.In the winter of 2006, a strange
phenomenon fell upon honeybee hives across the country. Without a trace,
millions of bees vanished from their hives. A precious pollinator of
fruits and vegetables, the disappearing bees left billions of dollars of
crops at risk and threatened our food supply. The epidemic set
researchers scrambling to discover why honeybees were dying in record
numbers — and to stop the epidemic in its tracks before it spread
further.
Silence of the Bees is the first in-depth look at the search to uncover what is killing the honeybee. The filmmakers of Bees take viewers around the world to the sites of fallen hives, to high-tech labs, where scientists race to uncover clues, and even deep inside honeybee colonies. Silence of the Bees is the story of a riveting, ongoing investigation to save honeybees from dying out. The film goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our diets and takes a look at what's at stake if honeybees disappear. Silence of the Bees explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals.
Silence of the Bees is the first in-depth look at the search to uncover what is killing the honeybee. The filmmakers of Bees take viewers around the world to the sites of fallen hives, to high-tech labs, where scientists race to uncover clues, and even deep inside honeybee colonies. Silence of the Bees is the story of a riveting, ongoing investigation to save honeybees from dying out. The film goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our diets and takes a look at what's at stake if honeybees disappear. Silence of the Bees explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals.
who killed the honey bee?
Vanishing of the Bees (2009)
More than honey
Einstein once said: “If bees ever die
out, mankind will have only four years left to live”. In the past five
years, billions of honeybees simply vanished for reasons still obscure.
If the bees keep dying, it will have drastic effects for humans as well:
more than one third of our food production depends on pollination by
honeybees and their life and death are linked to ours.
Life without the bee is unthinkable. But,
between pesticides, antibiotics and monoculture, the queens and their
workers are losing their power.
MORE THAN HONEY, a new documentary by the
Swiss filmmaker Marcus Imhoof, is looking into the fascinating world of
bees, showing small family beekeepers (including the beekeeper of ERSTE
Foundation beehive, Heidrun Singer) and industrialized honey farms.
MORE THAN HONEY is a film on the relationship between mankind and
honeybees, about nature and about our future. Honeybees show us that
stability is just as unhealthy as unlimited growth, that crises and
disasters are triggering evolution and that salvation sometimes comes
from a completely unexpected direction.
Illinois illegally seizes bees resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup; Kills remaining Queens
Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought
As 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.
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.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to
spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions
have not applied to fungicides.
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. And that’s not just a west coast
problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth
$4 billion.
In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years
in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But vanEngelsdorp,
an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the
new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is
affecting bee health.
“The pesticide issue in itself is much
more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more
complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution
does not lie in just banning one class of product.”
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. That pollen,
however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants
were not the target of spraying.
“It’s not clear whether the pesticides
are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at
agricultural spraying practices,” says vanEngelsdorp
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten