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Absconding or CCD?

How can you tell if your bees absconded or disappeared due to colony collapse disorder? Many similarities exist between the two and it can be confusing.

When a colony absconds, the entire colony leaves the hive including all the workers and the queen. The bees usually take everything with them, including the stored honey, and leave only the empty combs behind.

Bees that abscond usually leave for one or more of the following reasons:

  • Lack of food
  • Lack of water
  • Overheating
  • Loud and continuous noise
  • Fires that cause prolonged exposure to smoke
  • Bad odors in the hive
  • Frequent disturbance
  • Invasion by predators such as yellowjackets, small hive beetles, Argentine ants, or wax moths
  • Parasites such as Varroa mites
  • Diseases such as American foul brood

Colony collapse disorder also results in a hive without bees, but the circumstances are different. Although we still don’t know the specific cause of CCD, a collapsed colony has specific characteristics.

  • Before a colony collapses it may contain much more brood than the small workforce can care for. In addition, the adult bees that are present are reluctant to take feed.
  • Once the colony disappears, it may leave behind both capped brood and the queen. The hive may be full of stored food as well—honey, uncured nectar, and pollen are all abandoned.
  • Then, after the collapse, a long period of time may elapse before the food stores and honeycombs are attacked by hive pests such as wax moths and small hive beetles.

Most of the time, especially in the spring, a new beekeeper is more likely to experience an absconding hive. A package of bees hived in brand new equipment may easily decide it would rather live somewhere else. Absconding also occurs frequently during a nectar dearth when food and water are scarce. In that case, the colony may decide to try its luck elsewhere.

However, when the bees disappear late in the year, when they leave lots of stores behind, when they leave brood behind, or when they seem to disappear without a trace, careful scrutiny is warranted. Yes, your particular bees may have absconded for some compelling reason and left some things behind. On the other hand, you should at least check for signs of CCD.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Rachel Carson Forum: opening remarks

 
Last night, I was honored to facilitate the 22nd Annual Rachel Carson Forum held at The Evergreen State College and hosted by the Masters of Environmental Science Association, MESA. The panel discussion was on the “Social, Political, and Ecological Implications of Pesticide Use in our Society Today.” Below are my opening remarks.

As a student back in the 1970s, I studied the biochemistry of pesticides. At that time, there was a clear demarcation between systemic and other types of pesticides. Systemics were used strictly for ornamental plants—those plants not eaten by humans or livestock. Yes, an animal could be stricken after consuming the plant, but for the most part, ornamental crops were small and covered little acreage.

But in the intervening years our government—through the actions of the EPA and USDA— has sanctioned the consumption of pesticides by humans. The old theory that you could wash it off is but a memory. By using systemic preparations or genetic manipulation, poisons are now incorporated into the very fabric of the foods we eat. When I see a bee pupa stricken with deformities or a worker bee shivering with convulsions, I always wonder when and where we will draw the line. Living things are, after all, more similar than different. I truly believe that where the honey bee goes mankind will follow.

These developments are not surprising in a system where safety testing is done by the companies who will gain from their approval . . . or in an economy where a company can buy out those who say inconvenient things. None of that has changed.

I also find it disturbing that our government has established no protocols for measuring metabolite toxicity, sub-lethal effects, and synergistic amplification of poisons. The popular press often refers to these chemical processes as if they were newly discovered evils—something we’ve never seen before—but in fact, Rachel Carson addressed all three of these issues by page 31 of Silent Spring.

Yes, the chemicals are different, the terminology is different, but the concepts are just the same. Rachel Carson laid out the facts for all of us to see. So why are we not paying attention? Haven’t we heard that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it?

In re-reading Silent Spring, I can’t help but single out her prophetic words about pollinators. “Man is more dependent on these wild pollinators than he usually realizes. Even the farmer himself seldom understands the value of wild bees and often participates in the very measures that rob him of their services.”

Now, fifty years later, after colony collapse disorder has devastated countless numbers of managed bees, we are suddenly asking what will happen if the honey bee dies out. Ironically, therein lies the beauty of colony collapse disorder: this devastating affliction has focused attention on pesticides like nothing else since Silent Spring. But we should have known . . . Rachel Carson told us this day was coming.

If we intend to turn the tide on the forever-expanding pesticide industry we must remember that education is job one. Armed with what you learn here tonight and a lawn chair, I invite you to spend some time in the gardening section of your local home improvement store. Sit a spell. Watch the pesticides fly out the door. You will be amazed at the trouble we’re in.

