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jal_ut
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About Bees

This quote from another post that has been locked: "We still don't know for sure exactly what combination of influences is killing off the bees,"

I am a beekeeper also. It goes along well with gardening. At present there are 26 colonies of bees sitting on my lot out by the garden.

What is killing the bees? Well those darned mites can sure take a toll. Some diseases also come around. Sometimes when bees swarm if the beekeeper doesn't happen to see the swarm and capture it, they may move off and set up housekeeping in a tree or old building. These wild hives then get no help from the beekeeper to ward off disease and mites. So they become sick and weak. Well bees are also robbers, if there is a weak colony the strong ones will rob it out. Well there goes the sickness and mites back to the beekeepers strong hives.

I have also seen the airplanes fly to spray insecticides on the hay fields........ and go out and look at the beehives and there in front of the hives is the whole foraging force dead on the ground. 20,000 or so bees from each hive dead!

Often corn fields are sprayed to keep out the earworms. When the corn drops pollen, the bees work it for the pollen. Spray it when it is dropping pollen you will kill bees.

Anyone spraying insecticides on flowering plants is likely to be killing many bees.

Cold winter weather also is very hard on the bees. Many don't make winter.

OK there are some reasons why the bees are having a hard time.

imafan26
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Colony collapse disorder has been linked to many things
Long acting systemics like imodacloprid is one of them. If imodacloprid is used, the plant should not be allowed to flower the entire time it is active. Pyrethrins also kill bees short acting organic pyrethrins are non-specific and kill both the good and the bad bugs. Pyrethrins mixed with oil is not organic and lasts 30 days or more. It is what you find in bugs sprays for roaches and ants.

It does not help that some bee colonies die anyway even without disease or pests.
Queens can die:
from accidents. Usually from beekeepers opening hives
Queen cells can fail to mature
New Queen needs to go on a mating flight or she won't be let back into the hive. She has to mate with twenty or more drones. She can die in the process from predators
In the hive, if she starts to fail, her own hive will replace her.
Old queens leave with the swarm to start a new hive. Swarms take all of the honey they can with them since it may be days before they find a suitable new home. If the swarms end up in people's yards, the first thing they want to do is kill it or drive it away. Old queens are starved to make them skinny enough to fly and her wings are smaller so it is the scouts who have to find a new home. Old queens may not live very long after.

If a hive goes queenless for too long, a worker bee will start laying drones. Bees in the hive will be loyal to the worker who behaves like a queen and would kill any queen you try to introduce. A drone hive is a dying hive.

Weak hives are more susceptible to pests and disease making them even weaker until they die. Weak hives will also be robbed by other bees since they don't have enough bees to protect their honey stores.

In winter, bees live on the honey they have stored. Beekeepers usually have to feed their hives during long winters or they will starve. They get sugar water and polllen cakes.

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rainbowgardener
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Colony collapse disorder and the wholesale deaths of bees especially disappearances is relatively new. Therefore in looking for causes we have to look for a cause that is relatively new. There have always been mites. They are certainly part of the problem now, but that implies that the bees are newly vulnerable to them. The combination of stresses the bees are under weakens them and makes them more vulnerable to whatever pests or diseases are around.

Part of what has to be stressing and weakening the honeybees has to be the multitude of herbicides and pesticides they are exposed to.

"Krupke said DEET, which is an ingredient in mosquito repellent, was found in every pollen sample.

He found 29 pesticides in pollen from the meadow site, 29 pesticides in pollen from the treated cornfield, and 31 pesticides in pollen from the untreated cornfield (which had not been deliberately sprayed with anything!) The bees were collecting pollen from these sites. " https://wlfi.com/2016/05/31/alarming-num ... ee-pollen/

"The study is in line with a 2013 study, in which researchers analyzed pollen from bee hives in seven major crops and found 35 different pesticides along with high fungicide loads.5 Each sample contained, on average, nine different pesticides and fungicides.

