An American problem because beekeeping is much more industrialized there? Bad weather? The result of breeding for docility, repressed swarming behaviour and increased harvests? These are all things she discusses.

As was touched on in the comments, my personal opinion is that CCD is more than anything a result of the general degradation of the environment caused by global warming, intensive agriculture and mono-cultures and the ongoing loss of global biodiversity. It’s not that very serious attention shouldn’t be paid to CCD, and effort shouldn’t go into understanding it better, but the only real solution is going to be to address the underlying problems.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Robin of Bumblebee Blog had a good idea. She suggested her readers post some of the the search terms people use to find their blogs, then she would then make a post linking to them after December 5th, so we could all compare. Here’s my contribution. I’ve been meaning to post about this anyway.

Of course people find us for the ‘right’ reasons, by searching on topics relating to this blog, but I’m going to give some examples here of some unexpected things.

The first thing to realize is Google has really changed a lot over the last few years, and search terms people were finding us with before are not the same as now, with one exception. Before and now, the single most common term people use to find this blog is ‘weed burner’. I made a post about weed burners very early on, and I seem to have become the main Internet information resource for weed burners.

As a result of using the word ‘weed’ in a popular post, and posting a little later about cannabis, we also have no end of people who find us wanting information on this:

pics of weed

weed

cheap weed

…

I also made a post about my 325 year old wooden house foundation needing to be repaired, and a lot of people started finding us looking for information on foundations:

Why is my house sinking?

sinking house foundation

How do I know if my foundation is bad?

What does a bad foundation look like?

For a long time, people were finding us searching on information about carrots:

Can you grow carrots in a bottle?

What do carrots look like when they are underground?

What types of carrots are there?

history of carrots

pictures of carrots

how do I grow carrots

To be clear, I’ve never particularly posted much here about carrots.

For a while a number of people were finding us searching for missing bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. The popularity of the topic led me to write a number of followup articles afterwards.

A number of people have found us recently looking for pictures of different kinds of garlic. This was part of the reason for posting the pictures recently, because there aren’t many pictures of garlic on the Internet.

By far in a way the biggest ‘Google event’ happened when Steph made this post on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

For those of you not familiar with this beer, in recent years it’s probably become the most popular ‘alternative’ beer in the US, and it’s particularly popular among students. When Steph and I were students in Chico, California, where the brewery is located, we went on a tour of the brewery while it was still in a garage. A few days ago we bought our first bottle in Amsterdam! It still tastes the same after all these years. At 15 euros (about US$21) for six bottles it’s not going to become our daily beer again anytime soon, but it was still a nice treat.

Anyway, after Steph made this post people started ‘borrowing’ the picture by linking to it within blog posts, forums, myspace pages and so on. It’s all over the Internet now, and a search on Google images shows it’s now the most popular image above even those released by the brewery itself! The picture itself is probably the single largest source of Internet traffic for our domain, I think more than everything else combined.

Like I said, Google is broken now, but until recently it was including all of these links in our page rankings. I like to think I’m popular for other reasons, but surely this has had the greatest impact on our Google rankings!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

This time it’s a virus called the ‘ Israeli acute paralysis virus’.  The association of this virus with CCD is less than certain, and the working assumption is still that it’s a combination of factors.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

This seems to confirm what I posted about a few weeks ago, and was announced by Spanish scientists. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the ‘official’ announcement from US scientists confirming they have discovered the cause in US bees.

The Daily Green article is interesting in that it goes a bit further and explains the underlying greed that caused the problem in the first place.

The good news in all of this is if the underlying problem has been discovered, it may be possible to do something about it!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

According to this article in Reuters Spanish scientists have discovered a parasite common in Asian bees is now infecting bees in large parts of Europe and the Americas. Asian bees apparently have a high degree of natural resistance to this microscopic parasite, so it’s not normally a problem there.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

I posted earlier on my own lack of bees this year, and interestingly I just remembered I live right next to a mobile telephone cell.

My garden is in the shadow of this array of antennas, and my mobile phone always has a full strength signal at home:

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

If these genes can move into gut bacteria, there is certainly the potential for them jump to other bacteria, and possibly other organisms,

This finding probably has little to do with the ongoing discussion of bees and CCD.

Gut bacteria is very promiscuous with it’s DNA, and scientists have long suspected such a transfer could take place, but proving it has always been elusive. In this case it involved herbicide resistant genes, which in themselves are perhaps not so important, but the implications are enormous.

Key to understanding these implications is knowing how GM plants are developed. It’s more complex than just inserting a new gene, and in fact usually involves a bundle of several different genes. Among the genes often inserted is a ‘marker’ for antibiotic resistance and promoter genes. It might also be more accurate to describe it as blasting, rather than inserting.

