Bees
 

Don't know if you saw 60 min. tonite but pretty scary info about bees disappearing in mass quantities with no known reason. A 6 month old show but an update stated that the same thing is happening again this year. Beekeepers will be forced out of business and look for food prices to rise if a solution is not found. Very bad situation. I have noticed a continual drop in bees in the last 17 years of having fruit trees and small fruits. Every year seems to get worse, and I have a cranberry grower with bees a 1/4 mile away. I have gotten to rely on bumbles and Mason bees to do most of what little I get in pollination. Bees, as stated in the show, are a good barometer of the environment and we know what we do to the environment.:fishslap:

P., missed it, but i haven't seen any honeybees here for the last two summers. :(

I have a feeling with the use of herbicides to keep our perfect lawns free of white clover
and insecticides to kill anything on the lawn that crawls is part of the reason.

Last year they were talking about a virus that was killing them, but we in any event, will be screwed without cross pollination.

the hives just up the street
 

An 1/8 th MILE up the road...

they'll be going to Maine soon when the people sell their farm
which used to be the other half of mine....

did that show say that most of the Bee's and Bee products
come from china now?

i thought the area (over there) where they had used to much chemicals and then
had to do all the pollination themselves (since all bees were gone)
was the saddest thing i ever saw...
interesting but very sad ....

AFTER,,, i mowed some of my asparagus bed down last fall and they re-grew a stalk...
i was real happy to see actual honey bees gathering the asparagus pollen ...
the first bees i had seen in ages

i will be ordering a colony soon, as no pollination = no fruit

funny thing is...about clover is that it's biologically similar to potatoes
in the way that it makes these tiny potato like roots called nodules that are able to absorb free nitrogen right out of the air...therefore enriching the lawn with free fertilizer....and because of that fact -i'll be ordering clover seed and broadcast seeding it into my lawn....as its nicer to walk on then grass anyways...

Had it on but was busy so I couldn't pay attention but didn't it focus more on the bees getting lost and not finding their way back to the hives rather than the hives actually dying? They think that the hives have been dying from a virus while the lost bees may be from an insecticide. The ave. person doesn't realize how important bees are.

bees,bees, the musical fruit..:laugha:

I saw exactly one honeybee last summer. I was so shocked I had to look again to make sure I wasn't seeing things or mistaking a yellowjacket for one.

We still had quite a few bumblebees around the yard all season.

I also had a nest of bald faced hornets under one of my eaves, so that may have accounted for why I saw only that one---presumably lost--honeybee.

I'll BEE damned.
 

Only had peaches last year no apples on five trees. I think I am going to polinate them myself this year. I had plenty of honey bees show up though for the male pumpkin flowers that I let go to full unprotected bloom after I had used what male flowers I needed to polinate the female pumpkin plants I was growing. The only problem is the pumpkin flowers bloom after the fruit tree bloom has gone by.

I am going to take a q-tip or just another flower and make whoopee with all the flowers myself and see what happens. I have some really unique apple trees that I haven't been able to grow anything on so far. One tree comes from a tree planted in Maine in 1705, a Cox's Orange Pippin. I really need to eat one these apples.

No bees is bad. I had fruit on all of my five trees as long as I beat the squirrelsto it.

I think it is called Colony Colapse Disorder. Have a friend that alleges it started in Warwick, RI. I believe the PBS special refers to it starting with a colony in Australia or New Zeland. I never realized that trading bees around the globe was such big business..

I still have plenty of bees here on Cape. My wife plants flowers all along the house perimeter and we have a flower bed by the drive, always full.

What we will have in the next few months if the cicadas, been seventeen years since the last onslaught. I thought aliens had landed in the woods behind the house as the noise was eeire for days then they came by the millions. Cats loved them, nice and crunchy with chewy centers.

Steve you probably have cranberry growers near you that is why. An expert told me many years ago that there are no wild honeybees anywhere, anymore. Been whipped out by virus's and mites. Yes CCD. In a nutshell they said the bees are disappearing, not dying. virus's and mites have long been a problem with bees and antibiotics are applied in their feed to keep those problems in check. They think the disappearance problem is more from the new pesticides that we use nowadays for lawns and golf courses and such.There seems to be a chemical in them that effects the memory of the bees so they leave the hive and can't find their way back. Something that bees are famous for, their navigational skills. This pesticide makes insects forget to eat and thus they die. They seem to think the bees are forgetting also where they live. French bee keepers got the chemical all but banned in France. The beekeeper on the show raises like 80 million bees and trucks them from Calif. to Maine year round. He has lost half of his bees for the last 2 years in a row and had to borrow 1000's to re stock. Says he will be out of buisness if it happens again. Said he makes $100,000 a year doing it. The major crop producing CEO's of blueberries, almonds, oranges, pumpkins, etc... are calling him to see how things are going because with out his help they will not be able to supply the market place

Swimmer I too have a Cox orange pippin and have yet to eat one. The

Cox's Orange pippin is only one of several old scions I planted that were grown on Russian cultivars. I really am going to polinate myself this year. Hell I do great with the pumpkins polination I might as well do it for the apples as well.

Careful or you will start looking like this.

Corn is the crop hit hard without pollination as each string of silk is attached to a

potential kernel, and if its not pollinated the kernel will not develop.

Corn is pollinated airborne . . . not bees silly :tooth:

Saw the 60 minutes thing. Funny thing is, last summer a gang of bees converged on my kitchen window. They completely covered the bottom half of the window. I'm talking a swarm, thousands of bees. I thought they were going to build a hive right there. Then out of nowhere.... they were gone. Kinda creepy.

Ya know G2, you are right. :btu:

Ya keep me learning. :)

bees vs cell phones
 

very interesting

Channel 4 wbz news in one minute, about bees and cell phone

there has to be a way to "show and tell" the bees back to the hive visually with either magnets or colored foil making strings go north, south, east, and west that are color coordinated as an experiment

to see if this solves the problem long before cell phone companies change the electromagnetic signatures that are screwing up the bees ability to navigate.

this bees and cellphone link was linked in another study I read last year.

More towers more radiation less bees more cancer.

And the government made it illegal to sue a cellphone company for radiation damage. :smash:

was that georgy bushes government or Obama's government?

Short segment was on and an asian country is doing a study with bees and cell phones. There had seem to be a die off when cell phone was placed beside a hive for a month.

I use to raise bees, had thirty hives and use to rent some of them out to others around the city. Back in the late seventies it was a mite that was killing off the bees.

It is illegal to kill honey bees.

i had fifty hives out in California .....

this disease has kept me from re entering the ring....

My privets in Truro are loaded with the common honeybee right now as they blossom. They weren't there the last coupla years. There is another breed of honey bee that looks like a miniture bumble bee that was strangely absent last weekend. Your familiar huge bumblebee was present along with maybe 5-6 different butterflys. We'll see this coming weekend

that privet smell is something i never forget. Small bumble type bee could be a mason bee, pretty common around here, thank goodness.

privet...eh... i don't know it

very distinct. Makes me think of the Vineyard as a lot of the house's there have lots of it.

busy as a bee
some bumbles in my Japanese Snowbell tree and a honey bee in the asparagus