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The Death Of Bees Explained – Parasites, Poison and Humans

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Calling all budding - or should we say buzz-ing - young naturalists! Join National Geographic Kids as we get the lowdown on one of our planet's most fascinating insects in our ten facts about Honey bees!

Facts about honey bees

1. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. This means that they help other plants grow! Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

2. Honey bees live in hives (or colonies). The members of the hive are divided into three types:

Queen: One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive's next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees.

Workers: these are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive.

Drones: These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out!
3. What are these buzzing bugs most famous for? Delicious 4. If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called " royal jelly". This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen. honey! But did you know they produce honey as food stores for the hive during winter? Luckily for us, these efficient little workers produce 2-3 time more honey than they need, so we get to enjoy the tasty treat, too!

5. Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!

6. Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means they have one serious sense of smell! They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognise different types of flowers when looking for food.

7. The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she'll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

8. The queen can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!

9. Honey bees are also brilliant boogiers! To share information about the best food sources, they perform their ' waggle dance '. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source. Cool, huh?

10. Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as 'colony collapse disorder', billions of Honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. In some regions, up to 90% of bees have disappeared!

We can all do our bit to support these brilliant bugs, gang! Why not plant flowers rich in nectar, such as lavender and bluebells, which will help bees find the food they need? Also, be sure to choose local British honey, too, which will support our Honey bees and their beekeepers!

Did you know that we have a FREE downloadable Buzz about Bees primary resource, all about these awesome insects? Great for teachers, homeschoolers and parents alike!

What did you think of our facts about Honey bees? Let us know by leaving us a comment, below!

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10 facts about Honey bees! | National Geographic Kids

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Calling all budding - or should we say buzz-ing - young naturalists! Join National Geographic Kids as we get the lowdown on one of our planet's most fascinating insects in our ten facts about Honey bees! 1. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables.

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Author: Leila Battison

Date: 17 Aug 2015

Copyright: Wikimedia Commons - Image appears as courtesy under CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence

In the past decade, there has been growing concern over the numbers of bees buzzing around our countryside. Bees are one of the major groups of insects responsible for carrying pollen from one plant to another to ensure the growth of fruit or the healthy sexual reproduction of crops. Scientific studies, news articles, and environmental campaigns have highlighted the critical need for these busy pollinators in order to sustain natural biodiversity and maintain our global food supplies.

Bees are responsible for pollinating a staggering 150 different crop plants, including the clover and alfalfa on which the beef and dairy industries rely. They are essential for the reproduction of twelve widespread crops, such as Brazil nuts and pumpkins, and together contribute to $15 billion of crop farming in the United States alone. In the Central Valley of California, endless rows of almond trees are accompanied by stacks of honeybee hives and the gentle hum of a huge workforce of tiny laborers; this industry is the most reliant on bee pollination worldwide.

So, when the first reports of a decline in bee numbers began to emerge in 2006, alarm bells rang out for these interdependent plant populations. Without the bees, how can the huge farming industries be sustained? What is causing the loss? And now, nearly ten years after issue was first recognized, can we predict its ultimate effects? Is it too late to fix the problem?

Various purportedly unbiased studies have attempted to divine the cause of the decline in bee populations. In 2010, a team led by French scientist Cedric Alaux published in Biology Letters [1], claiming that the loss of bees was linked to the already severe loss of biodiversity caused by the expansion of human settlements and industry. With fewer wild plant species to feed on, the bees' immune systems become compromised and as a result, they are much more susceptible to diseases which, decades ago, they would have been able to shrug off. Today, it is widely recognized that a complex interaction of factors can lead to the loss of bees within managed hives, in a phenomenon that is now termed 'Colony Collapse Disorder'. Pathogens, including various fungi, parasites and viruses, can move rapidly through tightly packed hives, while synthetic chemicals such as neonicotinoid pesticides can also directly harm the insects [2]. Additionally, the ever-intensifying pressure for bee-pollinated crops, product-maximizing beekeeping practices, and the complex effects of climate change all act to negatively exploit the overworked colonies.
Estimating Bee Numbers
But just how sure can we be that the bees are in decline? The alarming reports of declining numbers require some hard statistical data to support them, but it is more likely that the average person is more likely to run squealing from a group of bees, or swat them away, than count them. However, it is not necessary to get up-close and personal in order to estimate bee numbers. For bees kept in hives, there's a nifty calculation based on the numbers of bees returning to the hive in a minute, the estimated time for a return journey, and the number of frames (honeycomb-supporting structures) in the hive. Alternatively, a direct measurement of the mass of a colony, minus estimations of frame and comb mass, can give a ballpark figure of population if you know the mass of a single bee. Repeat these calculations at appropriate intervals, and there's your data.

