What happens if the bees disappear. Bee Extinction: Causes and Consequences
Honey bees are the glue of an agricultural crop. About 30% of everything we eat requires pollination by insects, and the vast majority is produced by honey bees. Interestingly, the bees came from the Old World with the early European settlers. Native Americans called them "white man flies." None of the varieties of New World bees, wasps, hornets, bumblebees, "yellow flies" - none of them can compete with honey bees in terms of productivity and commercial value of their labor.
From the almond orchards of Central California, where billions of honey bees from all over America come to spring for pollination, to the blueberry fields of Maine, these insects enrich the American agricultural industry with $ 15 billion every year with their inconspicuous work. In June 2013, the Whole Foods chain store in Rhode Island, in order to draw attention to the “bee problem” and emphasize their importance, temporarily removed from its assortment all products that were somehow dependent on insects. Of the 453 positions, 237 disappeared, including apples, lemons, zucchini, pumpkins.
Around 2006, professional American beekeepers noticed something strange and sounded the alarm: their bees began to disappear in huge numbers. In the hives there were honeycombs, wax and honey, but not the insects themselves. As the number of messages from concerned beekeepers grew, scientists even came up with a special term - “the syndrome of the destruction of bee colonies”. Suddenly, the bees were in the spotlight of the media, the audience was fascinated by this mystical mystery of their disappearance.
Meanwhile, by 2013, a third of all colonies in the United States did not survive the winter: the bees either died or left their hives.
This is 42% more than the number of insect losses that beekeepers are accustomed to - it used to make up to 10-15% percent of the total amount.
What reduces the bee population?
Deadly pesticide
Of course, agricultural pesticides were called the “first suspect”. Most suspicion fell on systemic pesticides belonging to the group of neonicotinoids, which, apparently, act on insects even in the case of the use of the so-called "safe doses".
Harvard School of Public Health, a professor at Harvard University's Public Health Institute, Cheng Chen in 2014 published the results of his study on the effects of neonicotinoids on bees. Lou and his co-authors from the Worcester County Beekeeper Association examined the health status of 18 bee colonies located in three different locations in downtown Massachusetts from October 2012 to April 2013. At each site, the researchers divided six colonies into three groups: one imidacloprid was added to food, the other was clotianidin (both belong to the neonicotinoid group), and the third was left without pesticides.
While 12 pesticide-treated colonies in the current study had a mortality rate of 50%, scientists noted that in their earlier study in 2012, bees in pesticide-treated hives had a much higher mortality rate from the “Colony Destruction Syndrome” - 94%. This massive death of bees occurred during a particularly cold and long winter of 2010-2011 in central Massachusetts, as a result of which the authors of the study suggested that colder temperatures combined with neonicotinoids lead to high mortality rates among insects.
Lu continued his research in this area and shared several of his findings at a seminar at the Institute of Public Health on August 14, 2014. According to the scientist, in the case of neonicotinoids, there is a chain of consequences. First, beekeepers bring pesticides to bee families, feeding them high fructose corn syrup - this product is made from corn, which is processed with these pesticides. Neonicotinoids generally gained great popularity among farmers: they spray all crops and pickle all seeds of these crops, so contact is dangerous at any stage of plant growth and development. As a result, bees poisoned by pesticides lose their ability to fly in a straight line (beeline), fly into other people's colonies, leave the hives in the winter and demonstrate a number of other neurological deviations that lead to their death or disappearance.
In the presence of a tick
Immediately after the 2006 crisis, when scientists diagnosed with the syndrome of destruction of bee colonies or CCD (colony collapse disorder), a search began for its root cause.
Beeologics, an Israeli research company, has estimated that the mass extinction of bees is primarily due to acute viral paralysis, which mites of Varroa “reward” insects. This company proposed to induce RNA interference into the organisms of bees - a kind of “intracellular police” that will be encoded to attack the proteins of these ticks. Thus, the varroa will be destroyed, but the bees themselves will not be affected.
Monsanto, one of the world's largest pesticide producers, on its official website names the solution to the problem of extinction of bees among the company's top priorities. However, American farmers do not trust Monsanto and the results of their experiments on the introduction of RNA interference: they believe that major players in the pesticide and GMO markets are just hiding behind environmental concerns. But in fact, Monsanto plans not to maintain a population of bees, but instead to create and introduce its own "robotic bees" that will be controlled by them and capable of performing all the same functions. In general, turn all the bees of the world into private property.
