This is what we will lose if the bees disappear

[MoonRiver]

[JCMach1]

1. Talk to a bee keeper if you don't take this seriously yet!

[MoonRiver]

2. I know!

[JCMach1]

32. the local bee keeper who supplies my small business has lost 65-75% of his hives

in the last 4 years...

[MoonRiver]

38. So sad. :-(

[Liberal_in_LA]

13. TED talk about this.... bee expert asks us all to plant flowers

[TexasProgresive]

3. Some of those are native to the Americas

Honey bees were not native to the Americas, so how did the native plants get pollinated?
The following list are plants native to the Americas but not Europe:

agave
amaranth (as grain)
arrowroot
avocado
common beans (pinto, lima, kidney, etc.)
black raspberry
bell pepper
blueberry (not to be confused with bilberry, also called blueberry)
canistel
cashew
chia
chicle
chirimoya
chili peppers
cranberries (large cranberry, or bearberry species)
coca
cocoa
cotton (long-staple species)
custard apple
guava (common)
huckleberry
Jerusalem artichoke
jicama
maize (corn)
manioc (cassava, tapioca, yuca)
papaya
passionfruit
peanut
pecan
pineapple
potato
prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica)
pumpkin
quinoa
rubber
sapodilla
squash
strawberry (commercial varieties)
sugar-apple
sunflower
sweet potato
tobacco
tomato
vanilla
wild rice (Indian rice, not directly related to Asian rice)
yerba maté
yucca
zucchini (courgette)

[bhikkhu]

4. There are 4000 species of bees native to the Americas

http://bugguide.net/node/view/475348

[TexasProgresive]

5. Are those bees suffering from decline?

I am aware that there are bees native to the new world, such as bumble bees, carpenter bees and lots of solitary bees. I have not seen any reports that native bees are in decline.

Now I know that commercial bee keepers farm out their hives of honey bees to orchard growers to increase pollination and yield of fruit and the loss of the honey bee would be devastating to the fruit and nut growers but if the honey bee continued to decline would our native bees gain from the lowered competition and take up the slack?

[Uncle Joe]

6. That's sort of like playing Russian Roulette,

will the empty chambers take up the slack of the loaded one?

I don't believe it wise to gamble on such.

[bhikkhu]

7. Here is a partial list

http://www.xerces.org/pollinator-redlist/

The quick answer would be yes, they are suffering from decline. Possibly due to the same problems honeybees are facing. The more complicated answer is that we don't know very much about the problem; bees (and insects in general) are hardly kept track of at all.

[TexasProgresive]

9. Thanks for the link

I am not saying that honey bee decline is not a serious problem. It is something that we will have to deal with or perhaps mother nature is wanting us to shuffle off this mortal coil. In other words, a reboot.

[MyNameGoesHere]

14. Also not native to America-

350000000 people. I am sure the native bees did quite well when they only had a few hundred trees to pollinate.

[airplaneman]

8. An observation.

Canola is listed twice.

[caballojm]

10. Bees are hardly important

when it comes to protecting Monsanto's profit margin. Poisoning the planet is BIG business.

[MoonRiver]

21. Sadly so true.

[SDjack]

26. Monsanto first came for the birds, then the bees, and next ... nt

[MoonRiver]

28. I think we all know who's next!

[Throd]

11. Tequila

[Zorra]

12. After four decades of being a radical environmentalist,

I have come to this conclusion.

"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money"
~ Alanis Obomsawin

I'm pretty sure that the only way to save the bees is to stop global capitalism dead in its tracks and institute sane environmental policies worldwide. And even then, it might already be too late.

[chervilant]

27. No great loss...

Our species is proving to be grossly narcissistic and hedonistic. When Gaia rolls over to scrape us off her backside, we'll just have to go along for that ride.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. Robot bees...

Problem solved.

[NRaleighLiberal]

16. well, mostly true, but let the gardener speak!

Tomatoes, eggplant and peppers are perfect flowered - self pollinated as the flowers open. So bees are not necessary; in fact for seed savers, bees are a nuisance, since they create unwanted crosses. I believe beans and peas are perfect flowered as well.

Bees are essential when you need pollen brought from the male flower to the female flowers - most easily seen in squash, cukes and melons.

[laundry_queen]

17. I've noticed problems with

zucchini and cucumbers over the last few years. I've been trying to pollinate them myself. Finally this year I bought a self-pollinating hybrid for cukes and finally got enough cukes throughout the summer, but man, it's really sad it's come to that.

[NRaleighLiberal]

18. I know. We had lots of bees two years ago, far less last summer - and we have loads of bee

attracting flowers and herbs around...so sad.