Counting wild bees and solitary bee species is somewhat more problematic, as there may be no accessible hive with observable bee traffic, and one rapidly moving bee looks very much like another. In these cases, then, more time-consuming methods must be used, such as the classic ecological mark-recapture technique, which samples portions of a population within a given area on two successive visits to estimate overall population size. This method is riddled with caveats and assumptions, but again, if the same assumptions are made among all measurements, then reliable comparisons may be made between datasets. As this approach requires considerable manpower and time, especially for such small animals, modern studies have made use of so-called 'citizen science' to collect vast quantities of data over large areas. One such scheme in the UK, the 'Great British Bee Count' [3], organized by Friends of the Earth, encouraged members of the public to identify and log bees within their own gardens and allotments, even providing a user-friendly app to keep track of bees. The large datasets collected in this way have already led to new discoveries of bee population distributions [4], and in time can be collated to give valuable time series.

We are unable to say 'Bees are killed by X, so we should stop X', and so this critical threat to biodiversity and food security still advances unaddressed. It is clear that additional data and meta analysis are required to isolate the most significant factors, and perhaps we should adopt a precautionary principle and take action to protect, not exploit, our planet's biodiversity before we reach a point of no return for our overstretched insect workforce.

Employing different data collection techniques over various areas and timescales, a range of scientific studies have produced contrasting results. For example, a study in 2009 [5], making use of historical data, indicated that the global population of bees has actually increased by 45% since the 1960s, but has been outstripped by the fourfold expansion of pollinator-dependent crops. Meanwhile, a recent study of 16% of all managed honeybee colonies in the United States (6) revealed that bee numbers have dropped by 42% in the last year alone, with summer declines greater than those of winter for the very first time. Yet, while these losses seem drastic, they are less extreme than the initial declines ten years ago.
Wild Bees
Most reports of bee decline have focused on the major losses occurring in managed honeybee hives, and the associated impacts on the crops that depend on them. However, an increasing number of studies have also begun to recognize the importance of wild bee species and other pollinators, which can be more than two times as effective as managed colonies. A study published in Science [7] in 2013, based on data from 40 crop types in 600 fields worldwide indicated that these groups of insects, many of which are solitary and depend on natural biodiversity, have also shown a major decline over the last decade, most likely as a result of habitat loss from urban expansion. Further, historical data has revealed [8] that around half of the 109 wild bee species in the United States went extinct during the 20th Century, again linked to the loss of forests.

In Europe, large solitary bumblebees are among the top pollinators, contributing up to €22 billion to agriculture annually. However, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 2014 [9] nearly a quarter of Europe's bumblebees face extinction, and yet still little is known about bumblebee disease. Without the high population density of an enclosed hive, colony collapse disorder is unlikely to have a direct effect, however bee numbers could still be directly linked to climate change, the intensification of agriculture, and changes in farming land uses.
Is it too late?
Studies of bee populations have unequivocally shown a consistent decline over the last decade, regardless of country, species, or crop. With a lack of true understanding of the causes, this loss can be expected to continue, and the long-term effects on natural and agricultural biodiversity are difficult to predict. With the large-scale loss of pollinators, crop yields will drop, leading to the inflation of certain food prices and the outright loss of certain foods. As part of their 'Share the Buzz' campaign in 2013, Wholefoods supermarkets removed from their shelves all the products that are dependent on these at-risk pollinators, providing a striking image of the huge impact this decline will have; they removed 52% of their normal product mix [10]. The impacts are not limited to vegetable products, either. Owing to the dependence of the meat and dairy industry on bee-pollinated clover and alfalfa, we risk the loss of beef, milk, and their derivatives from our weekly shop.

But is it too late to save our bees and our bee-dependent lifestyle? What can we do to halt the decline and reverse the effects? Organic farms provide forage as food for bees and generally employ less intensive agricultural methods to prevent the pollinators from being 'overworked'. But, as prices of organic goods in supermarkets demonstrate, this is an expensive and potentially unsustainable approach to global food production for over seven billion people.