It's Complicated
So who is to blame for the situation? What kills bees - corporate pesticides or ticks? Pesticides are called the most likely cause. It is believed that if pesticides are removed, the number of dying bee colonies will decrease significantly. In 2014, the media massively picked up the results of the aforementioned Chen Shen Lu experiment, the results of which also allegedly confirm the only true version of this problem: the whole point is the detrimental effect of neonicotinoids on bee organisms. But the fact is that the scientist’s study was subjected to a flurry of criticism from other entomologists and beekeepers.
What is the problem with researching chenshen lu?
To begin with, he was denied publication of a number of serious American publications, so Lou had to publish a study in, to put it mildly, the unpopular Italian magazine The Bulletin of Insectology (the impact factor of this magazine in 2015 was 1,075).
“We found that neonicotinoids are more likely to be responsible for colony breakdown syndrome,” Lu concludes his study.
Something needs to be clarified. Neonicotinoids are a relatively new class of pesticides that are made from nicotine and actually affect the nervous system of insects. These pesticides usually treat the seeds of future plants. Neonicotinoids have become popular, because they are much more effective than old insecticides and less toxic to humans - they are widely used in growing crops such as corn, soy and rape.
For its experiment, Cheng Chen fed two-thirds of the bees with corn syrup, to which these pesticides were added. The remaining third was a “control group” that was not given neonicotinoids. We know about the results: 6 out of 12 colonies that took pesticides were destroyed. But at the same time, the rest of the entomologists who were aware of the experiment complained that Lu used a too large dosage of pesticides, incomparable with the amount that bees can get in real life. This amount is: 135 to a billion, while even Bayer, a pesticide-producing company, recognizes a figure of 50 to a billion deadly bees. And in the wild, when collecting nectar from plants, bees may even encounter pesticides of 5 to a billion.
At the same time, there are, of course, counterfeiters, and on the other hand, claiming that pesticides are completely harmless - and this whole “bee apocalypse” is actually a simple hyped media and grant-eater sensation. For example, this side has Henry I. Miller, a well-known medical researcher and journalist who writes articles for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He regularly publishes texts on the topic of the “bee apocalypse”, in which he mainly insists that this is all a myth, vanity unsupported by arguments, and so on. Moreover, already on the first page of Google, if you drive his name there, publications appear in the spirit of “Why You Can't Trust Henry I. Miller”, which consistently lists his previous achievements: tobacco lobby, denial of serious climate change, protection of pesticides and the plastic industry .
Who to believe?
On the one hand, we have Cheng Sheng, which feeds the bees an overestimated dose of pesticides,to prove their primary harm to insects. On the other hand, people like Henry I. Miller, who are urging panic to stop and not to worry about using neonicotinoids at all.
True, most likely, not on someone’s side, but, as usual, somewhere in the middle. There are studies showing that exposure to certain fungicides and pesticides (including neonicotinoids) can make bees more susceptible to infections. Meanwhile, other studies have shown that even low doses of neonicotinoids can affect the performance of bees, making it difficult for them to return to their native hives or the appearance of a queen bee.
Against this background, looks interesting, published in the journal Pest Management Science in 2012 by three leading researchers of honey bees in France, the UK and the USA. Its authors note that the period of mass extinction of bees (and the diagnosed “colony destruction syndrome”) is not necessarily associated with the use of pesticides.
For example, in California, bee colonies began to rapidly disappear in the mid-1990s, before the widespread spread of neonicotinoids.
And after the start of their use in this area, the reduction of bees decreased. A similar example is Australia, where neonicotinoids are also widely used, but bee colonies are not subject to mass extinction. Perhaps because the varroa tick is not common there.
In general, it is difficult to single out the only true reason. A combination of factors rather plays a role here. The deadly tick of Varroa probably killed many bees in the winter. A variety of viruses is most directly related to colony destruction syndrome. An important reason is also the poor nutrition of bees, which occurs due to the fact that open lands turn into areas cultivated by farmers where they plant crops. This deprives insects of a tangible percentage of nutrition, and pesticides in new plants, of course, can only exacerbate all these problems. In a word, the problem is complex, with many aspects.
This week, British beekeepers besieged Parliament and the residence of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, demanding increased allocations to deal with the terrible scourge - a continuing decline in the bee population. Over the past year, it has fallen by about a third.