I commend MESA for selecting a topic so ironically on point fifty years after the publication of Silent Spring. Tonight, I want you to glean as much as possible from our distinguished panel, then pass it on to your friends and family. All of us—we humans as well as the birds, the bees, the fishes, and frogs—need all the help we can get.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Airtime for bees

Last night was great for TV bees. Quite by accident I stumbled across two pieces, one right after the other. The first, on Oregon Field Guide, was about the loss of the western bumble bee and how farmers are beginning to plant for wild pollinators to take over for the ravaged honey bee. Scott Black of the Xerces Society and an Oregon blueberry farmer are interviewed.

The second piece, on Quest, originally appeared in November 2011. “New research into disappearing bees” is about CCD, mites, and bee pathogens. Randy Oliver, Joseph DeRisi, Eric Mussen, and Michelle Flenniken chime in on these complex topics.

It’s hard to keep up with all the bee news these days so, if you haven’t seen these pieces, you’ll find them below. Each is between seven and eight minutes long.

First, from Oregon Field Guide:

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And, from, Quest:

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Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Beekeepers come and go

Recently a friend pointed out that the popularity of beekeeping ebbs and flows in a big way. The fluctuation is caused not by commercial beekeepers but by hobbyists and side-liners who tend to segue in and out of the hobby with the fad of the day. The previous big surge in beekeeping occurred in the 1970s after books like Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé focused attention on our food supply, and legislation such as the Endangered Species Act highlighted problems with our environment.

Today’s surge in beekeepers can be almost directly linked to colony collapse disorder. CCD focused attention not only on honey bees, but on native pollinators and other food supply issues such as pesticides and industrial farming. I say “almost” because other food and environmental imperatives pre-dated colony collapse disorder, among them outbreaks of e-coli 0157:H7, mad-cow disease, and salmonella in eggs.

Nevertheless I agree with my friend that the popularity of beekeeping will peak, then die off as some new environmental issue snares public attention. Her point (I think) was that I should be prepared to have something else to write about and perhaps what I’m doing here is all for naught.

However, I don’t see it that way. I think Colony Collapse Disorder—whether it actually exists or not—has done enormous good because it captured the public’s attention and focused it on creatures that have gone largely unnoticed. People who knew nothing about pollination or crop production became aware of the interplay between humans, bugs, and the food on our tables. Others learned that there was something to be treasured about stinging insects . . . that not all that buzzes should be banned . . . and that life as we know it depends on bees. How can that be bad?

Colony collapse disorder served as a wake-up call, a warning that things are not right in the world of industrial farming. A huge influx of hobby beekeepers will not, by themselves, save the honey bee—but a surge of public awareness might. Groups all over the country are pouring money into pollination research, bee breeding programs, pesticide inquiries, and alternative farming practices. This is the type of action that may ultimately solve—or at least ameliorate—the pollination problem facing us today and in the future.

As for me? I’ll always have something to write about.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Thoughts for a winter day.
Thoughts for a winter day.

Native bees should not be managed like farm animals

Talk of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) tends to bring out two groups of extremists—the group that believes the demise of honey bees will completely destroy our ecosystem and the group that says, “Good riddance, honey bees are not native anyway.”

It is true that honey bees are not native to the Americas. If all the honey bees died tomorrow we would still have an ecosystem. But the ecosystem we have at present is not native either. It is overflowing with introduced crops, ornamental plants, weeds, animals, and even introduced humans. Species have disappeared as well; many plants and animals have gone extinct without a trace. And if that isn’t enough, we’ve changed the composition of our water, our air, and our soil—we’ve even mucked with the climate.

So I don’t agree with either group of extremists. The western honey bee was brought here to pollinate introduced farm crops. As Alex Wild over at Myrmecos says, honey bees are farm animals and CCD is an agricultural problem. This is true.

On the flip side, however, removing honey bees will not restore our ecosystem; it will just leave us with a lot of crops without pollinators. There are many native pollinators that are probably up to the job—but none that can succeed with our present agricultural methods.

There is a lot of talk about finding a “replacement” for honey bees—of finding species that can be managed in large numbers to provide vast amounts of pollination service for our gigantic monoculture cropping system. This, I believe, is something to be wary of.

If we take a native species and try to breed it, manage it, medicate it, and RoundUp Ready it for agricultural service we may very well build into its genetics the same problems we are having with honey bees. We have weakened the honey bee by forcing it to work in these highly artificial agricultural environments, and we will weaken its replacement as well. Already, managed bumble bees have contracted diseases that have spread to wild populations, and managed alfalfa leafcutting bees have come down with diseases such as chalkbrood.

Instead of trying to convert our valuable native bee species into pollination machines, we need to fix our agricultural system so that crops can be pollinated by the large number of native bee species that are already in place and ready to work. If we try to raise native bees like farm animals, we will be setting ourselves up for failure all over again.

Rusty