In general, there are difficulties in promoting awareness and action against the loss of pollinators, due to the lack of clear cause and effect. As the bee decline is linked to the complex interaction of multiple factors, there is no definite course of action for policy-makers, while the voting public also crave simple links and simple solutions. We are unable to say 'Bees are killed by X, so we should stop X', and so this critical threat to biodiversity and food security still advances unaddressed. It is clear that additional data and meta analysis are required to isolate the most significant factors, and perhaps we should adopt a precautionary principle and take action to protect, not exploit, our planet's biodiversity before we reach a point of no return for our overstretched insect workforce.
References
[1] http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/4/562

[2] http://www.usda.gov/documents/ReportHoneyBeeHealth.pdf

[3] http://www.foe.co.uk/what_we_do/the_bee_cause_home_map_39371

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/28/first-great-british-bee-count-reveals-allotments-make-best-bee-habitats

[5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982209009828

[6] http://beeinformed.org/2015/05/colony-loss-2014-2015-preliminary-results/

[7] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1608

[8] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611.abstract

[9] http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014-bbsg-annual-report.pdf

[10] http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/bees

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Author: Leila Battison Date: 17 Aug 2015 Copyright: Wikimedia Commons - Image appears as courtesy under CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence In the past decade, there has been growing concern over the numbers of bees buzzing around our countryside.

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Around the globe, honeybees have been disappearing. Beekeepers will open a hive and find the 30,000 or so bees the average hive normally teems with missing. There will be no dead bees lying around, either. The honeybees will simply be gone. Beekeepers have, in some instances, lost 90-95% of their hives this way.

Colony Collapse Disorder Hurts Ecosystem Biodiversity

This phenomenon, dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," (CCD) threatens ecosystems and food security. Michael Schacker, author of the book A Spring Without Bees, writes,"Today there are 250,000 species of flowering plants and trees, providing most of the crops and ornamentals we depend on. Of those plants, 130,000 rely on insects, mostly 20,000 species of bees, to ensure reproduction. Bees are thus essential to biodiversity, a main indicator of health of an ecosystem."

Some fear CCD is a canary in the coal mine, pointing to agricultural practices that are turning the environment increasingly toxic with pesticides. That said, researchers haven't been able to find any one reason why honeybees are dying. Rather, CCD seems to be caused by a collection of problems that include mites, viruses, parasites, and genetics that make certain species of honeybees more susceptible to pathogens.

Pollinators and Pesticides Don't Mix

However, evidence increasingly points to pesticides playing a strong role in CCD, particularly one called imidacloprid (IMD), which is an insect neurotoxin. IMD is sometimes sprayed on plants, other times put into the soil where it can remain for more than a year.

French researchers have found IMD affects bees' memories and sense of smell, both of which honeybees rely heavily on to collect pollen and nectar, and to convey to other bees where flowers are located. It's believed bees, when exposed to levels of IMD between 100-500 parts per billion, become disoriented and can't find their way back to the hive.

Since these findings, the European Union has recommended a ban on the use of neonicontinoid pesticides (IMD being one of them) to begin later in 2013.

Wild Pollinators are also Crucial, and also Threatened

While CCD has garnered enormous attention (and rightly so), wild pollinators, also crucial to ecosystems and plant pollination, should not be forgotten. They are also under threat. This recent article on cornucopia.org states that a global study finds loss of wild pollinators, "...may be an even more alarming threat to crop yields than the loss of honeybees." Wild pollinators are more efficient than honeybees in pollinating plants, visited more plants, and were better cross-pollinators.

But wild pollinators are also declining due to habitat destruction. The article states, "The new research shows for the first time the huge contribution of wild insects and shows honeybees cannot replace the wild insects lost as their habitat is destroyed."

Some Facts to Underscore the Importance of Pollinators

Besides benefiting humans with their honey and beeswax, in North America, honeybees pollinate around 100 different kinds of crops, some of which are 100% reliant on honeybee pollination.

Most pollination services in the US are provided by commercial migratory beekeepers.

1/3 of the food we eat is the direct result of bee pollination...every 3rd bite you put in your mouth!

Globally, 3/4 of food crops require pollination.