The head of government was handed a petition with signatures of 140 thousand people, concerned about the misfortune that had befallen the country, CNN reports citing AP agency.
In the next 10 years, the UK, the document emphasizes, could completely lose its honey bee population if the government and interested organizations do nothing to protect these beneficial insects from diseases that affect them. Beekeeping in the country employs more than 40 thousand people. The situation in the UK is still better than in the United States. American beekeepers report annual deaths of 30 to 90% of swarms - differently in different states, writes sunhome.ru.
The British honeybee population is also threatened by the expected "arrival" from Europe of a tiny beehive that destroys the hive from the inside.
Lord Livesey, who participated in these hearings, noted that the problem of preserving the honey bee population is not limited to protecting these insects. Bees, he recalled, pollinate many crops, and without them there will be a serious threat to the entire agricultural sector of the British economy.
Bees are dying en masse across Europe
Bees have been dying en masse throughout Europe for several years. This can lead to the extinction of many plants: almost 80% of them pollinate the honey bee Apis mellifera and other wild bees.
Beekeepers are alarmed in the UK, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Poland and Ukraine.
Insecticides are capable of destroying the tick, but honey after such processing is not subject to sale: it may contain poison. German biologists propose the use of another protective agent - oxalic acid, which, if applied according to the method developed by them, destroys up to 95% of ticks.
However, the drug, created on the basis of oxalic acid, which is contained in spinach and rhubarb, can hardly be considered a panacea, because, in addition to the ill-fated tick, bees have another enemy - modern agriculture.
According to another version, the cause of mass death of bees in the United States and Europe may be radio signals from cellular networks. This conclusion was recently reached by scientists from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
German scientists for a long time have been studying the violation of the orientation of bees near power lines. In a new study, they concluded that the radiation of cell phones and transceivers violates the bee's orientation system, it cannot find its way back to the hive and dies.
Perhaps the reason for the mass death of bees in the last two years is the increase in the density of coverage of large areas of the USA and Europe with cellular networks. The coating density or signal strength could exceed some critical threshold, which led to disturbances in the orientation of the bees.
Dr. George Carlo, head of research conducted by the US government last year, called the findings of German scientists very convincing.
For its part, the Institute of beekeeping them. Prokopovich Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, we are sure that Ukrainian striped insects cannot die from the emission of mobile phones, as stated by American and German experts, concerned about the deaths of bees in the USA and Europe.
According to them, agronomists who use a certain French herbicide (most likely, we are talking about a drug with the active ingredient imidacloprid, which was banned in France in 2003 - NEWSru.com), which bees poison in pollination time. Scientists say that the situation may worsen, as rapeseed in Ukraine began to grow more, and accordingly to use herbicides more often.
In Russia, there is no general system for monitoring the health of bees
In Russia, the mass death of bees was recorded in the fall of 2007. Outwardly, a bee disease is practically not manifested in any way. But the beekeeper suddenly in one day discovers an almost empty hive, and the insects themselves disappear without a trace.
In Russia, unlike the United States and Europe, there is no common system for monitoring the health of bees. But both the Rosselkhoznadzor and the regional veterinary services confirm the sad statistics - in such quantities, the bees never died. But there are still no laboratory tests.
As previously noted, the head of the beekeeping department of the Russian State Agrarian University - Moscow Agricultural Academy named after K.A. Timiryazev, Professor Alfir Mannapov, you can’t sit back, since this initially “American” problem could very well become Russian if it is not given special significance now.
http://foto-zverey.ru/nasekomye/pchely/pchela4.jpg
Mass death of bees in recent years is recorded in different countries of the world. In Russia, according to the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, NRU Higher School of Economics, over the past 10 years, the bee population has declined by 40%.
In the United States, 90% of wild bees and about 80% of domesticated beehives have already died. In China, the situation with bees is catastrophic. About 80% of crops - all vegetables, fruits, berries, sunflowers and much more - bees pollinate.
“If the extinction of bees continues at the same rate, by 2035 the bees can become an endangered species,” scientists warn. Why do bees die out? What awaits humanity with the disappearance of bees? And is it possible to prevent this process?
The situation is commented on by the doctor of biological sciences, the head of the biology department of VolSU, Vadim Sagalaev:
Global warming or herbicides?
At the end of June, only in Kikvidzen district of the Volgograd region killed more than 1000 bee families, each of which numbered more than 120 thousand individuals. Beekeepers blame the airplanes for chemical aviation, which cultivated nearby fields with fertilizers. Those, of course, deny themselves and assure that they did everything according to the rules.
