Bees?

[Calvary]

Yeah, bee hives. I have 20 bee hives. Any bee keepers here?

God bless,

Calvary

[lettheredeemedsayso]

I don't know anyone but what is being a beekeeper like? They are interesting to study.

[Tim]

My Grand Father (Dad's Dad) was a bee keeper. Everytime I would visit I would get to play with his hood and smoke thingy (that is the technical name ). but I never went near the hives. He sold honey to stores all over the county, at one time he had 30-40 hives.

[saved&serving]

:puzzled: I heard on the national news that 8 beekeepers across the US had been shocked to find that their bees were missing! There were no signs of escape or predators- and there were no bodies! They were just GONE! I thought this was very interesting! What do you think? :huh:

[Psalms18_28]

maybe they don't think winter is over yet?

[lettheredeemedsayso]

I saw something on the news the other night. It was saying that honey bees are dying off and the fruit trees are not getting polinated and may cause the orchards not to produce. They claim that global warming may be the culprit.

[kevinmiller]

ANYTHING strange that happens in nature nowadays is attributed to global warming. I'm kind of sick of hearing about personally. :loco

[IM4given]

Disappearing bees stump beekeepers

Saturday, April 7, 2007 12:54 PM CDT

By MIKE LEONARD
The (Bloomington) Herald-Times

Distributed by The Associated Press

The ramifications are so great that "colony collapse disorder" has moved from a concern among beekeepers to a wide swath of agricultural interests and, ultimately, the consumers of American-grown fruits and nuts and even beef.

The problem tests the wisdom and patience of the most experienced beekeepers and the most diligent scientists. Whole hives of bees are flying off in search of pollen and not returning, leaving beekeepers with a perplexing set of questions.

"This is totally new and no one knows what the cause is," said veteran beekeeper and retired Indiana University biologist George Hegeman. "The bees just disappear from the hive, leaving behind all of their stores, the nectar, the pollen and the baby bees.

"In the past, we've had problems but we've had dead bees," he said. "This is completely different. The bees just disappear. We don't know where they went or why they didn't come back."

Nationally, the impact of CCD could be staggering. Some statistics put the value of honeybee pollination of agricultural products at about $14 billion a year.

"They say every third bite of food you take requires a honeybee," said Tracy Hunter, a third-generation beekeeper from Morgan County. "It's not only the fruits and nuts we eat, but it goes down to the alfalfa and the clovers required to raise beef. Bees play a huge role in the pollination of the crops we depend upon."

"They're pollinators par excellence for agricultural crops," said an admiring Hegeman. "They're so interesting because they're flower-faithful. They start out on a field and they work one type of flower diligently."

In fact, honeybees long ago surpassed their value as honey- producers to take on the role as migrant pollinators, temporary workers and understudies to indigenous bee populations. As spring moves across the southern states to the northern ones, many beekeepers travel with the pollination season like carnival troupes, ensuring farmers that the bees will be on hand to pollinate their crops at what is often a short and critical time for optimal agricultural production.

"The people who really work the circuit go citrus in the south during January and February and then work up through Georgia for peaches and right through Indiana for apples and strawberries and up to Michigan for blueberries and cherries," Hegeman said.

The migrant crops, Hegeman and Hunter agree, are the ones most affected by CCD.

"We're not seeing it here," said Hunter, whose Hunter's Honey Farm encompasses about 50 hives annually, provides pollination services to several Indiana constituencies and produces honey varieties sold at retail locations throughout south-central Indiana.

Hunter said he took a hit during the winter of 2006-2007 but that's nothing new. "For the last 20 years, parasitic mites have been a problem here and we've seen losses on the average of 50 percent a year," he said.

"It's always something. This winter we had the cold snap and the hard ice, and that makes it tough for a colony to survive. They need to move around within the hive and cleanse themselves and they couldn't get out to feed on stored honey or take care of themselves. So they died."

Hunter believes that CCD may have something to do with the stress put on migratory bee populations. They're constantly relocated and it makes some sense that they'd have a hard time continually finding their way back to their hive and queen.

Hegeman said he thinks a pesticide aimed at bee predators such as mites might play a role in the problem.

"It's a nicotine-based pesticide that is primarily used in the areas where the most migrant pollinators are used -- which incidentally is where the greatest losses are being seen," he said. "It seems to make the bees disoriented and would account for them not finding their way back to the hives.

"That's all conjecture," he added. "I think once the real problem can be isolated, the resources are available to attack the source."

