Massale verdwijning van bijen in de Verenigde Staten

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Op zondag 15 april 2007 18:58 schreef JohnDope het volgende:
Goed nieuws, nu de wespen nog.

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Andere mogelijke oorzaken:


Overige straling

Zonneactiviteit

Klimaatverandering

GM gewassen

Insecticiden

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Op zondag 15 april 2007 21:16

Pfff, je zal maar een bij Burger zijn in deze tijden

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Pfff, je zal maar een bij zijn in deze tijden

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Op zondag 15 april 2007 22:41 schreef francorex het volgende:

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30 hornets vs 30.000 bees

Een beetje eng.

zeg nauw wie wil geen bijenleven... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpntAH50-AY

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Op zondag 15 april 2007 19:24 schreef Aasgier het volgende:
Zie ook: Het raadselachtige verdwijnen van de Bijen

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Op maandag 16 april 2007 15:15 schreef Double-Helix het volgende:
Nu nog de wespen

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Op zondag 15 april 2007 22:41 schreef francorex het volgende:

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30 hornets vs 30.000 bees

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Op maandag 16 april 2007 15:24 schreef buachaille het volgende:

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Dat er zomers toevallig eens één op je glaasje limonade gaat zitten lijkt me nog geen reden om die diertjes het graf in te wensen. Vergis je trouwens niet hoeveel ongedierte door de wespen wordt opgeruimd. Zonder de wespen zouden we weer een plaag hebben met andere vieze beestjes zoals slakken (die gaan dan weer niet in je limonade zitten maar ze zijn wel weer gek op bier).

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Op maandag 16 april 2007 15:31 schreef popolon het volgende:

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Stoer.

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Vanishing honeybees mystify scientists

Bron :
Reuters
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Go to work, come home. Go to work, come home. Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.

Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.

The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees also have been reported in Europe and Brazil.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.

If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.

Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service.

"They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming.

Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.

"It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.

Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder.

"What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said.

SMALL WORKERS IN A SUPERSIZE SOCIETY

The problem has prompted a congressional hearing, a report by the National Research Council and a National Pollinator Week set for June 24-30 in Washington, but so far no clear idea of what is causing it.

"The main hypotheses are based on the interpretation that the disappearances represent disruptions in orientation behavior and navigation," said May Berenbaum, an insect ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

There have been other fluctuations in the number of honeybees, going back to the 1880s, where there were "mysterious disappearances without bodies just as we're seeing now, but never at this magnitude," Berenbaum said in a telephone interview

In some cases, beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder, with some suffering even higher losses. One beekeeper alone lost 40,000 bees, Pettis said. Nationally, some 27 states have reported the disorder, with billions of bees simply gone.

Some beekeepers supplement their stocks with bees imported from Australia, said beekeeper Jeff Anderson, whose business keeps him and his bees traveling between Minnesota and California. Honeybee hives are rented out to growers to pollinate their crops, and beekeepers move around as the growing seasons change.

Honeybees are not the only pollinators whose numbers are dropping. Other animals that do this essential job -- non-honeybees, wasps, flies, beetles, birds and bats -- have decreasing populations as well. But honeybees are the big actors in commercial pollination efforts.

"One reason we're in this situation is this is a supersize society -- we tend to equate small with insignificant," Berenbaum said. "I'm sorry but that's not true in biology. You have to be small to get into the flower and deliver the pollen.

"Without that critical act, there's no fruit. And no technology has been invented that equals, much less surpasses, insect pollinators."

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Op maandag 23 april 2007 20:15 schreef Opzoutvaatje het volgende:
In een BNR-Radio item werden mobiele telefoons echt als belangrijkste oorzaak van het uitsterven genoemd. Gezien de noodzaak van bijen voor de gewassen zou dat betekenen dat we onze telefoontjes moeten wegdoen. Is dat uberhaupt wel mogelijk?

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Op maandag 23 april 2007 20:46 schreef Wojworshebn het volgende:
Afgelopen weekend stikte het in het bos van bijen. Dus niks om je druk over te maken. De beestjes hebben natuurlijk even een vakantie genomen.

