millions of bees dying., i think its global warming. Options

[pandamonium]

lol but the sad truth that millions of bees are mysteriously dying which mean a lot of our foods can suffer. here the article.

Honeybee Die-Off Threatens Food Supply
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

2 hours ago

BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies _ or about five times the normal winter losses _ because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.

"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.

"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse _ and we took it for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.

The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.

Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.

Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.

"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."

[EmoEyelinerx]

People need to do something about global warming.. were going to die if we keep up what we're doing.

[pandamonium]

its sad cause america only makes up 5 percent of the world as in people, and we make up 45 percent of the pollution.

[alysaphobia]

That... sucks.
It seems like now you constantly hear about animals on the brink of being wiped out or becoming extinct.

[*Podomaht*]

AMERIKKKA NUMBER 1!!!!!

[*My Cinderella.*]

When I first heard of this. I thought YES! no more bee stings. But when I found out Manhattan would die 4 years after the extinction of bees, my view changed. Without bees delivering pollen, where would we get our oxygen?

[Jeng]

Wow, I even saw a video on global warming in chem, and it was shocking to see what would eventually happen to us. Now bees? arghh, stupid global warming.

[Mystic Eyes]

When I first heard of this. I thought YES! no more bee stings. But when I found out Manhattan would die 4 years after the extinction of bees, my view changed. Without bees delivering pollen, where would we get our oxygen?

I was the same as well. I thought good riddance since it meant no more stings but actually on second thought it would be bad in soo many ways. I'd rather have the wasps die than bees.

[xannurrs]

Did you know bees pollinate $14billion dollars worth of our food?
1/3 of our diet is thanks to bees.
We're screwed

(I have to make a public service annoucement in one of my classes so I did this)

[cori-catastrophe]

my science teacher also told me about how bees are dying because of cell phones. i forgot how she worded it, but basicaly the cell phone signal(waves) are messing with them.

[*karmakiller*]

Eep. I don't like bees, but everything in the world serves a purpose.

[voguelove]

i heard that it was cell phones.

like, there were too many towers or something and the rays were killing them.

did you know, tht if a bee comes near you, you can take out your cell phone, and it will fly away? its because of the rays in the phone. or something like that,

[ThatMcFLYGirl]

i heard that it was cell phones.

like, there were too many towers or something and the rays were killing them.

did you know, tht if a bee comes near you, you can take out your cell phone, and it will fly away? its because of the rays in the phone. or something like that,

aww I rather get stung then kill it.
no wonder I don't see any bees near my highschool; everyone's constantly on their phone.
but like in middle school and stuff, where they didn't allow phones on campus, there's like a flock.

[RoyalSwagger]

global warming is scary

i had a marine bio class last year all about global warming. (the teacher was new and new nothing of the ocean). so we learned about global warming :)

[jonemakey]

I had a question, first take a look here:
[LINK REMOVED]

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[laxumaster8]

yea, i read about that...and that honey is a major part of our diet or something

[Detective]

I heard about this on the news a couple of days ago. But hopefully we could fix it because then a lot of things are going to get expensive because we rely on the bees.

[SenorClean]

yaeh when i was downtown there were some people who had quarintine suits on and were holding signs that said "the bees are dieing"
"Me = you"

[*steve330*]

lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll @ global warming.

The earth goes through it's own little cycle of temperature change. We're simply nearing the crest of the cycle. It was warmer during the medieval times than it is now.

When Mt. Pinatubo erupted it put out more emissions than we had SINCE the industrial revolution. Sure we're contributing, but we're not making it or breaking it. Global warming was even recently recalled as the term politicians loved using because they came upon the conclusion that the warming had stopped and that the temperatures were stabilizing. Now they call it climate change. Cuz it's a naturally occurring event.

I got more but I don't feel like putting it all here. If you want PM me and I'll send you a 7 page report.

[ipetpandas]

Bee's get lost by the cellphone waves, and they don't know there way back to the nest. so they eventually die. it's not the ray's that are killing them.. I don't think...

[xKatt]

Who gives a f**k about bees?

[Note]

Yeah. I hate bees. I hate honey. I'm greedy so I rather worry about global warming effecting Humans.

[*shotgunFUNERAL*]

thank you for giving us a story as long as the bible.

with that said, i'll reply based on the title. global warming is a joke. if it were anything big, we'd have done something more that put on a concert to warn us of the threats of global warming, rather than reaching out to actually do something. like steven said, the earth does it's own things. we are merely pawns being played by the earth. noone knows everything about the earth. sure, there is plenty of evidence that support this so called 'global warming', but there is also tons of evidence supporting the chicken and egg theory, but yet it still can't be proven one way or the other.

[*IVIike*]

thank sucks i like fruit

[lojay]

Who gives a f**k about bees?

Actually bees play a big part in the foods we eat; i.e. honey, fruits. Our fruits wouldn't be very sweet if it wasn't for pollination. So I would assume a lot of people actually do care about bees.


Anyway, I was talking to my aunt today and she brought up bees and how they now think that they are dying because of insecticides. So... maybe it isn't from global warming. Either way though, global warming or not, it is caused by humans.

[synthase]

aww, but I like broccoli!

[*MyMichelle*]

GLOBAL WARMING?!




Oh noes. We will all die.

[*steve330*]

GLOBAL WARMING!? WE DIDNT LISTEN

[*Mercy*]

Id rather have ahd the flys killed then the bees.