When this bundle of new genes is ‘blasted’ into the cells to be modified, it is an imprecise procedure with a limited success rate, and indeed with the potential for causing possibly undetected genetic damage to the cell. Because the success rate is not 100%, some technique must be employed to separate the cells that have been modified successfully from those that haven’t. This is where the marker gene for antibiotic resistance comes in. By exposing all the cells to antibiotics those that have not been successfully modified and do not have the marker gene will be destroyed by the antibiotic, leaving behind only those cells which have been modified.

Promoter genes can be used to ‘switch on’ an otherwise dormant trait. This is needed because sometimes the genes to be inserted contain traits that would remain dormant without these genes. It is also suspected these promoter genes have the ability to switch on other dormant traits, with possibly unexpected results.

The fact that genes from GM crops are probably crossing the species barrier into gut bacteria is much more significant with respect to the antibiotic resistant marker gene and promoter genes, than with the herbicide resistance.

In this study genes transfered into gut bacteria of bees, but there is no reason why the same thing couldn’t happen to gut bacteria in people.

Besides the possibility of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria developing, some GM crops are developed so they manufacture their own pesticides.  If these traits were transfered to human gut bacteria this could result in pesticides being manufactured in our digestive systems.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

” Even though the active ingredients in the pesticides may be considered safe for bees, the inert ingredients — which compose most of the product (up to 99 percent, in some cases) — may be severely detrimental to bees. Not only are the inert ingredients not listed on the pesticide labels, but many also haven’t even been tested and are classified as ‘toxicity unknown.’”

Just as important were his observations in his own property:

“While bad beekeeping practices, such as hauling bees cross-country in the daytime and using pesticides in beehives, may be the cause of CCD in beekeepers’ colonies, they are not the cause of the decline of wild bees. We live on 20 acres, and last summer, after all of the sunflowers and other plants were blooming, we couldn’t find a single bee on the property. However, we are surrounded by cornfields that use pesticides regularly, and there is no doubt in my mind that the reason we don’t have bees is the pesticides.”

This brings to light an important question in my mind. When we talk about CCD and the bee crisis, are we talking about the financial importance of bees and what can be done to keep commercial bee hives in operation, or are we talking about looking for the true cause of the problem and fixing the associated environmental damage? It seems like these could evolve into mutually exclusive goals.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

There hasn’t been a lot of information in the news here about this, at least that I’ve noticed. This is the only thing I’ve heard locally.

I have a small pear tree on my roof, and it didn’t set any fruit this year, apparently because there were no bees.  At least I didn’t see any when the tree was in bloom.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

“The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.”

This article also goes on to explain that commercial bees are encouraged to grow large by providing them with oversized foundation cells, the cells bee keepers provide their bees when starting their colonies. This results in bees that are more susceptible to the varroa mites as well as possibly other problems.

It seems to me this might be a somewhat simplistic assement of CCD, but it may explain an important part of the problem.

The Bush Bees site has a lot of general information about bee keeping.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

He makes a good argument for the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder being a general biodiversity issue, rather than directly related to GM crops. He also suggests the answer to the problem may not lie with scientists, but rather with the bee keepers themselves, who are the ones more likely to be able to observe changes in their hives over time.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

While it remains a complex issue, with little hard evidence, there continues to be a lot of reasons why we should suspect GM crops are playing a major role in CCD.

I think it’s a little interesting too that studies that might show CCD is caused by GM crops don’t seem to be getting any funding, and at the same time there are people saying we shouldn’t be so quick to blame GM crops because there’s no proof! It’s almost like someone or something out there is trying to keep us from finding out the truth…

Personally, I’m still waiting for someone to prove GM crops could not play a role in CCD.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

He linked to my recent post on the possible link between the disappearing bees and GM crops. This is causing a tenfold increase in traffic to this blog, and generating a discussion unlike any other here. Regular readers of this blog may want to go over and have a look.

To all new visitors, welcome! Please have a look around. I hope you add this blog to your bookmarks or RSS readers, and come back soon. You are just the kind of people I would like to have here, and I will try to write some more posts soon along similar lines as this one. This is not just a gardening blog!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Jouni Ylinen recently pointed me to a study that was done 2001-2004 which observed a similar problem, so it’s not like it’s been a secret this whole time. Note near the bottom of the page, where it says:

A chance infestation by parasites (microsporidia) resulted in more significant damage to the Bt-fed colonies. The underlying mechanism which causes this effect is unknown.

Bt works by damaging the gut on certain insects, and causing it to rupture. Until now Bt was thought to only attack very specific insects that are susceptible to it, and be non toxic to others. Apparently the toxicity of Bt may not be fully understood.

A seeming unrelated story has emerged in South Africa, on babies with HIV. Transmission of the disease is lower in breastfed babies, and the reason they think is because infant formulas irritate the gut, which more easily allows the virus to pass into the body.

Could these two unrelated news items actually be related?

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.