However, just a month before this incident, in the Mikhailovsky district of the Volgograd region there was also a case of mass death of bees after treating the fields with pesticides from the air. It is known that this happens in a number of other regions of Russia. In Europe, for several years one of the strongest poisons has been banned - all glyphosate-based herbicides used to control weeds, but poisonous fertilizers are increasingly used in our country.
Meanwhile, US scientist Paul Caradonna and his colleagues argue that bees can also die due to global warming. Like, they do not withstand climate change. And the beehives overheat in the sun, when in the summer months the temperatures are around 40 degrees Celsius, it leads to the death of bees.
"If temperatures on Earth rise as much as climatologists predict, then the bees will be on the verge of extinction due to the fact that they will end up in their physiological limits. The bees will completely disappear in the warmer regions of their habitat," RIA Novosti quotes the scientist Paula Caradonna.
So what caused the mass death of insects: global warming or poisons?
The global warming factor is in last place among the reasons that caused a massive reduction in the number of bees in the world, Vadim Alexandrovich Sagalaev is sure. - The main reason is environmental pollution. And, above all, fertilizers. The most dangerous for bees is the very specific pesticides used in growing GMO crops. Due to the spread of GMOs on the planet, bees are primarily affected.
But when they die out, we humans will suffer. However, this topic is under a great ban in the media. After all, GMOs are promoted by large multinational corporations that own big money. This is a billion dollar business. And you can allocate part of the corporation's budget to find "British scientists" who will explain the death of bees by other reasons, such as climatic ones. Not only are the bees dying out now - and this is a recorded fact on all continents of the Earth, the dynamics of the bee population is also observed ...
- What does it mean?
There are bees that live in beehives, and there are African bees. This bee species is very aggressive, they have strong poison. And somehow, maybe on a ship or with other vehicles, several years ago, African bees got to South America. And lately, there has been news that there have been cases: from the attacks of African bees, people die, livestock die.
And biologists note that these wild African bees are well established in South America, and are moving to the North. Already reached Guatemala. So they can reach the United States. Fortunately, we do not have African bees in Russia, our climate does not suit them. However, we have our own wild bees, and they are very important for the ecosystem.
They are the main pollinators of flowering plants: wild bees and bumblebees. You must have seen a wild bee: it is smaller in size than the bees in the hives, and does not leave a sting when, when defending itself, it injures a person. In Russia, wild bees hitting the environment hit hardest. Their number and number of species are declining. In the "dashing" 90s, when there was a crisis in Russia, and there was no money for fertilizers, they began to use much less. And nature literally perked up.
I observed a revitalization of nature and an increase in the number of bees and other insects with my own eyes in 1998-2000. Now look around for what is happening: right along the tracks, next to the fields are brightly colored barrels: green, red, blue - these are pesticides, fertilizers for the fields. And I must say, even though a bee is the main pollinator, in addition to bees, plants also pollinate butterflies, bumblebees and a number of other insects. But this chemistry kills them too!
We remain without fruits, berries and vegetables
If the bees disappear, then humanity will last no more than four years, Einstein warned. Whether this is so or the process can be slowed down, it’s hard to say now. But one does not have to be a genius to understand that the disappearance of bees will lead to a global environmental disaster.
Even in the greenhouse, in order for the cucumbers to appear, they specially breed bees, ”Vadim Sagalaev explains where the vegetables come from.
They say that in China, where they also faced the problem of extinction of bees, pollination is forced to be carried out manually. Workers every day during flowering bypass fields and shake off plants ...
Even though there is no shortage of people in China, it is simply physically impossible to manually pollinate all the plants. A bee carries pollen targeted: from a stamen to a pistil. Nobody can do this except insects.
In nature, one bee family pollinates about 3 hectares of culture. A bee increases crop productivity by 30 percent. But the chemical war that man started with fertilizers can ultimately turn humanity itself sideways: without bees there will be no fruits, no vegetables, no berries, not even flowers and flowering herbs. They will simply disappear from the face of the Earth after the bees, as thousands of species of animals and insects have already disappeared thanks to human activity.
The disappearance of bees, says Vadim Sagalaev, Doctor of Biological Sciences, will lead to a sharp decline in agricultural productivity, and ultimately to hunger. We are not starving now. But there is famine on the planet: in Africa, in parts of Asia. The disappearance of bees will make hunger on the planet our reality. You can stop the extinction of bees: you need to drastically reduce, prohibit the use of chemical fertilizers in the fields.
