Apparently it’s not nice to poison Mother Nature:
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
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. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.
Here’s the actual study.
So now that we know what is happening, much like we know what is happening with climate change, what are we going to do about it?
Here is what will happen. The Koch brothers and their allies in the petrochemical industry will fund some new start-up organization to dismiss the science and defend fungicide use. The shitbirds at existing “think tanks” like the degenerates at the Competitive Enterprise Institute will pen op-ed after op-ed and all the right wing nutjobs will link to them. In no time, DeMint and the Heritage foundation will release their own studies “proving” that there is nothing wrong with bees and fungicide and Instapundit and Reason Magazine will “heh-indeed” the studies and link approvingly, and Nick Gillespie, the Fonzi of Freedom, will make a couple weepy youtube videos whining about all the excess regulations that might come down the road if we move too quickly. Because freedom, duh. Fox news will now grab the baton and run to the front of the pack telling us it is all a hoax, and within weeks it will be the received view among Republicans and “centrist” stooges in the Democratic party that not only do fungicides not hurt bees, but there is no such thing as a bee colony collapse.
The entire sick farce and eventual death of all the bee colonies will then be punctuated with Steve Doocy or Brian Kilmeade on the Fox morning show, grinning, and announcing to America “Of course the bees aren’t sick. I just stepped on one last week and let me tell you, he was healthy because the sting hurt for days.”
You’re welcome.
Walker
And I just got finished spraying my pear trees with fungicide. Leaf spot is a bitch in wet summers.
Zifnab25
Or we could all ignore it. Help of a lot cheaper if everyone just shuts up and pretends colony collapse isn’t happening.
dan
Cole, when you are good, you are very good.
Linda Featheringill
“I stepped on one last week . . ”
Actually, that bee was probably female. Drones are stay-at-homes.
One constructive thing that might happen from this study is that Europe will take steps to protect their bees.
El Cruzado
Not so sure. First, there’s money on the other side of the equation too (big Ag, mostly). Second, food security is a Big Deal and at some point the politics dictate that if the Koch’s tender feelings have to be hurt, they get hurt.
But of course that will happen after plenty of bullshit goes through.
Another Bot Splainer
I took beekeeping as an elective class many years ago. It was a fun class. I love bees and they are awesome creatures. But you are right no one will do anything about this. We’re screwed.
terraformer
Nice comparison with climate change. Much like banksters and politicians and the rich in general, BigAg will stop at nothing to keep that gravy train flowing.
We’re seeing our advancement as a race backfire on us. In the past few hundred years since the industrial revolution, both our numbers and knowledge has grown exponentially, but it has been a growth fueled by a fatal combination of political greed and lack of foresight.
What makes this especially tragic is that many of us – both on an individual and an institutional level – know very well what needs to be done about these problems to prevent global catastrophe, but we cannot enact change because power and vested interest rest in the hands of the few.
catclub
Wild bee populations are ( and were) very small compared to today’s commercial colonies. Think about the numbers of wild and domestic cattle as a comparison.
“The Beekeepers Dilemma”
talks about how the almond pollination season in California basically gathers all the bees in the country into one valley, so they can swap spit.
Mojotron
I’ve been discussing this for a while with other local beekeepers, especially after several of us lost our hives last year. Consensus seemed to be that it’s a perfect storm of conditions- 1) a massive increase in pesticide use by commercial farms as well as by typical homeowners (the problem with Monsanto’s GMO plants like “Roundup Ready” isn’t the plants themselves, but the fact that they can survive massive amounts pesticides and herbicides which get dispersed throughout the ecosystem) and 2) the introduction of varroa mites to the US in the 80s in conjunction with increasingly warming temperatures that they thrive in. Basically we’re poisoning the bees while improving the situation for their killers.
quannlace
Or they’ll giggle, ‘Hey, why can’t we just hand pollinate, like I do my squash plants? Problem solved”
catclub
@quannlace: They are doing that in China, already, due to bee loss.
dmbeaster
In another context, bees would just be described as collateral damage, and the whole enterprise justified in that manner.
Seanly
Good that scientists are studying this.
I have a co-worker who has a couple of hives. He got his hives from his dad in Montana and neither has had any collapse. My co-worker thinks that one overlooked aspect is that bees need a wide variety of plants with a wide variety of pollen-rich times of the year. The lack of diversity in the food, but especially the decreasing variation in pollen availability weaken the colonies.