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Op dinsdag 24 april 2007 11:49 schreef SSSsssSSS het volgende:

Het artikel doelt op Genitsch Gemodificeerde gewassen welke een afweerstof maken voor ziektes en plagen....Mischien dat de bijen dat meenemen naar het nest, vandaar dat er geen predatie optreedt na het verlaten van het nest.

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Op dinsdag 24 april 2007 11:56 schreef KroJo het volgende:

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onzin natuurlijk, omdat het een erg domme aanname is die zichzelf tegenspreekt ...

enerzijds nemen de bijen probleemloos die gewassen mee in hun korf waaraan ze sterven en daarna blijven andere bijen weg, kennelijk door de aanwezigheid van die gewassen ..

dat kàn natuurlijk rationeel gezien nooit, ofwel bijen kunnen merken dat er iets verkeerd is aan 'genetisch gemanipuleerde gewassen' (wat onwaarschijnlijk schijnt, omdat genetische manipulatie gewoon gebruik maakt van natuurlijk biologische eigenschappen die ook via kruising over te dragen zijn, enkel dat duurt een stuk trager, en duurt minstens tientallen generaties)..
maar in dat geval zouden die bijen nooit die nektar verzamelen; of bijen merken dat niet, maar dat zou onverklaarbaar maken waarom daarna de bijen opeens wél wegblijven.

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Op dinsdag 24 april 2007 14:22 schreef Vassili_Z het volgende:
ik denk niet dat het door de klimaatverandering komt, maar door insecticiden en straling.

Dit probleem is zeer, zeer ernstig. Ik hoop dat de heren politici dit probleem erkennen.
Eigenlijk denk ik dat hier niks aan gedaan zal worden in Amerika, de Bush-regering kennende en dat de staten afzonderlijk met oplossingen zullen moeten moeten.

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Op dinsdag 24 april 2007 15:43 schreef SSSsssSSS het volgende:

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Nouja deze beste man doet het wel al een tijdje. Het kan natuurlijk wel zo zijn dat als het laat in de winter nog warm is dat de bijen al eitjes gelegd hebben en als het dan ineens erg koud word dat ze dus dood vriezen. Beetje het verhaal van de beren uit hun winterslaap...

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Op dinsdag 24 april 2007 15:52 schreef Vassili_Z het volgende:

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Dat is wel naïef...

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Op woensdag 25 april 2007 10:02 schreef SSSsssSSS het volgende:

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En dat is omdat?

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Op woensdag 25 april 2007 11:15 schreef Vassili_Z het volgende:

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omdat het probleem veel gecompliceerder is
je lijkt wel zo'n tegenstander van dat de aarde teveel opwarmt met het argument als: mwoaaaa maakt niet uit, vroeger hadden we ook temperatuurschommelingen blablabla

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Op donderdag 26 april 2007 20:08 schreef Hallulama het volgende:
Reuters - 26 Apr 2007: Taiwan stung by millions of missing bees

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A fungus that caused widespread loss of honeybee colonies in Europe and Asia may be playing a crucial role in the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder that is wiping out bees across the United States, researchers in California said Wednesday.

The new findings represent the first solid evidence pointing to a potential cause of the disorder. But they are "highly preliminary" and from only a few hives in California's Merced County, said Joe DeRisi, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Other researchers said Wednesday that they, too, had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country -- as well as in some hives that have survived. Those researchers also have found two other fungi and a half-dozen viruses in the dead bees.

N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it is probably not the culprit ... but it may be one of the key players."

Cox-Foster was one of the organizers of a meeting in Washington this week at which about 60 bee researchers discussed Colony Collapse Disorder.

"We still haven't ruled out other factors, such as pesticides or inadequate food resources following a drought," she said.

Many researchers at the meeting in Washington widely dismissed a report that cell phone towers and radio waves may be to blame for the bees' disappearance. The theory has percolated throughout the Internet, despite repeated denunciations by bee researchers.

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A honey bee mite has been discovered at a bee farm in Manoa, Oahu, after abandoned hives from Makiki Heights were relocated to the property last week. Varroa mites were detected on bees in three of the abandoned hives on April 6 by the beekeeper and reported to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA). Samples of the mites have been sent to a mite specialist at a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratory on the mainland for confirmatory identification.

