Winter is by far the largest killer of bees presently known. Plus the mention of 37 million bees dying isn’t really that apocalyptic as the article seems to indicate. Each and every hive, provided it is healthy with room to grow, should have anywhere between 90 and 200 thousand bees. It would not be unheard of to have a million bees at a single site with only 5 hives. That is easily in the management range of a normal backyard beekeeper. Hive population is controlled by the hive collective and responds to many factors that include hive health, the season, the availability of food, and if resources will support reproduction (a swarm). If it is a hard year (poor nectar and pollen flow) a colony may not swarm at all and many have died from starvation in a bad year. That is something that must be monitored by beekeepers to determine if intervention is required. Lastly, a huge problem with bees being tended to by beekeepers is honey stores. An over eager beekeeper will want every drop of honey he can get out of his bees. The problem is the bees need some of the honey too. What many commercial beekeepers do is strip all of the honey off of the hive and when the colony begins to starve he replaces it with sugar water. This is VERY unhealthy for a colony and is a huge reason we have weak bees. They honey they make is what they are meant to eat…not processed granulated sugar dissolved into water.