Mailing list for the Person County Beekeepers Association, Roxboro, NC

[Randall Austin <s.randall.austin AT gmail.com>]

The actual PLOS-One article is a lot more informative but is far less colorful:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182

I love the enthusiastic embellishments of the writer of the Quartz article, including:

"the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow."
(Actually, there are more managed honey bee colonies in the US now than there have been in the past 20 years, but that fact messes up a great story!)

"Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. " (Actually, the issue isn't that there are so few bee colonies available [there are more than ever] it is that the almond orchard acreage is increasing at something like 80,000 acres every single year. With 2 colonies needed per acre, at this rate every hive in the Western Hemisphere will be needed to pollinate California almonds before long. That has absolutely nothing to do with bee health -- it is a pure agricultural economics issue.)

"The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. "
(Actually, what the paper says is, "All of the non-target pollen that we were able to identify to genus or species was from wildflowers, suggesting the honey bees were collecting significant amounts of pollen from weeds surrounding our focal fields." and "Interestingly, the two crops that saw high levels of pollen collection by honey bees are Old World crops that evolved with honey bees as natural pollinators. Crops native to the New World, where honey bees have been introduced, yielded little or no pollen in our samples." But it doesn't smush the two thoughts together into the irrelevant, confused statement in the Quartz article)

"When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae."
(Actually, the paper talks about statistical significance, which is nerdy mathematical concept related to sample size and the variation of values around the mean within a sample. It indicates that the means of two different groups may in fact be different from each other. It does not mean "oh my gosh! what a big difference! we're all going to die!" as the innocent reader may be led to believe. In fact the paper does not comment on the "agricultural significance" or "colony health significance" of the difference between the two groups.)

It's curious that the Quartz article failed to quote one of the more useful bits of the paper:
"two fungicides (chlorothalonil and pyraclostrobin), and two miticides used by beekeepers to control varroa infestation (amitraz and fluvalinate) had a pronounced effect on bees’ ability to withstand parasite infection."
This complements what other researchers have recently suggested, i.e. that treatment with Fumigilin to control nosema may actually make it worse. Why doesn't the popular press ever mention that beekeepers are one of the biggest threats to bees?

There's more too. Enjoy!

Randall Austin

On 7/25/2013 5:41 PM, Amanda Blanks wrote:

08767C33-828A-4513-A008-FE3C1FB49F40 AT charter.net" type="cite">

http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/


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