Roughly forty years ago, poor apiary management at a research facility in Brazil released Africanized bees to the wild in South America.
A topic of numerous attempts at horror movies, and television miniseries, the Africanized bees have been slowly making their way north to finally, officially enter the United States in the early 1990’s. Some biologists believed the cooler climate would keep them at bay in Texas, but inter-breeding with gentler European breeds used for agriculture and honey production in the US has given them better fortitude to survive the relatively cooler winters. They continue to make their way north.
Africanized bees are not the horror they are portrayed to be in the movies, while certainly dangerous, it is literally a case of if you leave them alone they will leave you alone. They are not overtly aggressive unless provoked.
Far more dangerous and a greater threat to the world is this:
In recent years there has been a disease wiping out European bee populations across the United States called Colony Collapse Disorder. Though a matter of much speculation the cause of these die offs has not been clearly understood. While the cause is still not clear, there has been a significant step made in it’s diagnosis.
From an article at Quartz.Com
Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought
By Todd Woody@greenwombat July 24, 2013As we’ve written before, 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. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.
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.
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.
Our agriculture has long been trending toward what is called Mono-Culture. The propagation of a single crop variety, for convenience of managing growth and offering a predictable product to the marketplace. It is true of potatoes, corn, soy, and other staples of our modern diet. It is also true of the bees that do not simply produce honey but pollenate much of those crops.
The threat mono-culture creates is by its very nature it is highly susceptible to disease. By varying crop types you protect yourself from a total die off of any one disease. Some types are more or less resistant to various diseases. Ireland learned this lesson the hard way in 1740-41. Or maybe they didn’t because it happened again in 1845-52.
In bees, also, we have long been propagating a mono-culture and now that is coming back to sting us where it hurts.
I have brought you many stories of apocalypse via zombies, asteroids, aliens, Mayans, and whatnot, and of them all this one is probably the most dangerous.
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