There are other, for example, biological methods of controlling pests that do not harm nature, scientists say. And you need to ban GMOs. There is more harm than good to these crops.
Pesticides that treat fields against weeds do not kill bees, but make them vulnerable to ticks. Well, scientists from Germany have a lot of evidence that the death of bees is affected by the radio signals of cellular networks. They violate the orientation system of the bees, and they cannot find their way home to the hive and die.
In countries where the greatest reduction in bees is recorded (USA, Canada, China, Australia, some European countries), genetically modified plants are massively grown. They, of course, do not pass bees. At the same time, the source of their genetic infection is not only pollen and nectar of GM plants, but also fertilizing from sugar produced from GM beets. When young bees consume GMOs, in adulthood, they have a destruction of internal organs and a decrease in immunity.
The world is changing - the bee is changing and disappearing. Now it is well known: compared with the United States, the situation with bees in the UK is better so far: in recent years, the bee population has declined by about a third. And the threat of the complete disappearance of the honey bee in this country is predicted in the coming decade.
Dead bees do not buzz ... Their mass death, about which the ecologists of a number of countries are already sounding the alarm, may lead to the extinction of many plants, including crops. Indeed, almost 80% of them are pollinated by honey bees. Therefore, great problems await humanity. Although attempts are made to somehow get out of this situation. Let's say “breeding ideas” are in the air. So, some scientists propose to develop a new species of bees that are resistant to any disease by crossing ordinary honey bees with aggressive African bees that have strong immunity.
Fiction writers meanwhile paint such a picture of saving the planet in the event of the disappearance of bees, people massively go to fields, meadows and conduct artificial pollination of plants. But where the bee flew, a person could not reach. For each has his own destiny. While there is time to stop the Great Chaos and Human Madness in relation to ecology. Even the bees, as we see, give an alarming "SOS!" About this.
MOSCOW, June 28 - RIA News. Overheating of hives due to global warming will cause mass death of bees on all continents in the coming years, environmentalists said in an article published in Functional Ecology magazine.
“If the temperatures on Earth rise as much as climatologists predict, then the bees will be on the verge of extinction due to the fact that they will end up in their physiological limits. The bees will completely disappear in the warmer regions of their habitat. A similar perspective is sobering and scaring us "Said Paul Caradonna of Northwestern University at Evanston.
In recent years, scientists have recorded a rapid decline in the number of domestic and wild bees on all continents, except Antarctica, where they do not exist. Over the past five to ten years, wild bee populations have declined by 25-30 percent, and the number of domesticated bees in the United States has halved in 2015 alone.
Approximately half of the bees in the US have died out over the past year, scientists say.Beekeeping in the United States lost about 44% of bees over the past year, which prompts scientists to talk about environmental disaster and the possibility of collapse of the entire bee population due to the Varroa tick epidemic.Caradonna and his colleagues tried to find out what role climate can play in all these processes. To do this, they carved several mini-beehives from wooden blocks and installed them in one of the arid mountain areas in the state of Arizona, where today the last colonies of wild osmium bees (Osmia ribifloris), the main pollinator of blueberries, are disappearing.
These insects, unlike domestic ones, lead a solitary lifestyle and are rarely found with other individuals. They build their nests inside stumps, snail shells, cracks in the rocks and in other natural secluded corners, where they create small reserves of food and lay eggs.
Environmentalists decided to check what would happen if the temperature inside such "incubators" rises or falls at a time when the larvae begin to grow. To do this, they painted a third of the hives in black, raising the temperature in them by several degrees, while others left colorless or covered with white paint.
These changes, the researchers found, greatly influenced the life of bees in the next two years. Insects living in black hives died out almost completely - 35 percent died in the first year, and more than 70 died in the second year. On the other hand, osmia living in regular or white hives continued to thrive and only one or two percent died before how they managed to continue the clan.
The reason for the mass death of bees, according to Caradonna, was the fact that because of the elevated temperatures inside the hive, the insects could not completely hibernate. Therefore, they quickly burned up stores of fat and woke up in the spring weakened.
While this phenomenon almost does not affect the life of bees in natural hives, however, the situation may become disastrous in the coming years, when the temperature of the "black" hive will be the norm for the whole planet.
Loading...