Joe speculated:
> The consensus is that the CCD decline is occurring
> in commercial beekeeping operations not organic
Not a consensus at all.
Known to be false.
While all such talk is considered "confidential", there
have been reports of CCD from (self-proclaimed) "organic"
beekeepers. This has been floating around for a while, but
no one seems willing to step forward and admit something
in public that would certainly defuse some unneeded hype,
and would imply no shame on the beekeeper who made the
admission.
As Peter Borst pointed out, "commercial" operations appear
to have the lowest incidence of CCD. Yes, one can question
the surveys, but one cannot question both official surveys
when one wishes to accept as legitimate the claims made about
"organic" and "wild" colonies, as they were made without
benefit of a single shred of actual data. (See below)
> or wild colonies,
This claim was and still is unsupported by ANY data at all.
Note that "An Absence of Evidence Isn't Evidence of Absence",
and realize that if an escaped swarm, or a speculative
long-established colony collapsed from CCD, this would be
much like the tree that fell in the woods with no one to
hear it fall.
> as mentioned in July-Aug issue of Science & Sprit, and
> from several other sources over the past several months.
Yes, the misinformed claims of a SINGLE PERSON named Sharon
Labchuk have been repeated over and over, just as the bogus
claims that "cellphones were killing the bees" was also
repeated over and over.
Sharon is a self-proclaimed "environmentalist", and a
twice-defeated candidate for election to various local
offices on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where she has
run on the "Green Party" slate. She also keeps bees,
and on PEI, one must recall that there was quite a
furor over Imidacloprid and bees a few years back, one
that seemed to echo the problems experienced in France
on Sunflowers, except without the Sunflowers, without
the symptoms, and without the advantage of data showing
cause and effect.
(In fact, the studies showed no similar situation at all,
which led to claims that the well-respected researchers
who did the work were either incompetent, paid off by
chemical companies, or both. They were lucky to
escape the island alive.)
So, perhaps you can see that Sharon might have been
just a teensy bit inclined to blame "pesticides"
for just about anything, even a problem not seen in
PEI, or Canada as a whole. (Yet, that is. Keep
your fingers crossed...)
Sharon came to her conclusions based solely on the LACK of
any reports of CCD being made on a single Yahoo discussion
group.
( http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/Organicbeekeepers/ )
Note that yahoo seems to classify "organic bees" as "pets",
while all the other yahoo groups dealing with bees are
in the "agriculture" or "biology" sections. I'm not sure
what this implies, I just think it is amusing.
While she said that this group had "over 1000 members", this is
more accurately described as the total number of people who had
ever joined, not the number of current, active members who might
participate in or read the discussions.
> "The reports of decline come mostly from commercial beekeepers
This statement is simply untrue. Both the Bee-Alert survey and
the Apiary Inspectors of America survey had more reports from
smaller beekeepers than "commercial" beekeepers. Not surprising,
given than of roughly 100,000 total US beekeepers, only a few
hundred could be called "commercial", "migratory", or anything
similar. It is true that the FIRST reports came from commercial
beekeepers, not surprisingly, as they had colonies down in Florida,
and were thus able to inspect their colonies before anyone else.
As spring moved North, more people reported finding the same
symptoms in their spring inspections.
> not organic or wild colonies,
The claim as to "organic hives" has been debunked above, but for
"wild" colonies, no one has done any sort of field work to see if
there has been any impact, so the best one can say is "no one knows".
Again, "An Absence of Evidence Isn't Evidence of Absence".
> and experts suspect the mechanism killing the bees is not natural,
> thus implicating pesticide overuse..."
Well, there are a few folks that still suspect that pesticides
might have a role, but the general consensus seems to be forming
around the "pathogen" angle.
Not only "a pathogen", but apparently, a pathogen from elsewhere.
No, not another planet, just another continent.
Stay tuned, which big-name journal will publish a paper with
a long list of authors is apparently up in the air.
Remember how I tried to get everyone to give a hoot about the
WTO-imposed changes to the USA bee import regulations back in
2002-2005? Well, now maybe you'll pay more attention.
I still hope that the scenarios I mapped out will not come to
pass. But now that we have had poisoned dog food, and even
poisoned toothpaste in one fiscal quarter, it seems clear that
we really do need port-of-entry inspections for EVERYTHING
we import, not just bees.
The biggest problem with the "pesticide theory of CCD" is that
hives nowhere near agricultural pesticide use have suffered
the same fate as hives near heavy pesticide use.
My favorite "poster child" example here would be Dr. Dewey Caron's
hives at U Delaware. It would be hard to find a yard of hives
that had better care, more inspections, and better record-keeping,
and it would also be hard to find better record-keeping about
the specific pesticides used nearby. It is "all research all
the time" at U-DE, so if anyone wants to suspect pesticides,
all the records are the place to start your search.
(Funny how no one thought of Dewey's hives as being an
easy-to-study, well documented case, isn't it?)
Sharon's baseless speculation, made because it matched her
long-standing agenda of her brand of "environmentalism"
was repeated so often by so many reporters and web sites
looking to fill column inches with minimal labor, the bogus
claims have even made it into a "Wiki" which self-proclaims
itself to be an authoritative information source about "CDD".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
You'd think they would have learned by now, but no matter
how many would-be "journalists" get burned by using a Wiki
to fact-check, more writers are tempted to use these Wikis
every day, mostly due to deadline pressures and a lack of
ability or will to work the phones and find people with
first-hand information.
You can e-mail your guffaws and corrections to Doug Yanega
at [log in to unmask] (He said he "edits" that Wiki, and
gets his information from "published reports".)
I think we need to Watch these Wikis and do a little
Wiki Facty-Checky now and again. I propose that we set up
the home office for this effort in Weeki Wachee, FL.
That way, the Wikis can be watched from Weeki Wachee.
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