When the pollen was fed to healthy bees, they had a significant decline in the ability to resist infection with the Nosema ceranae parasite, which has been implicated in bee deaths. In all likelihood, it's not one or two chemicals that are the problem but many."
https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/b ... -so-are-we

So it is very hard to isolate one pesticide that is causing the problem, when all the bees are exposed to so many of them and they probably have synergistic effects. Almost all the commonly used pesticides have some toxicity to bees, though some are worse than others. Pesticides that are listed as toxic to honeybees: Carbaryl (Sevin), malathion, trifluralin (Preen), all the neonicotinoid class pesticides, 2,4-D (Weed B Gone), permethrin and other pyrethroids, Raid (active ingredients allethrin and tetramethrin). And that is just of the ones I researched https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... 3&start=15

And of course bees are just the indicator species that we pay attention to because they are very important to us. Anything that is wiping out honeybees is probably also wiping out native bees, ladybugs, the parasitic wasps that help control a lot of pests, etc. etc.

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KitchenGardener
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My next door neighbor has bees and they have swarmed several times into my yard and that of another neighbor's. As a result, we all feel quite responsible for the bees, and would never do or use anything to harm them (by nature I'm all organic anyway). It makes me realize that exposure is a healthy thing, and that the more education about bees, the better for all of us. A few places have exhibits where you can see into the bees hive and see the combs and, if you're lucky, the queen. Those types of exhibits go a long way in having people understand their importance and, subsequently, the importance of proper care for them - I.e., no pesticides and fungicides.

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jal_ut
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Thank you all for your interesting contributions to this thread. Yes, the bees are very important to us as pollinators for our many
crops. Some have said, "Lose the bees, we won't be far behind!"

imafan26
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Habitat loss is another problem for all living things. Bees need a variety of flowering plants with nectar and pollen as well as a suitable home nearby. To help the bees and butterflies out, people need to preserve wild areas for habitat. Grow more nectar and pollen flowers that will provide food for the bees as long as possible or year round. Beware companies now are coming out with new seeds that are seedless and pollenless that are sterile like seedless sunflowers.

All pesticides are toxic and bees are easy to kill with almost anything. Even neem has been linked to CCD. One theory is that Neem sprayed on pollen is fed to larva and they may not be able to emerge. When in doubt, if you have to use anything, remove flowers and buds two days before spraying and keep disbudding until the active ingredients have dissipated.

Swarming season is April through August. If you see a swarm call a beekeeper first within a day and do not spray them. Most of the beekeeper organizations have lists of people who want to collect bees to start their own hives. If bees are sprayed or have already established themselves, it will cost a lot to get them removed.

Our winters are warm so our bees produce honey year round. The character of the honey changes with the season, but the garden has enough diversity of plants that there is some forage year round. In the winter months the bees are swarming on the basil a couple of times a day and we do have some plants that will flower late in the year. The rose garden has limited their spraying to mostly fungicides and they time their pruning so that the roses will bloom at the same time. So, it makes it easier to determine when to spray. We can get roses year round but the rose society replaces the roses every year.

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jal_ut
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I robbed the bees and spun the honey out some time back, but today was the day to render the cappings. I got a bunch of cupcake papers full of wax.

Image

The bees could smell that honey cookin and were all over it.

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jal_ut
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Make a bee board for the little wild bees. Drill 7/32 inch holes in a piece of 2x4 and hang it up out under the eaves of a shed. The little leaf cutter bees will come and raise their young in these holes.

Image

imafan26
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People don't realize that there are a lot of other pollinators out there besides the bees. There are a lot of other kinds of bees as well that pollinate but are solitary bees that live in the ground, in caves, or trees. They don't live as a colony and they don't make a lot of honey. Leaf cutter bees are good pollinators but they cut circles or arcs out of leaves and take the leaves back to their nest and live off the mold that grows when the leaf decomposes. Carpenter bees like to live near each other but they are more like condo dwellers, each bee has their own apartment. Sweat bees, squash bees, yellow faced bees, stingless bees, mason bees, bumble bees, and mining bees. Some are social, some solitary, others are specialists.