His ideas made sense to me though I’m sure fungicide or other environmental issues just compound the problem.
Violet
Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit about us. She’ll manage things just fine, thank you very much. Now, if that means we’re expendable, so be it. All our concerns about bee colony collapse and global warming and so forth are concerns about how it affects us. But Mother Nature doesn’t need us around. If we’re so delicate we can’t survive in the new conditions that we had a hand in creating, well, too bad, so sad.
balconesfault
That is, until someone can come up with a marketable bee vaccine to prevent the parasite …
ranchandsyrup
Fuck it. Let’s go full idiocracy and start watering the subsidized crops with Gatorade because it has the electrolytes we need.
Just Some Fuckhead
We have to destroy the bees to save them. The bees will greet us as liberators.
Mj_Oregon
I don’t see anywhere near the number of honeybees I used to in my garden here in the Willamette valley. We’ve seen many grass seed farmers switch over to wheat in the past few years and a huge increase of crop spraying of fungicides as a result. Beyond that, the farms that still grow grass seed are also using an increasing amount of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides because field burning was banned completely a few years back. Burning was used to control diseases, insects and fungal infections. Yes, we did have a few days of smoky air in my part of the valley in August and it played havoc with my asthma, but I’d prefer staying indoors for a few days to having so many chemicals used on the fields, which then leach into our ground water as well as running off into the Valley’s huge web of drainage ditches, streams and rivers, not to mention drift from spraying.
The lack of honey bees in our vegetable garden means I have to go out in the morning with small paint brushes and do hand pollinating if we want any watermelons, cantaloupe or winter squash. I started worrying about the bees a decade ago and it’s only gotten worse. Think maybe we could get all the R’s to go out and do some hand pollinating of all these crops?
pacem appellant
@Linda Featheringill: Dammit! Beat me to it! Also, drones don’t have stingers.
NotMax
Reminded of the Los Alamos project from just a few years back to use honey bees to detect explosives, subsequently expanded to include training the bees to sniff out illegal drugs. info (Original report at the Los Alamos website seems to have gone “poof.”)
Comrade Mary
Toronto banned the use of pesticides a few years ago (to much complaining by the usual suspects), and our backyard and wild hives seem to be thriving, while hives outside the city are dealing with CCD big-time. But while this gives us some extra honey, it doesn’t help the rural crops that need bees to pollinate them.
piratedan
@Just Some Fuckhead: had to say it, while I don’t agree with a lot of your takes, that was fabulously funny :-)
Trinty
@dan: Agreed. Nice John. Way to break down the path of the wingnut hive mind.
Mike E
@Mojotron: Any studies on the honey produced by said hives? Nasties in the nectar?
Trollhattan
@Linda Featheringill:
That will be interesting to watch, actually, since a lot of the BIG agrochemical makers are European.
California almonds are the nation’s biggest crop requiring bees, and here’s hoping they can swing some weight on the right side of the fight.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0216/Fewer-bees-in-US-threaten-almond-crop
furlyfly
Wholy hell batman. Wr0ng w@y Cole managed to make a post without once mentioning his cat….AND…get it more or less right for a change. Then again, Mr 2 time Bush voter and fat bastard Christie lover knows how Republicans think.
El Caganer
Funny how that works. http://grist.org/business-technology/safety-last-why-a-nerve-eating-cancer-causing-chemical-is-still-on-the-market/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=update&utm_campaign=socialflow
Roger Moore
@El Cruzado:
Not to mention that the beekeepers have some say in the matter. Their hives are, if nothing else, a major economic asset, and they are paid to bring them to farms to pollinate crops. Don’t be surprised if they either outright refuse or at least charge much higher prices to farmers who use chemicals that are shown to be a danger to their hives.
burnspbesq
@Mj_Oregon:
Get your own bees. We did.
We had a colony living in our front hedge last year that our next-door neighbors were bitching about. We talked to a local beekeeper and worked out a deal where they temporarily removed the colony, sealed up the place they used to live, brought them back a week later and put them in a box hive in the back yard. They did all of that for free, in exchange for a share of the honey production.
They come by every six weeks or so to harvest honey, and give us a bunch of jars to give as gifts.
