CCD
gregladen | May 11, 2014Probably.
I want to start out by welcoming all you bee experts who think it is not the neonicotinoids, or that it is not so simple, to make your case in the comments. There is a great deal of controversy over what is causing bees to die off. That controversy even impinges on how we describe the thing we are talking about. Notice that I've not used the term "colony collapse disorder" because that is a term that may have been misused, or at least, that people who know stuff have noted has been used incorrectly thus mucking up the discussion.
Here's the thing. There is a bee crisis.…
milhayser | May 14, 2013Last week the European Union voted to ban neonicotinoid pesticides in an effort to fight colony collapse disorder among honeybees. Although research has clearly fingered these pesticides in bee behavioral problems, the ban is still rather speculative, as multiple environmental factors may be at play in CCD. Greg Laden writes "navigation over long distances, communicating with other bees about newly found hard to get and far away sources of food, mechanisms of controlling reproduction within the colony, thermoregulation of the hive, building and maintaining architecture," and other bee…
gregladen | May 6, 2013We recently discussed news from the EU on banning neonicotinoid pesticides in order to stem the so called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) among honey bees. Bug Girl has an important guest post on the phenomenon of CCD by bee expert Doug Yanega. This is a must read not only for those interested in bees and CCD, but skepticism and science reporting in general, as Yanega places the current discussion in a strong historical context and provides a valuable critique of much of the reporting on CCD. Go read Honey bees, CCD, and the Elephant in the Room.
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Photo Credit: wildxplorer via…
kcollins | May 27, 2011Bees represent some of the most resilient, adaptable and enterprising insects on earth. Not only that, they pollinate about one-third of all the food we eat. So when honey bees began dying or disappearing at alarming rates in the U.S. and around the world more than four years ago, scientists such as Nifty Fifty Speaker Dennis vanEngelsdorp, as the acting Pennsylvania state apiarist (beekeeper) and one of the nation's most prominent advocates and researchers of bees, was naturally deeply concerned. "Bees and other pollinators are a barometer and referendum on the state of our environment,"…
edyong | August 25, 2009Since late 2006, honeybees in Europe and North America have been mysteriously disappearing. Once abuzz with activity, hives suddenly turned into honeycombed Marie Celestes. They still had plentiful supplies of honey, pollen and youngsters but the adult workers vanished with no traces of their bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD). In the first winter when it struck, US hive populations crashed by 23% and in the next winter, they fell again by a further 36%.
Eager to avert the economic catastrophe that a bee-less world, scientists have been trying to find the…
edyong | August 23, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. There's been more work on CCD since, but I'm reposting this mainly because of some interesting follow-up research that will I will post about tomorrow.
In 2006, American and European beekeepers started noticing a strange and worrying trend - their bees were disappearing. Their hives, usually abuzz with activity, were emptying. There were no traces of the workers or their corpses either in or around the ghost hives, which still contained larvae and plentiful stores of food. It seemed that entire…
esiegel | March 24, 2008Cameras, CCDs, prisms, grisms, etc., are all some of the instruments that can go on top of telescopes to help us see things better. We haven't really increased the size of telescopes so much as we have the quality and ability of the apparatus that go atop them. Take a look at various pictures I've stolen off the web, all taken by (avid) amateur astronomers in different years. The pictures are of M81 and M82, two galaxies in a group that make up possibly the nearest cluster of galaxies outside of the local group. (The closest is either the M81 group, the Centaurus group, or the IC 342 group.)…