The varroa mite is considered one of the most serious honey bee pests and occurs almost worldwide. Hawaii had been one of the few places where the mite was not known to occur. It is not known at this time how the mites were introduced to Oahu. So far, surveys conducted on hives in the Tantalus, UH-Manoa and Makiki area have detected varying degrees of infestation of the mite. Surveys on commercial hives on the Big Island, where several of the state’s queen bee raising operations are located, have not detected the Varroa mite.

“This bee mite poses a major threat to Hawaii’s bee industry and to feral bee populations,” said Sandra Lee Kunimoto, Chairperson of the Hawaii Board of Agriculture. “Teams of HDOA staff have been working rapidly to determine the extent of the infestation and to establish containment and control plans.”

HDOA Plant Industry staff from three branches, including entomologists, plant quarantine inspectors, plant pest control specialists and pesticides specialists, have mobilized statewide and are working closely with the local bee industry and USDA officials.

“We are enlisting the help of all beekeepers, commercial and backyard hobbyists, to help us in assessing the extent of this infestation,” said Lyle Wong, administrator of HDOA’s Plant Industry Division. “HDOA officials will be visiting bee hives to conduct surveys and the cooperation of beekeepers is very crucial in possibly stopping the spread of the varroa mite.”

Entomologists and pest control specialists will survey all islands for the mites as soon as possible. The Plant Quarantine Branch is preparing a quarantine order preventing the interisland movement of bees and beekeeping equipment. In the meantime, beekeepers are being asked not to move bees interisland.

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Op vrijdag 27 april 2007 06:52 schreef Hallulama het volgende:
Mooi dat ze 't hebben gevonden, snel opruimen die handel en laat ze weer vrolijk zoemen

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Op vrijdag 27 april 2007 19:47 schreef Hallulama het volgende:
Ratenmanagement, weer een nieuw woord geleerd!

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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.

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Op woensdag 11 juni 2008 20:15 schreef OldJeller het volgende:
Die kleine beestjes zijn erg belangrijk.

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De bij is, na varkens en koeien, het belangrijkste dier in Nederland.

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Op maandag 16 april 2007 15:11 schreef buachaille het volgende:

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En lees dan vooral het citaat van Albert Einstein (niet de minste ) in de opening:
"Als er geen bijen meer op de aarde zijn, heeft de mens nog vier jaren te leven; geen bijen meer, geen bestuiving meer, geen planten meer, geen dieren meer, geen mensen meer..."

Albert Einstein

Beetje vreemd omdat ook onder andere insecten en dieren zorgen voor bestuiving maar wie ben ik om te twijfelen aan theorieën van Einstein

Heeft er iemand trouwens wel eens Koninginnegelei gegeten? Lekker!! Willem Alexander geeft het ook aan de kleine Ariane Wilhelmina heb ik uit onbetrouwbare bron vernomen.

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Op donderdag 12 juni 2008 11:42 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:

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Nu in zijn latere jaren begon die meneer toch een behoorlijk hoeveelheid onzin uit te kramen

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If the intent of propagating this quote is to get our attention, it's certainly been working. Did Einstein sagely foresee an environmental crisis we're only just now beginning to notice?

To answer that last question (without denying the importance of the honeybees), we have to consider the related question of "Did Einstein really say this?" First off, searches of Einstein's writings and speeches and public statements, as well as of (scholarly) compilations of Einstein quotations reveal nary a reference to the "four years" phrase or any other statement mentioning bees (save for a brief comparison between humans and colony insects such as ants and bees). The compiler of The New Quotable Einstein also found no Einsteinian source for this quote and lists it as "Probably Not by Einstein."

Secondly, even though Einstein died in 1955, assiduous searching of a variety of databases of historical printed material (e.g., books, newspapers, magazines) has so far failed to turn up any mention of this quote (attributed to Einstein or anyone else) antedating 1994, when it suddenly started popping up in newspaper articles reporting on a protest in Brussels staged by beekeepers:
A pamphlet distributed [in Brussels] by the National Union of French Apiculture quoted Albert Einstein. "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!"

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Op donderdag 12 juni 2008 11:42 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:

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Nu in zijn latere jaren begon die meneer toch een behoorlijk hoeveelheid onzin uit te kramen