We’ve never had better looking flowers or more tomatoes.
It’s completely win-win.
wasabi gasp
There’s a documentary titled Queen of the Sun (available on Netflix) that is somewhat more spiritual than science, but it’s a pretty good movie with an eclectic array of characters. My girlfriend started watching it and in short time I was sucked right in to the point of setting aside whatever else I was doing, so I could give it my full attention.
ksmiami
@El Cruzado: Hey – this is a big deal to even the right wing farming community so there will be action. No bees = No food. Of course it will be lauded as the best bi partisan effort evah overlooking that thing called global warming that will render Texas and Oklahoma unliveable
Lurking Canadian
Gosh, you mean when you poke randomly at a complex dynamic system that you don’t fully understand, bad shit can happen? Whocouldanode?
The Tragically Flip
Good summary, only thing you’re missing is that Congress will pass a law prohibiting the EPA from doing anything to block the poisons killing the bees, via an amendment to the Transportation bill or some other completely unrelated law that gets added anonymously in committee and the whole bill gets passed on a voice vote on the Friday before a long weekend.
Mojotron
@Mike E: Not sure where they pick the parasites up; but once they do get them the bees are terrible at getting rid of them (by themselves) and they slowly get sick, stop producing honey, and use up the honey reserves they have to try and feed themselves (which is just feeding the parasites) until they starve to death. One of the best ways to get rid of the parasites is something called a “sugar drop” (or “sugar dust”)- you put a window screen and bucket under your bees and then sprinkle powdered sugar on ’em. The bees can’t get rid of the mites by themselves, but once you dust them with powdered sugar they’re able to shake off both it and the mites, which then fall through the window screen into a receptacle.
Keith
I think this is the 3rd year in a row that scientists have ID’ed the cause of CCD.
Just Some Fuckhead
@piratedan: Sorry, but this ain’t cafeteria curmudgeon. You now cosign everything I’ve ever thought and will be shunned by The Others.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
Funnily, they invoke that exact trope all the time when it benefits them. Help other people get health care? Raise the minimum wage? Raise taxes on those who can’t even feel it? Oooooh, I don’t know. The economy’s so delicate, I think we need to have a better understanding of how these things would affect it before we go along with anything so irresponsible! Etc.
DFH no.6
I’ve tried most of my nearly 6 decades on this planet to be hopeful and optimistic in the face of a plethora of grim news on a variety of subjects, very much including our environmental woes.
I was a HS freshman in Cleveland when the Cuyahoga river famously burned – though it had actually caught fire scores if not hundreds of times before, that time it burned long and large and hot enough to melt a steel trestle bridge, so it made national news. But then, not long after: the first Earth Day, then significant environmental legislation, the EPA, and real environmental improvement, at least in heavily industrial areas like, well, Cleveland.
For quite a while it looked to me like our civilization was moving in the right direction.
I no longer think that is true.
My “jungle forester” BIL who lives in Indonesia and has done “save the rainforest” projects throughout SE Asia for the past 25 years is not at all sanguine about the prospects of actually saving the rainforests anymore, anywhere. Many reasons: climate change, palm oil plantations, burgeoning populations, still-rampant illegal logging, etc..
Ocean fisheries are also fucked, from vast over-fishing. We are living in the last generation for a while (maybe ever) who will regularly consume commercial wild-caught ocean fish. In 20-30 years, only farmed fish.
And on and on, like the bee colony destruction (and there are even far fewer wild bees than there used to be in my area; fewer and fewer in my flowering plants and trees every year over the past 10 or so).
And of course the big one, the aforementioned climate change.
I’m old enough that I won’t see the worst of the world-spanning slow motion catastrophe that is inevitably leading to. But my children and grandchildren will, I’m afraid. They’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn the whole goddamn world into fucking Somalia.
Christ, I hope I’m wrong.
mikefromArlington
Fuck it, who needs food, right?
Citizen_X
Hey, that’s the price of progress. Can’t make an omelet without squashing a few bees! Or something.
sinned34
I’ve already seen one story about a month ago stating that colony collapse is normal, and that it happens in waves, so no need to panic.
