Tag: bees

Bees Are Behind Our Food And Natural Medicines – And They’re Disappearing

Bees are dying—and at an alarming rate.

Between 2023 and 2024, US beekeepers lost an estimated 55.1 percent of their colonies—the worst loss in more than a decade and nearly 15 percent higher than the previous 13-year average.

Bees pollinate three-quarters of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts we eat, and many of us rely on bee products for their nutrition and health-promoting gifts. If bees vanish, it’s scary to think of all we stand to lose. And some say that if the bees go, we go too.

Jeff Pettis, president of Apimondia—The International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations—sums up the health benefits that bees offer humans in one word: huge.

Although two-thirds of our diet comes from carbohydrates—crops like rice, wheat, and corn—which are pollinated by wind rather than insects, many other important foods require bees.

“So we’re not going to starve if we don’t have bees. But literally, everything you can think of that’s nutritious—fruits, nuts, and vegetables—all of those are, we’ll call it, animal-pollinated. The vast majority of those are pollinated by honey bees or other wild bees,” he told The Epoch Times.

Bees Pollinate

Ryan Burris is a third-generation beekeeper and the president of the California State Beekeepers Association. He points out that many people don’t realize how many fruits and vegetables we eat depend on bees for pollination.

“The biggest one, obviously, for beekeepers, is almonds. And then you have things like blueberries, watermelons, and stuff you don’t think about, like onions and carrots—all require pollination. There’s an estimated 100 crops that require pollination,” he told the Epoch Times.

Twenty thousand species of bees grace our planet, and 4000 species are native to the United States. Bees are some of our most well-known and beloved pollinators. One in every three bites of food you eat depends on pollinators to produce, and bees pollinate one in every four bites.

Beyond their critical role as pollinators, bees also gift us powerful products like honey, bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly—each packed with nutritional and medicinal benefits.

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USDA approves first ever vaccine for HONEYBEES – it makes them immune to a deadly bacteria that was only contained by burning the hive

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved the world’s first vaccine for honeybees to protect the endangered insects from a deadly disease caused by spore-forming bacteria, Paenibacillus larva.

The disease, known as American Foulbrood, was only contained by burning the colony and hive.

The vaccine is developed with killed whole-cell Paenibacillus larva bacteria that is mixed with food fed to the queen and passed on to her offspring, which will then be immune to the disease. 

The treatment has been approved under a conditional license, which is issued to meet an emergency condition.

And for the case of honeybees, these creatures are a critical component of agriculture – one-third of the global food supply relies on pollination.

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Honeybee Lifespan Could Be Half What It Was 50 Years Ago – New Study

A new paper shows how the lifespan of the adult honeybee appears to have shrunk by nearly 50% in the past 50 years. The European Red List for Bees suggests nearly one in ten species of wild bees are facing extinction. Imagine how we would react if human lifespans halved. The equivalent would be if the average woman in the UK was living to 41 instead of 82 years old.

Our future is intertwined with bees. Without bees and other pollinators, we cannot grow the majority of crops we depend on for food.

This research could help explain the high levels of bee colony deaths around the world over the past few decades. Bee deaths were particularly severe in the USA in the winter of 2006-7, when some commercial beekeepers lost 90% of their colonies.

Unexplained high rates of bee colony deaths have also been reported in Canada, Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Finland and Poland. In the cold winter of 2012-13, 29% of honeybee colonies in the UK died.

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EPA Refuses to Regulate Pesticide-Coated Seeds That Harm Pollinators

Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a legal petition by Center for Food Safety (CFS), Pesticide Action Network of North America and others, demanding that the agency fix its failure to regulate pesticide-coated seeds, which are known to be widely harming bees and other pollinators.

These crop seeds are coated with systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticides, and have devastating environmental effects.

CFS filed the rulemaking petition in 2017 that would close the loophole, but was forced to take take the agency to court when EPA failed to answer the petition as of late 2021.

Last week’s response is issued pursuant to a court-set deadline.

“We gave EPA a golden chance and a blueprint to fix a problem that has caused significant harm to people, bees, birds, and the environment — and it stubbornly refused,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety. “It’s extremely disappointing and we’ll be exploring all possible next steps to protect communities and the environment from the hazard of pesticide-coated seeds, including a lawsuit challenging this decision.”

Crops grown from pesticide-coated seeds, such as corn, soybean and sunflower seeds cover over 150 million acres of U.S. farmland each year.

Neonicotinoids are taken up into the plant’s circulatory system as the plant grows, permeating leaf, pollen, nectar and other plant tissues. Neonicotinoids affect the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death.

Sublethal impacts include impaired navigation and learning. As a result, beneficial insects, valuable pollinators and birds — including threatened and endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act — are killed or injured.

For songbirds, ingesting just one neonic-coated seed can cause serious harm or death.