Honeybees are not naturally aggressive. They only sting when they feel their hive is threatened.

Honeybees live in highly organized societies, with specific roles such as "nurses, guards, grocers, housekeepers, construction workers, royal attendants, undertakers, foragers," etc.

Honeybees can live as long as 5 years.

Honeybees have existed on the planet for 25 millions years.

The value of global crop production reliant on pollination = 153 billion Euros (1 Euro = around US $1.30)

What You Can do to Help Honeybees & Wild Pollinators:

Keep beekeeping in your area viable by buying local honey.

Grow a variety of flowering plants in your garden and avoid using pesticides. If feel you must spray, do so at dusk, when bees aren't out and about.

If you see a large mass of bees in a tree (called a "swarm"), don't harm it, and don't panic. Swarms are not dangerous. Call a professional beekeeper to come and carefully collect it.

Write your senators and representatives, asking them to support funding for honeybee research, and bee-friendly legislation.

Learn the difference between honeybees and other flying insects such as wasps/yellow jackets: many people mistake honeybees for the latter and inflict deadly sprays, thinking they are "pests.

Consider becoming a backyard beekeeper!

Live in a city? Some urban areas allow beekeeping! Read 10 Urban Beekeeping Tips from grit.com.

Grow native plants in your yard.

Check out this list of plants for year-round bee foraging (bees need to collect pollen and nectar from spring to fall)

Support natural habitat conservation efforts!

Spread the word about the importance of pollinators to others.

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Disappearing Pollinators Hurt Biodiversity & Threaten Food Security

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Around the globe, honeybees have been disappearing. Beekeepers will open a hive and find the 30,000 or so bees the average hive normally teems with missing. There will be no dead bees lying around, either. The honeybees will simply be gone. Beekeepers have, in some instances, lost 90-95% of their hives this way.

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Issue - Pollination, biodiversity and our well-being: everything is interconnected

Pollination, biodiversity and us

On average, more than 30% of bee colonies disappear in Belgium every year. The acceptable rate is 10%... This is an excellent indicator of the extent to which pollinators in general (bees, butterflies, beetles, etc.) are threatened.

Yet, the well-being of pollinators and man is closely interlinked! That fact is not purely an environmental one, it also happens to be an economic reality.

Pollination is the manner in which most flowers reproduce. It entails the process of carrying a pollen grain from the stamen (male organ) to the pistil (female organ) which allows plants to be fertilised. More often than not, pollen grains are carried by pollinating insects (entomophilous pollination), in the main, bees.

Biodiversity and food diversity are by and large the result of this fertilisation process.

Food diversity: For 30% of our food, we directly depend on pollinators. E.g.: tree fruit production (pears, apples, cherries, plums, etc.), soft fruit (strawberries, redcurrants, raspberries etc.), market gardening (gherkins, cucumbers, melons...), seed production (carrots, salads, chicory, etc.), oil production (rape, sunflower, flaxseed, etc.).

Some studies deem that if bees were to disappear, Belgium would have to import an extra 20 to 40% of its food with all the ensuing and obvious negative effects on the economy, energy consumption, health, etc. Now, if the current trend was to continue that myth could become reality within 25 to 50 years from now.... A recent study conducted at the University of Reading, England, concluded that, for all the crops to be properly pollinated, Europe would need another 13.4 million colonies of bees, i.e. another 7 billion bees.

Biodiversity: proper fertilisation of plant species by pollinators is essential if part of the flora and fauna are to be conserved (food, reproduction...).

And man? Pollinators have real value:

Economic value: 84% of species we cultivate depend on pollinators. These species give us raw materials, medicines, food for humans, foodstuffs for livestock, biofuels.... The global value of the services pollinators provide amounts to approximately 153 billion euro a year.

Ecological value: conservation of flora and fauna has a direct or indirect impact on the quality of our water, on soil fertility and stability, on climate regulation...

Emotional value: pollination has a beneficial effect on our health, the quality of our green spaces, the beauty of places...

Ethical value: pollinators help to conserve numerous species.

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Bees, pollination, biodiversity and well-being

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On average, more than 30% of bee colonies disappear in Belgium every year. The acceptable rate is 10%... This is an excellent indicator of the extent to which pollinators in general (bees, butterflies, beetles, etc.) are threatened. Yet, the well-being of pollinators and man is closely interlinked!