Category: Pollinators

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Bee shortage? What bee shortage?

An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.

One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.

This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.

Continue reading “Bee shortage? What bee shortage?”

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Stamp on biodiversity

Bilde June 29 will be the day to buy this new set of pollinator stamps — if you are in the US. They celebrate National Pollinator Week, and I guess they were agreed far too long ago to feature hives emptied by Colony Collapse Disorder. I really like the symbolism of the design: “The designs are arranged in two alternate blocks that fit together like interlocking puzzles. In one block, the pollinators form a central starburst. In the other, the flowers are arranged in the center.” For details of the animals and flowers, see this news report.

We’ve recently had some other philatelic news, a set of eight postage stamps celebrating banana biodiversity, but whereas I can simply steal the US image from its source, the banana ones need some work. While I’m about it, I thought it would be fun to make a digital stamp collection featuring agricultural biodiversity, and I found some corkers at the official sites for Slovenia, Botswana and elsewhere. But in order to do what I plan to do, I need lots of examples. Your mission: to send me links to stamps of agricultural biodiversity, wherever you may find them. Please.

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The best bee paper ever … for now

What’s Killing American Honey Bees? by Benjamin P. Oldroyd, an Australian entomologist, is without a doubt the best summary of the current state of play on Colony Collapse Disorder. I know I’m biased, being — gasp — a scientist, but Oldroyd’s paper is the bees’ knees. It has hypotheses (wot, no mobile phones?), facts, and interpretations. And one rather interesting conclusion. I’ll let Oldroyd explain:

Remarkably, honey bees maintain the temperature of their brood nest within ± 0.5 °C of 34.5 °C, despite major fluctuations in ambient temperature. If the brood is incubated a little outside this range, the resulting adults are normal physically, but show deficiencies in learning and memory. Workers reared at suboptimal temperatures tend to get lost in the field, and can’t perform communication dances effectively. Although entirely a hypothesis, I suspect that if colonies were unable to maintain optimal brood nest temperatures, CCD-like symptoms would be apparent.

… snip …

I suggest that another possible cause of CCD might simply be inadequate incubation of the brood. Thus any factor—infections, chronic exposure to insecticides, inadequate nutrition, migration in adult population, and inadequate regulation of brood temperature might cause CCD-like symptoms.

My hypothesis could be easily tested by removing brood from several colonies and incubating some of it at optimal temperature and some at suboptimal temperature. The brood would then be used to constitute new colonies in which some colonies comprise workers raised at low temperature and some comprise workers raised at optimal temperature. I predict that the colonies comprising workers reared at suboptimal temperature will show signs of CCD. Moreover, I would not be surprised if they showed higher levels of stress-related viral infections. These effects could act synergistically—more virus leads to shorter-lived, less efficient workers, that in turn leads to suboptimal temperature regulation, and more short-lived bees.

See, kids, that’s the way science is done. But really, go read the article. And if there’s anything in it you honestly don’t follow, ask.