Wish I could remember where I read that. It’d be interesting to try and find out where those claims originated and if there’s any validity to them, or if it’s the petrochemical complex beginning their offensive on the science of what is causing bee populations to decline so spectacularly these last few years.
mikefromArlington
Deputy commissioner of the FDA used to be a Montsanto lawyer. We r fucked!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor
Read his bio and weep.
MrSnrub
@balconesfault:
You can’t vaccinate bees! You’ll give them autism.
The Dangerman
Colonies aren’t collapsing; they are just going on strike. This is all the fault of organized labor.
Lurking Canadian
@sinned34:
Rule 1: It isn’t happening.
Rule 2: If it’s happening, we didn’t do it.
Rule 3: If it’s happening, and we did it, it must be good for you.
Gin & Tonic
@Violet: So true. Human existence is but a speck on the Earth’s existence.
If the existence of the Earth was on a 24-hour clock, humans came into existence les than a minute and a half before midnight.
sparrow
@DFH no.6: I hate thinking this way but I think there is a possible future where the few people who really control the levers of power will decide that it’s just time to kill some large percentage of the world population (mostly browns, cuz fuck them). It may or may not be totally intentional, but I think the Bee population collapse is a harbinger of human population collapse, either through war (sooner) or just goddamned lack of control of our numbers (later). It has happened before on smaller scales (see: Mayans in the Yucatan). Those of us on the less-populated continent of North America will probably not see the wars over water & food that are coming up soon for places like India, but who knows what kind of crazy desperation migration will happen. I sometimes think about not having kids because of how I think things are likely to go in the next 100 years.
Shakezula
It is now my goal that I eat one of these smug bastards after the food runs out.
@catclub: You see? JOBS!
Mike E
@Mojotron: Wow, Def Leppard to the rescue!
I wonder if any of the harvested toxins wind up in the honey.
Felonius Monk
At his birth, his mother looked at him and said: “Well, it’s too late for an abortion now, so I will name him Steve Doocy so that he will be forever known as a stupid fuck-stick”.
I assume, John, that you did not name the furry, purry Steve (formerly known as Boss) after this douche-bisquit Steve Doocy.
Linda Featheringill
@MrSnrub:
:-)
Alex Wild
The new PLoS paper is good, but it does not make the claim that CCD is solved- that’s a premature extrapolation. No one has yet conducted the experiments to replicate CCD using the hypothesized fungicide/pathogen mix, so they’re far from done. What we have here is a promising hypothesis- perhaps the best one yet- but still just a hypothesis.
Also, the scary decline numbers pertain to *winter losses*, and while bad they aren’t as severe as the media would lead you to believe. Bees reproduce quickly enough to recover from winter losses. They are insects, after all. Year-to-year the populations are steady rather than declining. This is in stark contrast to the 1980s, when bee populations plummeted following the introduction of several new pathogens (globalization, basically), from which they still have not recovered.
http://myrmecos.net/2013/07/25/not-every-dead-bee-is-colony-collapse-disorder/
Just Some Fuckhead
You think it’s bad now? Wait until President Obama turns it into a political football by suggesting a compromise wherein we only kill half of the bees and then Republicans label him as weak on bees. The Glenn Beck and the Concerned Women of America figure out Obama is really trying to destroy spelling bees and quilting bees, two staples of Americana. We could be looking at impeachment.
The Moar You Know
Devil’s dilemma right here.
We can barely feed the people we have. Pull out the fungicides and the pesticides and we can’t. So we buy food from…oh wait, everyone else is pretty well maxed out for food production as well.
So we keep going as we have been, kill of most of the bees, and then we’ll feed ourselves with…
Oh shit.
danimal
It’s a mighty struggle to beat Big Apple and their fungicidal friends. (If I were really clever, I’d work in an A-Rod reference here.)
Belafon
@MrSnrub: I was working on a similar joke involving Jenny McCarthbee.
Belafon
@The Moar You Know: Actually, we could feed everyone on the earth, but that would involve eating less beef and actually producing to feed everyone, rather than feeding the pockets of a few.
Jay in Oregon
@Lurking Canadian:
Rule 4: if it’s happening then the free market could have taken care of it but for that intrusive government regulation.
