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I noticed honey bees are already out this year looking for nectar. The one thing I have noticed here is that no one has flowering much of anything anymore. I had some flowering plants by the porch and had to move them because so many bees came. They got into our hummingbird nectar too. A couple years back, two people had hives in town and everyone was spraying their bees if they went into their yard so I think they moved out by the Amish in the country. I tend to think this can be turned around with a little effort.
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Originally Posted by zthatzmanz28
We definitely need more flowering plants, particularly in urban areas.
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Originally Posted by RememberMee
Have you been to agricultural rural areas recently? Finding something flowering there is a challenge unlike urban areas that provide some sort of habitat and food for insects. Super specialized mono agriculture is like a kiss of death.
Dunno where you guys are at, but plenty of flowering going on around here. I mean TONS of flowers.
My major problem is that I have a deathy allergy to bees, wasps, yellowjackets, hornets, etc... yet I still am an avid gardener. But to help fix that problem, I grow flowering vines on one corner of the property close enough to the garden, but still enough away that I am relatively safe when gardening.
Being that I learned my lesson, I dress like a bee keeper when I check on veggies and harvest, and always carry my epi-pen!
I would think there is a stronger link to GMO herbicidal crops--
Think MONARCH BUTTERFLY GENOCIDE when GMO corn was initially introduced,.
LOL!
you mean the one that i have demonstrated repeatedly was completely fictitious?
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There is no significant risk to monarch butterflies from environmental exposure to Bt corn, according to research conducted by a group of scientists coordinated by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), U.S. Department of Agriculture. This research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Bt Corn and Monarch Butterflies
I'll never forgive bees after being stung in my first week of kindergarten
Yeah but there are different kinds of bees. I hear you though, I've been stung and it hurts. I got stung in the mouth when I was about three. That was the worst one.
[quote=TexasHorseLady;3432747]Nope, not Africanized bees. Quite friendly little critters, really - been here for as long as we have (12 years now) and my husband only got stung once, just recently, when doing some brush clearing near their hive.
The Africanized bees ARE in Texas, but thusfar we'ev had no personal experience with them (knock on wood).[/
Where I live its quite common for a queen to leave the hive and take bees with them. We have quite a few bee keppers who provide removal services for free.Qite interestig to see them capture the quuen and see the others fill the box they use.
I think there are multiple factors in the declining bee populations and believe spraying, restricted food supply (species & season), and hive transport are the biggest contributors. Mites and disease outbreaks are extremely problematic, but transmission and exposure is made much worse when we transport hives from all over the country into concentrated areas and by forcing bees to forage over greater distances to find adequate food supplies because the flowering plants in their local area are either not abundant, of lower food quality, or are not flowering all season. Conventional farming tends to concentrate on a handful of plant species that flower once or twice during the season, rather than continuously across the season, combined with intensive weed controls that eliminate those flowers from the food supply as well (not to mention spraying and moving the hives around).
Interbreeding between European and African bees as the Africanized swarms move northward has been noted in many studies. While African bees are typically more aggressive than European/Western species, the newer hybrid generations seem to be calming down a bit. They are more prolific and hardy (in warm regions) than European/Western species, so there is hope that the new hybrids could replenish the waning bee numbers and increase genetic diversity. However, they are less tolerant to scarcity of food supply and will abandon the entire hive and move on if they run out of food; leading to more "feral" swarms and winter die-out if the swarm doesn't have enough time to collect enough food before winter.
They also tend to be more aggressive when the food supply is scarce. Africanized swarms and hives exist with minimal incident in areas with abundant food and water supplies; and stable pollination AND honey hives have been domesticated in areas where flowering of multiple species occurs continuously over the entire season rather than a single crop type once or twice a year. The bees appear to acclimate to their handlers and any livestock, etc in the area as long as the hives are not continuously disturbed and stressed. However, Africanized bees/hybrids DO NOT respond favorably to hive disturbance and transport (they attack & abscond)... so the mobile pollination beekeepers would be SOL. And I certainly wouldn't want to be an invader who riled the bees on that homestead
Unfortunately, our winters here in AK are too harsh for most European/Western bees so the Africanized hybrids definitely aren't an option for us. But I lived in TX when the swarms had just started moving in and we had a few feral hives in our area (back when they were even more aggressive than they are now). Yes, they were a little more aggressive than the local bees, but it just meant you had to be a little more careful and follow normal TX rules... don't put your hands where you can't see, don't mess with holes in the grown, don't swat at it until you know what it is, etc. If I could keep an Africanized hybrid hive up here, I wouldn't be afraid to do so if it helped increase/stabilize the local pollinator population.
nowhere does that paper even mention genetically modified crops, much less the still-unreleased 'terminator' technology
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I hear you though, I've been stung and it hurts. I got stung in the mouth when I was about three. That was the worst one.