[JDPriestly]

20. And avocados.

I cleared out all my wood sorrel one year. Our avocado harvest was sad. That's how I learned to protect some weeds for the bees.

[TexasProgresive]

22. Thanks for birnging that up

My point in my response to the OP was there was lack of information and as you wrote actual misinformation. I don't think it is intentional since not all people are knowledgeable in biology/horticulture.

The bee decline is a serious problem but it is important to have the facts correct so that others will learn how grave it is.

My advice is, "When discussion something, don't give out a mixture of correct and false facts because that will diminish or destroy your position." (Even though that seems to work for RWers we are not allowed such liberties.)

[JDPriestly]

19. Bees love weeds. Leave a few weeds in your garden, and you will have bees.

If you use chemicals to destroy weeds, I can't prove you will kill the bees, but I do know that you make your garden less hospitable to bees.

I grow lots of milkweed (partly for the butterflies that feed on it) as well as wood sorrel under my trees because they attract the bees that give me good food in my garden.

The best way to reduce the number of weeds in your garden is to just pull out or dig up those you really don't want. Leave the rest for the bees. They especially love yellow flowers.

[B Calm]

23. I have millions of bees on my apples that fall to the ground.

[Zorra]

30. Do the insects on your decaying apples look like this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_jacket

or like this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee

[B Calm]

34. They are not yellow jackets, but

they seem to be smaller than honey bees. They are larger than your normal sweat bee. I have seen hornets feasting on them too.

[JDPriestly]

31. The apples or the bees fall to the ground? If the bees, do you spray your apples?

We do not spray our avocado trees. Do you grow things like milkweed or other flowering plants?

[B Calm]

33. After the apples fall to the ground,

bees swarm in and and i guess are eating them. No I don't spray the apple trees, too big of trees.

[KittyWampus]

35. I think you are seeing yellow jackets. They're all over my apples too.

[B Calm]

36. I thought I knew what a yellow jacket looked like.

Last edited Sat Nov 2, 2013, 03:49 PM - Edit history (1)

I just got back from looking at them up close and looking at the link in an above post, they are yellow jackets! I don't know why, but I always thought yellow jackets were about the size of bumble bees.

[davidn3600]

24. Wasn't it Einstein that said once the bees are gone, humans will be extinct in 4 years?

Or something like that....

[MoonRiver]

25. That sounds correct.

That man had incredible insight!

[Paulie]

29. An article talking about research linking pesticides and immune system troubles in bees

The Italian researchers behind this current work previously analyzed an infection present in bees. But the concerns being raised about insecticides motivated them to look into whether there might be a connection between the two. Rather than focusing on bee mortality, they decided to look at the pathways that mediate immune responses in insects.

Bees lack that adaptive immune system that generates pathogen-specific antibodies and T cells in mammals. But they share an innate immune system, which is able to generally recognize infectious agents like bacteria. In fact, this innate immune system is evolutionarily ancient, as the same genes are used to control the response in animals as distantly related as bees and humans.

Previous toxicology work in mammals indicated that a specific class of insecticides, the neonicotinoids, could influence the activity of genes involved in the innate immune system. These genes were activated by the presence of neonicotinoids, and they shut down a key regulator of the innate immune system (a protein called NF-?b). Thus, the more of these insecticides, the less effective the innate immune system is likely to be—at least in mammals.

The researchers started by showing that the same is true in insects. Initially, they worked with everyone's favorite fruit fly, Drosophila, showing that the equivalent genes responded in the same ways in the flies. They then showed that the innate immune response isn't activated when these same flies are exposed to an infection. A different class of insecticide (an organophosphate) had a much weaker effect on the fly's innate immunity. With the molecular activity well characterized, they went on to demonstrate that the same effects could be seen in bees.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/an-insecticide-infection-connection-in-bee-colony-collapses/

[mike_c]

37. much of this is simply not true....

At least it's not true if we're talking about honey bees. All bees, maybe, but there are many thousands of bee species (and ironically, agribusiness dependence upon honey bees creates some of the greatest threats those native bee species face).

Few, if any of those plants coevolved with honey bees, i.e. they all evolved pollination partnerships with OTHER species, including other bees. Modern intensive agriculture has coopted the honey bee as the pollinator of choice because it enables large scale monoculture agriculture and allows growers to treat their surrounding pollinator habitat like crap. Honey bees are efficient, but NONE of those species the OP mentions are dependent upon honey bee pollination, except in the agricultural settings in which they are most often grown for maximum production and profit.

Declining honey bee populations-- if they actually occur and are prolonged-- will lead to some significant changes in agricultural practices. And they'll hurt agribusiness, including beekeeping and honey production, but none of the apocalyptic predictions currently popular in the fearmonger press will come to pass.