Caprine Queen
I have a small organic farm on the fringe of California’s Central Valley (almond/walnut/wheat/tomato country!), and started bee keeping a few years ago. I was up to nine hives last year, but only a couple managed to limp through this past winter, and by spring, all were dead. My bee keeping friend who keeps at a commercial level lost several hives during the winter and has lost about 25% of his hives this summer, so far. The verroa mite and nosema (which gives bees diarrhea- gross!) aren’t the only afflictions bees can get- there’s also tracheal mites, foul brood, chalk brood, small hive beetles, wax moths, deformed wing virus (does what it says to the point that the bees can’t even fly), and attacks from yellow jackets and my least favorite insect in the world- Argentine sugar ants, who invade the hive and make off with everything that isn’t nailed down. Including gallons of honey at a time. Pollenation costs have gone way up for farmers because it has become much more expensive to keep bees, what with all the feeding and medications they now require. I’ve also noticed way, way less activity amongst our native bees and wasps this year, in spite of making sure we have sources of water, nectar, and pollen available to them 24/7.
The Tragically Flip
Damn you liberals, in the 70s the scientists were all worried about takeover by killer bees, now you expect us to believe the bees are dying?
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The bees need to sting those Heritage f*ckers.
The Tragically Flip
Oh, I suppose you liberals want us to all starve to death when we stop using pest controls and locusts eat all the crops. Great job bee-huggers!
Tone in DC
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Wait until President Obama turns it into a political football by suggesting a compromise wherein we only kill half of the bees and then Republicans label him as weak on bees. The Glenn Beck and the Concerned Women of America figure out Obama is really trying to destroy spelling bees and quilting bees, two staples of Americana. We could be looking at impeachment.
LULz.
Cruise: I want the pollination (and the honey)!!
Nicholson: You can’t handle the pollination!
aimai
@Lurking Canadian: In a nutshell.
The Tragically Flip
Of course conservatives hate bees, bee society is pretty fucking socialist.
Eric U.
I’ve wondered if the fact mankind has been able to pollute indiscriminately through history isn’t going to lead to our extinction as a species. What works for a few hundred million people doesn’t work for many billions. But people don’t see the damage of their little bit of pollution
Of course, it may just be the oft-wished for meteor.
Lavocat
Pretty much.
The world will come to an end with a talking head on Fox News guffawing that the obvious end is merely a hoax.
And then white noise for all eternity.
What a fitting epitaph for the human race.
Deny, deny, deny, until it no longer matters – cuz yer dead!
StringOnAStick
@Mike E:
How could they not end up there? I recall reading sometime within the last year that Costco’s honey is from China and tested as full of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. After that news hit the fan, you have to read and interpret very carefully about the country of origin just to get a hint about where any honey is from. Bees are insects, not nasty chemical-removing androids who suddenly decide “whoa, the humans are poisoning everything, let’s help them out by removing these nasty things from the honey they so love to steal from us! We’ll just set up a toxic waste dump next to every hive.”
Stuff like this was obvious to me as an overly well-read teen and led to my decision to not have kids before I even hit my 20’s, even though not having any kids means I’ll probably die in a gutter when I’m old and no longer deemed worthy of Medicare coverage (get in line, fellow Boomers, no shoving at the cyanide buffet!). Probably has a lot to do with the depression I’ve struggled with off and on for years too.
Humans will be a flash in the earthly pan, and it will be our own damned fault. Considering that we can’t even get our own country to agree that letting people die from lack of health care coverage is a bad thing, I don’t see how we can even pretend we’ll address the problems that will render the planet uninhabitable for mammals of any kind. Some days I wish I could just stop thinking and enjoy what’s left.
Chris
@Lavocat:
QFT.
Mike E
@StringOnAStick: Thanks for the informative, if a wee bit condescending, reply.
Sasha
Cole, you have the clear-eyed comprehension of a conservative convert.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
AFAIK, the Koch’s aren’t far enough ‘downstream’ to have interests in fungicides. Fungicides are a pretty small market, so I’d expect them to lose versus wider agricultural interests. So for this case, I’d expect The Science to win.
raven
@StringOnAStick: As a non-worry-wart boomer I say “speed on brother hell’s only half full”!
Lurking Canadian
@Lavocat: Chomsky used to say that if he had any artistic talent, he’d do a political cartoon showing the WSJ editorial board writing something denying the existence of global warming even as the rising waters lapped at the window of their 10th floor Manhattan office.
wasabi gasp
My bottle of Kirkland honey says product of U.S.A. and Argentina.