Additionally, more than 80% of the pesticide coating can leave the seed, contaminating the air, soil and waterways of surrounding environments. Most notably, clouds of neonicotinoid-laced dust released during planting operations have caused mass die-offs of honeybees and wild native bees.

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Unusually High Bee Die-Off In Canada Will Impact The World

An unusually high honey bee die-off in Canada is going to impact the world’s farming system. Bees are necessary pollinators and help in all agricultural industries.

In 2020, the total estimated contribution from the Canadian honey and bee industry was between $4 to $5.5 billion. But over this past winter, beekeepers across the province are reporting major losses of up to 90 percent of their colonies, according to the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association.

“This is the worst that we have ever seen and I’ve been doing this for 50 years,” George Scott told CBC Hamilton. “In Niagara, we’ve lost thousands of colonies. Most of our operations here are so severely impaired that we are not going to provide pollination services this year,” he said.

“We believe, and we can document the loss in Canada of farmgate revenue of over $1 billion. So, that’s farmers who are not going to have that revenue because pollination is not going to happen.”

Eduard Unger owns B-Y’s Honey Farm at Niagara-on-the-Lake. He says he’s been a bee farmer all his life and the bee die-off this year is unprecedented. “It will have a big impact on the whole agriculture industry, like all the farmers. The grape farmers, the food farmers, the blueberry farmers, and everybody. They want bees from us, they’re calling on us for bees from far away and they cannot get bees. It has never been like that.”

Roy Allemann, president of the Golden Horseshoe Beekeepers’ Association of Greater Hamilton, Brant, and Halton Regions said agrees with Scott about the bee die-off. His losses were massive as well. “We’ve got another problem of really catastrophic proportions … We are looking at now a rather drastic combination of industries that are very, very common in Canada, and they are fungicides combining with insecticides.”

Allemann believes “an over-reliance on agricultural chemicals” is a significant contributor to an increase in bee deaths, especially in the last 10 years.

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Millions of bees that were transported on a Delta flight died in extreme heat after being left on the tarmac in Atlanta

Millions of bees bound for Alaska died on a Delta Air Lines flight after the plane was left on the tarmac in Atlanta, Georgia, following a diversion. 

Alaska Public Media (APM) reported on Wednesday that a Delta plane carrying a shipment of around 5 million bees bound for Anchorage, Alaska, was forced to reroute to Atlanta. Most of the bees died in the Georgia city.

The shipment of 200 crates, ordered by Sarah McElrea of Sarah’s Alaska Honey on behalf of 300 Alaskan beekeepers, carried 800 pounds of bees and was worth an estimated $48,000. 

The crates had been due to travel from Sacramento, California, to Anchorage Airport via Seattle, Washington. But the bees did not fit on the Seattle-bound flight and were instead rerouted through the Delta hub in Atlanta. 

Delta told McElrea the bees would have to wait in a cooler last Saturday but they were transferred to the tarmac the next day over fears the bees were escaping. McElrea told APM the temperature in Atlanta was 80 degrees Fahrenheit on the day they were left there.

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Study shows common insecticide is harmful in any amount

A new UC Riverside study shows that a type of insecticide made for commercial plant nurseries is harmful to a typical bee even when applied well below the label rate.

The study was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Chemically similar to nicotine, neonicotinoids are insecticides that protect against plant-consuming insects like aphids, but seriously harm beneficial insects, like bees. They are widely used by commercial growers.

Much research has focused on their use in food crops like canola, in which they are typically applied at low doses. However, this study is one of the few to examine neonicotinoid application in potted ornamental plants, which can represent more potent, acute sources of exposure to the toxin for bees.

“Neonicotinoids are often used on food crops as a seed treatment,” explained UCR entomologist and lead study author Jacob Cecala. “But they’re usually applied in higher amounts to ornamental plants for aesthetic reasons. The effects are deadly no matter how much the plants are watered.”

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Roundup causes high levels of mortality following contact exposure in bumble bees

Our results are the first to show that contact exposure to either consumer or agricultural Roundup® products at label recommended concentrations can cause high levels of mortality in bumble bees. The consumer product Roundup® Ready‐To‐Use caused 94% mortality at the pre‐mixed concentration, and still caused significant mortality at a quarter strength. The agricultural product Roundup® ProActive also caused significant mortality, although over a longer time period. Interestingly, Roundup® No Glyphosate caused 96% mortality while the generic GBH Weedol® did not significantly increase mortality. Together, this demonstrates that the co‐formulants in these Roundup® products, not the active ingredient glyphosate, are driving mortality. We suggest that the mechanism driving this mortality may be surfactants in the formulations blocking the tracheal system of the bees, which is essential for gas exchange. Given the hazard demonstrated here with all tested Roundup® products, and the extensive exposure of bees to such GBHs world‐wide, GBHs may pose a high risk to bees, and thus may be an as yet unidentified driver of the bee declines that are occurring around the globe.

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