Have you been rooting for the honey bee? DoA has created a super bee to fight Colony Collapse Disorder (sound, support)

[mossomo]

The feel good story of the day.

For almost two years, the honeybees that support almost all human agriculture have fought a plague right out of a sci-fi movie. Varroa mites, a deadly parasite, have hid in the labyrinthine combs of beehives, feeding off the juices of still-living insects, and causing the the problem we know as Colony Collapse Disorder.

To combat the mite problem, the Agricultural Research Service took that natural hive cleaning instinct and bred it into overdrive. The newly bred bees show a increased aggression in their mite hunts, team up with each other to bite through the egg caps, and rooted out and eradicated the mites where ever they hid.

In a test of 40 hives, hives populated by the extra-vigilant bees showed a significantly lower rate of collapse than the regular hives. Even more interesting, hybrid hives containing bees breed to have a less active form of hunting than the fully modified bees also showed less mite-infection than the regular hives.

Breeding Super-Hygienic Bees to Take the Offensive in Colony Collapse Fight | Popular Science

[tcrackly]

Sometimes the answer is the simplest one. So-called hive collapse is largely from the environmental pollutants we expose them to. Can you say canary in the coal mine?

Salon.com Mobile - Pesticides indicted in bee deaths
Sierra Club Urges EPA to Protect Honey Bees from Toxic Pesticides
Busy bees enjoy urban Paris 'penthouses' at Grand Palais - The China Post
https://www.kitcomm.com/archive/index.php?t-15744.html

[forest beekeeper]

Many studies suggest that CCD has very little to do with mite load.

A bee's lungs filling with mites will cause that bee to die during winter. But that has no effect on why should the bee fly away and get lost [which is happening with CCD], unable to return to it's hive.

Mites are controlled with better comb spacing and organic peppermint.

Topbar hives are not having CCD issues either.

Breeding more aggressive bees sounds dangerous, especially when it is not focusing on the problem.

The 'answer' for producing wheat is not making GMO aggressive wheat, but in maintaining healthy productive soils. However our gubbermint is more about encouraging the manufacture of 'new' GMO foods.

[forest beekeeper]

There ar emany theories concerning why bees are dying: the effects of GMO, the effects of pesticides, the effects of traveling, mite-loads [and now with 2 entirely different types of mites], and the effects of microwave radiation.

Personally, IMHO, I think it has to do more with cell-phone repeater towers [ie, microwave radiation].

We know that migratory birds have iron molecules in their brains which give them a 'natural' sense of which way is North. They have this natural sense or ability to tell direction.

I do not think that it is un-likely that bees may have a similiar sense of direction.

If it is from an iron molecule, then it stands to reason that planting microwave repeater towers every 20 miles in a grid that covers our entire nation; just might have some small effect on their sense of direction.

When we are discussing CCD that is what is happening. Bees fly out foraging and they get lost. They simply do not return to their hive. IMHO their internal compass is fubar.

Granted many colonies also have 'issues' with mite-load, but that is not CCD that is mite load.

All bee colonies have mites.

It only becomes a concern when the level of mites gets high, and the beekeeper is faced with putting toxins into his hives to control the mite population, or trying any of the organic methods.

[bluepacific]

Originally Posted by forest beekeeper

There ar emany theories concerning why bees are dying: the effects of GMO, the effects of pesticides, the effects of traveling, mite-loads [and now with 2 entirely different types of mites], and the effects of microwave radiation.

Personally, IMHO, I think it has to do more with cell-phone repeater towers [ie, microwave radiation].

We know that migratory birds have iron molecules in their brains which give them a 'natural' sense of which way is North. They have this natural sense or ability to tell direction.

I do not think that it is un-likely that bees may have a similiar sense of direction.

If it is from an iron molecule, then it stands to reason that planting microwave repeater towers every 20 miles in a grid that covers our entire nation; just might have some small effect on their sense of direction.

When we are discussing CCD that is what is happening. Bees fly out foraging and they get lost. They simply do not return to their hive. IMHO their internal compass is fubar.

Granted many colonies also have 'issues' with mite-load, but that is not CCD that is mite load.

All bee colonies have mites.

It only becomes a concern when the level of mites gets high, and the beekeeper is faced with putting toxins into his hives to control the mite population, or trying any of the organic methods.

I've actually looked at some of the research that thus far has been done, and even several of the documentaries that have been released. It seems that rather than any type of mites, which of course could be a problem, the main issue when they did the autopseies on several of the bees from multpile areas around the world, it seems a type of cancer had spread in that all of their internal organs seemed to be nothing more than mush. No doubt another human cause.

From the early 1960s, the area of Rattlesnake Mtn in San Diego where I grew up always had 7 major wild bee colonies that lived and resided in the same hives in mostly rock outcroppings. The last time I actually saw them was in 2003, but they were'nt as many. The following year and a half later, they were totally gone. That was incredible because for decades these same colonies had survived and who knows how lng before that. This is clearly something of a major crisis and I hope they are able to solve it, but given the usual trail science goes down in these later days I'm not holding my breath.