Costco Connection honey article
Shakezula
@The Tragically Flip: And they’re run by single moms with millions of babies who mooch off other people’s flowers.
burnspbesq
@Lurking Canadian:
Before you start poling fun at anybody over environmental issues, do something about Alberta.
catclub
@wasabi gasp: “My bottle of Kirkland honey says product of U.S.A. and Argentina.”
Emphasis on ‘says’. You may also think that Italian Olive Oil is from Italy.
Mis and mal-labeling of honey is well established.
Gex
I’ve never understood why I, a gay, childless person, care about the health and well being of conservatives’ children more than they do. Yet here we are.
So glad I don’t have my own children’s future riding on these asshats purchasing a clue.
Svensker
@catclub:
That just means that it was processed in the US and Argentina, I think I remember reading a while ago.
catclub
@wasabi gasp: I also heard on a cooking show about some honey sold in a village in Turkey, where the bees are a different kind than the usual. Very special.
Villago Delenda Est
Now that we have a good idea of why this is happening, we will just ignore it, as we do climate change, because sacred corporate profits are more important than the continuation of human life itself.
El Cid
There is no real proof that bees pollinate anything. This is just more of this Bug Government, honeycomb-tower elites waggling around to try to misdirect us.
Trollhattan
@Caprine Queen:
Now you’re really depressed me. Nice to hear some hands-on experience though, even if it’s
mostlyall bad. Did our Initially wet then dry as hell winter have an affect on their low survival? The Valley doesn’t get “winter” like most of the country perceives it.Also, too, I hate those Argentine ants. They were just getting established when we bought our (city) house in the ’90s but soon enough wiped out all the indiginous ants. IIUC they’re effectively just one, giant colony because the nests don’t fight one another.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
I worry about what will happen to all of us if the bees keep dying. We don’t think about bees a whole lot unless we’re trying to get away from one we think might sting us, but they pollinate all kinds of shit, all over the damned place. It’s more than watermelon patches and apple groves.
I know conservatives don’t believe in sciency shit like this, but they’ll be as fucked as all of us if there’s a wholesale die-off of all kinds of trees and grasses and shrubs. It’s all bound up together in more ways than we can even fathom.
Chris
@Gex:
“We will have peace when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Paraphrased from Golda Meir. I’d take issue with that quote in its original context, but it applies to American conservatives perfectly.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Moar You Know:
Soylent Green! It’s the answer, I tells ya!
Trollhattan
Speaking of our corporate food overlords, Seattle’s mayor is picking a fight with Whole Foods over wages and city participation in a new store. Organic popcorn, please.
Yatsuno
TEST
Trollhattan
@Svensker:
To be fair, the article Wasabi linked to is pretty detailed about Costco tracking their honey sources for the in-house brand back to the very hives that produce it.
Gindy51
@StringOnAStick: It wasn’t just Costco either:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/#.UfGUUW3hfOY
Culture of Truth
Then they will hack into some scientists e-mails, proving a vast conspiracy, , then NRO will photoshop a mug shot of the guy prompting a libel suit, Al Gore will be spotted buying honey and swatting a fly, then Brian Kilmeade will hit a child with a football.
WereBear
@balconesfault: The answer, of course, is that Monsanto is stealing bees to create Frankenbees.
Mojotron
@The Tragically Flip: bee society is pretty fucking socialist.
Her royal majesty would disagree with that.
@Caprine Queen: The verroa mite and nosema (which gives bees diarrhea- gross!) aren’t the only afflictions bees can get…
I didn’t mean to imply that mites were the only affliction; foulbrood is really nasty and may require junking everything and starting fresh to eliminate it. But most people who lost hives around here stated that they didn’t see any signs of foulbrood and chalked it up to mites. But foulbrood and a lot of the other afflictions have been around for a while, it’s only within the last 30+ years that CCD has accelerated.
Silver & Silkey
We liked “Boss.” Isn’t there a great football player since the 1970s with a better name that you could memorialize? We feel that all cats are “Boss.”