Besides bees, some flies, midges, ants, butterflies, moths, and beetles are also pollinators.

Almost half the produce on the shelves are dependent on pollinators to produce fruit.

Human activity is probably the biggest factor in the demise of many species including beneficial insects. Mainly through loss of habitat, monoculture, pesticides, pollution, development of "seedless/pollinless plants", and active destruction as people are unwilling to share the space and kill bees if they try to nest in their yard and kill beneficial insects with sprays. Some people see a bug and reach for an insect killer automatically. They will kill a bug just because it is "ugly" to them and they don't really care if they are good or bad.

It is probably a combination of stressors that are impacting the bees that cumulatively contribute to CCD. Insects like mites and hive beetles have been around but globalization helps to spread the bad guys around to "virgin" areas where they have no natural predators to control them. Varoa mites and hive beetles are relatively new to Hawaii and were not a problem prior to around 2010-2011. When the varoa mite first came in, it was noticeable within a short time that all of the bees had suddenly disappeared. With managed colonies, the numbers are returning but ultimately it will only be through captive hive management to control beetles and varoa mites in the long term. Our climate does not allow for winter kill of the pests.

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jal_ut
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imafan26, your climate there is definitely much different from what I have here in Utah. My home is at 5000 ft elevation and we can get some real cold winter weather. Temperatures down to minus 20 degrees at times. Yes, that kind of weather will kill off a lot of insect pests, and quite often kills all the honey bees too. It is a project to winter bees here even with careful preparation, they often don't make it. Many of the bigger beekeepers are migratory, they will take their bees to California for winter and back to Utah for summer. I can't really do that for my six, or so, colonies so I try to prep them and hope for the best. some years I will have good success and other years have lost them all. One just never knows. It depends a lot on what the weather does.

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jal_ut
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When its cold the bees cluster up close on the combs filled with honey and eat honey, and develop enough heat in the cluster to stay alive, but if it does not warm up every 4 or 5 days so they can move on to new honey, they will run out of honey in the cluster and die.

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applestar
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There used to be a farm beyond some woods and a community basketball court. There was a field past that, that was sometimes planted in corn, and the farm's buildings, etc. was somewhere beyond some more woods. I'm sure I used to get many more visiting honey bees before that farm was sold and turned into another residential development.

Another farm was sold down the back road from my development recently. So honeybees have become even rarer -- It's as much a discovery to see them in my garden as other wild pollinators and I make a special note of them when I see them ...and I did see one yesterday. :D

Jal_ut, I missed your post about those beeswax in cupcake liners -- nice! I bought a big bag of yellow beeswax like that (the one I got looks like tiny disks like melted wax was dripped in cold water to float up a drop at a time and harden then strained and dried?) a while back at one of the festivals, and I use the wax for various craft projects. I like the way this was sold because I can just scoop out as much as I need at a time, even small amounts.

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jal_ut
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Interesting about dripping hot wax into cold water. I might give that a whirl.

The bees do work the corn for pollen. When it flowers the bees will be all over it. Here in this area alfalfa is grown as a hay crop for animals. On the dry farm areas only a first crop is cut. The second crop doesn't get very tall because of the lack of water, so it will bloom and bloom, and the farmer does not cut it because it is so short, and the bees really work it for the honey.

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jal_ut
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You need to know the bees will visit all the flowers. Besides nectar, they also bring back pollen from the plants they visit. A little of the pollen will end up in the extracted honey. If the beekeeper does not run it through a fine filter to remove the pollen some of this pollen will remain in the bottled honey. Many people come to me looking for pure raw unfiltered honey as a remedy for hay fever ills. The theory is that by taking a spoonful of honey daily the body gets a mild dose of all these alergens and will develop an immunity to them.



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