Elaine Meinel Supkis
We keep bees. We have to protect them from bears and from infestations as well as extreme cold and violent storms. Domesticated bees are actually quite friendly unless unhappy. The British and Dutch studying bees are now certain populations are in decline and this is affecting flowering plants.
Thanks to pesticides and mite infestations, wild bee populations have plummetted.
BBC: Scientists report that the diversity of bees and the flowering plants they pollinate has declined in Britain and the Netherlands, a possible indicator of the problem worldwide. Other scientists worried about species extinction call for the formation of an international body to monitor such threats to biological diversity, similar to one that now tracks global warming.
When China opened trade with the west, the price of honey dropped. Like the collapse in value in our sheep flocks, the drop in price of honey hit our own production pretty hard. Since we keep bees many miles away from operations which use pesticides, we had the right to call our bee's honey, 'organic' in that it is pretty pure. It is nearly 100% wildflowers.
Just when the world price of honey fell, our bees were attacked by the mite infestation that is devastating bees worldwide. When it rains, it hurricanes.
The bees survive the summer but they die during the winter. We used to see wild bees all over the place and now there are none. And many domestic beekeepers have become too upset at the loss of hives to keep up their queens so there is a very noticable dearth of bees around here except for us.
For once, something nice happened. We had left out one hive after cleaning out the dead bees and it still had some honey inside when we noticed a swarm of bees trying to move in. We reset the hive and put the queen in the center. Since these wild bees moved in, they have been doing fine, they even survived the winter with no problem. Evolution works on all organisms if one creates a niche for them and bees are very ancient animals and they are evolving ways of dealing with mites, namely, they clean themselves more carefully.
They analyzed observations of bees and hoverflies recorded from 180 sites in Britain and the Netherlands before and after 1980. Kunin told Science magazine that they found local bee diversity had declined in both countries. The hoverfly trends were more variable. "But in both countries and in both groups, the tendency was for local communities of insects to become simpler, to have fewer species that dominated the collections. So about 30 percent fewer species would make up half the observations, again, in both countries and in both types of pollinators," he said.Not surprisingly, plant species reliant on the declining pollinators have themselves declined. Kunin says it is not clear whether the plants or the pollinators declined first, or whether they both responded to some other factor, such as pesticide use, changes in land use, or climate change. "A loss of pollinators in the U.K. and the Netherlands is not a global pollination crisis as some people have suggested. But I would be surprised if there aren't some similar patterns elsewhere," he said.
Flowers exist because bees evolved with them. One might actually say, bees domesticated wild plants so they can use them in several ways. All the parts of flowers evolved because of apian activities. Without the bees, the flowers no longer need to exist and they will disappear. Maybe some other creature will evolve with an eye for color and beautiful shapes but maybe not. This is why our destruction of the environment is stupid. Whether the planet was warm or cold, the bees continued their work. They have been at this for at least 60 million years or more. So this sudden decline is purely the fault of humans, I might suggest.
Who wants to live in a world with no bees, no flowers? The loss of joy would be most acute. Apes show little interest in beehives. They much prefer eating termites. Termites drill into wood and make mud houses. They are pale and bumpy looking and their homes are the same and they leave a mess behind.
Bees have black and yellow stripes which warns everyone they can sting but they leave behind fruits and flowers. Which makes for beautiful trees and honey which even the earliest humans wanted so badly, they were willing to endure the stings of outraged bees to gain those golden, sweet combs.
Our own bees are pretty paranoid about thieves, too, of course. When I use tools like shovels nearby, for example, in the garden below their hive, one or two guard bees will come over and buzz loudly at me. A bee's buzz is not very noticable if they are peaceful but when they want to warn someone away, they change the tilt of the wings and the speed of moving them to create a very noticable escalation in volume. When this happens, I set down the tool and look at the angry bee who scans my face. After a couple of minutes, the bee finally decides I am doing no harm and flies back to the hive.
Humans have domesticated bees for thousands of years. We have only recently decided to make life hell for them. When the mites first appeared, we used all sorts of powders and poisons to kill the mites but this only caused them to evolve into nastier and nastier incarnations.
I say, leave everyone alone. We just have to keep restoring hives, helping the queens and let the bees rapidly evolve to deal with this problem. They have in the past without our interference.
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