DanF
@Roger Moore: That’s exactly what I was thinking. We might see bee hive operators charge larger sums of money to pollinate orchards and fields that use pesticides and fungicides due to the increased risk to their bees. Unless it’s enough to offset the cost benefits of using the fungicides and pesticides, it might not make a difference.
zombie rotten mcdonald
@StringOnAStick:
Some days I wish I could just stop thinking and enjoy what’s left.
That’s what alcohol’s for.
The Tragically Flip
@Mojotron:
She’s a figurehead, with no real authority. The workers control the factory.
Mj_Oregon
@Gindy51:
The only mention of Costco in that article was its inclusion in this list of big box stores – “77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out.” Filtered honey is the retail industry standard and has been for decades.
Costco’s Kirkland brand honey carries the True Source Certified label. If I had to buy big box/supermarket honey, I’d choose only those so certified by True Source. As Costco is ever expanding its organic offerings, I doubt they’d try to misinform their customers about their honey, even if it isn’t organic. They’re pretty sensitive about what they sell.
Bill Arnold
For whatever it’s worth, it hasn’t been said except obliquely by Caprine Queen; honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas, nor are Africanized bees. Population collapses of some North American bumblebee species (genus Bombus) are at least as worrying. (One conjecture is that the collapses are related to a fungal disease that infected bumble bees imported from Europe, if I recall for tomato pollination in greenhouses.)
Also, 3d printing with bees. (Yeah its a promo piece for liquor, but still fun to watch.)
Bill Arnold
@The Tragically Flip:
The workers are also all sisters, in fact closer than regular sisters (0.75 related). (haplodiploidy)
Pogonip
I have also noticed that lightning bugs are becoming very rare.
Caprine Queen
@Trollhattan: Yes, California might as well not even be attached to North America for how unlike the rest of the continent our weather patterns are. The extremely dry January-onward weather, combined with freakishly warm days early in spring lead to a combination of bees being too active too soon, and not enough food available when they came out of their hives. The heavy rains before January did lead to more problems with mold, which healthy hives can deal with, compromised ones cannot.
@Mojotron: We had everything in our hives that bees could get. All of it. I blame the guy a couple properties over who plunked down 50 hives just about the moment I got my hives. His bees (they were a different color than mine) put enormous pressure on my hives and the pollen/nectar sources I had established years before we got bees, and in the fall would try to rob them. I know he did almond orchards, which is probably where his bees got the diseases to transmit to my bees. Strangely enough, as soon as my hives died, his left the area.
@DanF: It is hard to imagine charging enough to make up for the loss of all of your bees plus all of the honey they would produce (and FYI, almond honey is basically only fed back to bees, as it is not tasty to people). Bee keepers also have a hard enough time already getting orchard managers to time their sprays so they don’t kill the bees that are there to pollinate. There are plenty of stories of smaller bee keepers getting enticed to pollinate an orchard or field, only to have the hives collapse within months because of something the farmer sprayed without telling the bee keeper. I’ve invested enough money in bee equipment that figuring in just that outlay and no labor, each 8oz jar of honey I’ve produced cost me $50. And with some diseases, you can’t reuse the equipment.
DFH no.6
@sparrow:
I hate apocalyptic thinking just like I hate stupid conspiracy theories and over-reactions to things like terrorist attacks.
We’re all doomed! Soon all the stuff in the Book of Revelation is going to start exploding all over (like the hilarious new movie “This Is The End”) and God’s only going to save his precious Bible-idolators (and not that sect, this one over here)! It’s the Tri-Lateral Commission, or the Illuminati, or the Stonecutters who control everything! No, it’s the Jews! Jihadis are going to kill us all if we don’t kill all of them first!
It’s so fucking childish, like Ayn Randism.
But I’m afraid that what our civilization (very much including myself and everyone like me) is doing to the planet has become irreversibly bad, at least as far as a decent future for the human race just over the horizon (and, well, mammals in general).
I see a very likely future of a pretty hellish world caused by the environmental disasters attendant to climate change, with horrendous wars over water and food (as you said) in places like India. I think it very unlikely that we keep the nuclear weapon genie in the bottle with that going on. Once that happens…
I see an America clustered mostly around the Great Lakes as the last large freshwater source in the world, jealously guarded by our still-mighty military, with everyone but a few hard-bitten types left in the Southwest (which will become as uninhabitable as the Sahara) and the rest of the country divided into less well-defended regions.