Hunter has already taken steps to replenish his depleted hives. A couple of weeks ago, he took several down to the Ohio River area, which is as much as 10 days ahead of the Bloomington-Martinsville area in favorable spring weather. He hopes to build his bee populations up to his normal levels.

Hunter hires out bees for numerous Indiana crops, beginning with apples later this month to pears, blueberries, strawberries, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes and pumpkins.

The Morgan County beekeeper and schoolteacher is a third-generation beekeeper, carrying on a family tradition started around 1910. "Beekeeping is not as easy as it used to be," he said.

"Beekeeping is a lot less fun than it was when I arrived in Bloomington in 1972," agreed Hegeman. "We've had to become more pesticide applicators and disease managers than I'd like."

That being said, the bottom line is this: Area beekeepers have weathered mites, bad weather and other problems but they haven't had to worry about the strange phenomenon of fly-away hives yet.

And in the meantime, they're using their honeybees to pollinate important crops and make honey -- for all of them, the proverbial icing-on-the-cake.

Hegeman pines for his favorite flavors of honey, all of which are dependent on optimal blooming seasons and the efficient isolation of bees. "Oh gosh, this is a wonderful area to keep bees. The honey from the black locust and tulip poplar and summer wildflowers make for some very interesting honeys.

"There's a lot of clover honey produced north of (U.S. 40) that's sold as clover honey that may well be soybean honey. It's all similar. It's mild and light and it's good. But we have so many more interesting honeys here."

One of Hunter's favorites is the apple blossom honey produced in the spring and then the more complex goldenrod and tulip poplar honeys that follow.

"My favorite is the black locust honey. We only get on average a good batch every seven years," he said. "It's so hard to isolate and everything has to happen just right. The black locust has to bloom at just the right time and nothing else can be blooming with it.

"When it's right you know why honey has been so valued over the years."

[Anon]

So Calvary, do you sell honey or just raise them for your family?

[777]

Whoa, I'm still freaking out over all those vanishing bees. Just weird.

I'm too allergic to wasp stings to want to go into the honeybee business, although I like honey. Everytime I think of this hobby, I think of Winnie the Poo.

[Chelle]

Here is an article about that very phenomenon (actually a link to three articles):

Are GM Crops Killing Honeybees?

Whether you agree with it or not, it's interesting reading. Whenever humans start playing around with DNA, the results are rarely positive.

[777]

Yeah, I do happen to know one local bee-keeper, he's observing the same thing - a drastic reduction in the bee population. He thinks the cause ofthatt IS the DNA manipulation, too. I told him that I'd heard it was cell phones. This still seems so weird:

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

http://news.independent.co.uk/environme ... 449968.ece

I really have no idea exactly what's going on here, looks like this is happening all over the world. Weird.

[Chelle]

Cell phones?!?!

Now that's funny! :haha

[777]

Celle, you are closer to Arkansas than I am, I think. Can you do something about this?:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - A swarm of bees clustered outside the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center shut down the emergency room Monday, as officials waited for a beekeeper to come vacuum up the 7,000 insects.
Although no one was stung, the Little Rock emergency room still decided to be closed for ambulance traffic.

"We'll take walk-ins, but ambulances are being diverted to other hospitals," UAMS spokeswoman Andrea Peel said.

Doctors did not see any patients with bee stings, but emergency room physician Dr. Delaney Kinchen said it was an important precaution to close the ER while clearing out the bees.

"I've been stung thousands of times and never had any problems, but I know people who've been stung twice and almost died," he said.

Beekeeper Harvey Johnston arrived Monday afternoon to remove the beehive.

"Somewhere around here was a beehive that got overcrowded," he said. "When bees get crowded, (the queen) leaves and takes a portion of the bees with her."

The emergency room reopened shortly after 2 p.m., Peel said.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

Don't they use cell phones in Little Rock?

[Calvary]

So Calvary, do you sell honey or just raise them for your family?

Sorry sister for the real late reply. :duh

It stared as a way to reach into a small rural community where we were beginning a mission work out of our church. We bought 3 hives to have a common point of ground.
Many families in that village are bee keepers.

We have sold some, give away lots, now we are 3 men who once a week go out to work the bees.

Right now here in Chetumal it is just starting the season for lots of honey production and we are storing it in big 200 liter drums.

We have noticed a huge increase in our hives and their populations, quite the contrary to what the news is reporting. Though we are concerned.

Bees are big time important to our food supply.

I was musing about the effect that the absence of bees could have on fulfilling the word of God like in verses in Rev where it says 1/3 of the plants, and stuff would be destroyed.

God bless,

Calvary