>> Why CO2 rise resulting in less nutrition in plant matter?
Here is a decent plain-English explanation of what's going on, one of the reasons why I kept accepting "invitations" to the Ted conferences every year since '84, despite the current nosebleed-inducing $10K ticket price, plus travel, room, board, and overpriced watered-down drinks.
https://www.ted.com/talks/kristie_ebi_how_climate_change_could_make_our_food_less_nutritious
https://tinyurl.com/u2d9xz4c
> I don't know about others who have kept bees for many years. Do your colonies nowadays grow as quickly and large as they used to? Mine don't seem to, but I don't have hard data.
There is hard data indicating that we should not all see the same impact on bees, if CO2 were a major factor in this "hive failure to thrive" to the same extent as a typical season circa 1980-something, as there is "flux" in the localized CO2 level, even though it mixes very well in the atmosphere. Long story short, those of us downwind of large fossil-fuel burning facilities see higher CO2 than those upwind. In the attached image, you can see a flux in Idaho, caused by wildfires in that area, far from any fossil-fuel facility.
The historical data from NOAA is here:
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/carbontracker/fluxmaps.php?region=nam&average=annual&date=2018#imagetable
https://tinyurl.com/suw9ufr7
But I do agree that hives do not expand with explosive force like they used to, and I can track this with ease, as "4-mediums" brood chambers simply do not exist in my beekeeping notebooks any more, and they used to be about 20% of 600-700 colonies by May in VA.
The single most important beekeeping tool is a pencil and a notebook, and Michael Roger made one just for me and for like-minded folks who have bees, in both pocket size and full-sized:
https://decomposition.com/?s=honeycomb&post_type=product
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|