The rest of the world, including Europe and China and South America, who can say, other than “not good”? Africa (along with the Indian subcontinent) will be worst of all. Hell on earth.
On that cheery note, I’m done.
As I said, Christ I hope I’m wrong.
WereBear
@DFH no.6: I can possibly be too much of a Pollyanna, I admit. But it works for me.
I spent my childhood doing “Duck and Cover” drills at school, though from 3rd grade on I knew they were lying to me. Imminent world-wide doom threatened me my entire childhood.
In the 70’s it was the Ozone Layer. We were killing it (and we were) and its death was going to force us underground in caves like Logan’s Run.
Global warming is extremely serious. And when it gets taken seriously, we’ll come up with things to help… or we won’t.
But I’m not going to be miserable, either way. That’s just the way I roll.
Quaker in a Basement
Coincidentally, today is Walter Brennan’s birthday. Was you ever bit by a dead bee?
Lurking Canadian
@burnspbesq: You know, I tend to discount internet accusations of stalking, but I believe that is at least the fourth time you’ve responded to me with some irrelevant shit about Stephen Fucking Harper.
I don’t know if it’s tu quoque or ad hominem or some other latinate error, but I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit, and furthermore, I suspect we both know it makes you look like an asshole.
I’ll make you a deal. From now on, I’ll append “Harper delenda est” to each post, and you stop acting like an asshole. ‘K?
Harper delenda est
StringOnAStick
@Mike E: Hey dude, you said you wondered if it was in the honey, but with no snark tag, and it wasn’t obvious to me anyway. Sorry if I offended you. Seriously, I am.
NPR reported on the Costco (Kirkland) honey issue last year like it was some kind of Whocouldaknowed surprise, and then suddenly it became harder to figure out where big brand honey came from. So, the problem hasn’t changed, just our ability to find out easily*.
*Your typical Free Market solution; thank you Invisible Hand!
StringOnAStick
@Trollhattan: Costco responded appropriately to the revelation of where their honey was coming from, so that’s a good thing. It wasn’t true over a year ago, when that story came out. I’m glad to see that at least Costco did something about it.
The standard way that scary honey (Walmart anyone?) is made and defended is by filtering out all the pollen so the origin can’t be independently verified. Right now our collective wealth lets some of us say “no non-artisanal honey for me”, but when/if the food issue gets ugly and a lot more expensive, origin isn’t going to matter, access is.
I guess it comes back to buying local and from trusted sources at this point in time.
burnspbesq
@Lurking Canadian:
No, that’s not OK. Your fucking country is right up there among the world’s biggest environmental criminals, and you preach to us on a regular basis. I am fucking sick of hearing it from you. Save it for someone who doesn’t know what your fucking country is doing to promote our ongoing environmental catastrophe, you fucking hypocrite.
WereBear
That is what we do; we buy local, wildflower, honey.
Redshirt
The reality of our future is the super rich and their sycophants helping themselves to the best of everything (food, water, medicine, technology, etc), safely ensconced behind walls, while the rest of us fight in a Mad Max wasteland for whatever crumbs remain.
It will be true Trickle Down Economics and that trickle will be mighty slow.
jenn
Hey folks, all of you concerned about pollinators, please contact your congresspersons about supporting the Save America’s Pollinators Act, 2013.
http://www.rodalenews.com/pollinator-act
The Fat Kate Middleton
@WereBear: As do we … and also buy veggies, fruit and eggs from local growers whenever we can (those we don’t grow ourselves), and chicken, pork and other protein sources. It’s not that difficult, really, and we love growing whatever we can. BTW – we buy our honey from our rural neighbor, who farms nearly a thousand acres around us here in Iowa. The honeybees are populous as heck, and we have more lightning bugs than ever. I’m not bragging … I’m just not sure I understand why it’s so.
PIGL
@DFH no.6: I am afraid I don’t think so. If I had my career to do over again, I’d have gone into virology, IYKWIMAITTYD.
PIGL
@burnspbesq: Why the hell should he, you arrogant prick? Alberta is run by your billionaires, you fucking deal with it.
PIGL
@burnspbesq: The tarsands are evil, and correspond to about 2% of global oil production. There is plenty of blame to go around, and the Fracking of America not the least. ¸
And, in conclusion, fuck you very much.