Fewer bees in my garden

It's also my opinion that some quoted scientists have been known to speak out of both sides of mouth, almost at the same time... imagine that.

The decline in the honeybee population in Canada is equally well known. Less well known is the fact that it isn't true, and both bee and hive numbers have been steadily increasing since 2006.

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DaleK, got some statistics to back that up?

So you are saying there has been no bee die off in Canada and the bees are prospering? If that is true then US needs to find out what you folks are doing differently than us.

Canada bees must be in better shape than those here. We took a beekeeping class last Feb. sponsored by a large local club. One of the main topics of discussion was the decline of bee populations and possible causes.
To address the OP's topic, I have also noticed very few honeybees in our yard which is mostly white clover. We could barely walk through the bees just a few years ago.
I now have three new hives and hope to see more of the girls working the clover soon.
I'd also like to encourage anyone who can to set up a hive or two. It is such a fun and interesting activity.

I call BS on this one.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hone...m=122&ie=UTF-8

Yep a survey by a group of mainly hobby beekeepers who were very careful who they asked to fill out their survey because their agenda doesn't have as much to do with beekeeping as making friends with the Sierra Club and others.. If you ask commercial beekeepers who make a living from bees and control by far the biggest number of bees in Ontario they give a very different answer, something a bit higher than the average winter kill but then again it was the hardest winter in 20-30 years and not unexpected. But numbers will still be up over last year.

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There is some honeybee colony decline in Canada but it's not anything like on the large scale as what is happening in Europe and America. Personally I suspect it's partly because Canada has such a small human population by comparison and therefore there's less human impact and interference. Another thing is the different climate in Canada.

I don't know how many species of bees there are in other provinces and states and on the European sub-continent but here in the west in my province there are 400 species of native bees in addition to the European honeybee imports. There is no detectable decline in the native bee species here and they are all pollinators. I looked at my monarda (bee balm) plants today and counted 11 separate species of bees (including native honeybees) all busy on one plant at the same time. And that was just bees, not counting the other pollinating insects that were busy on the bee balm too - so at least here in the west I'm not too worried about crop plants not getting pollinated.

This is a good website if anyone is interested - it has fairly up-to-date bee news about honeybee declines/inclines in North America and Europe as well as lots of other information about all manner of organic farming and livestock animal welfare including an organic farming forum. http://www.certifiedorganic.bc.ca/rc...ning/bees.html

I would be interested to read the viewpoint/stats from the commercial beekeepers but haven't been able to find that info yet.

Thank you for posting this. I will go to the link tomorrow.

Without DDT, the Panama Canal couldn't have been built.Many lives were saved from Malaria because of DDT.
Most of the evidence against DDT has been disproved, the case against DDT was filled with altered data.
Several companies made Agent Orange for the government, including Dow Chemical. Are you boycotting Dow, too? The process specified by the government was flawed and the resulting contaminate, dioxin is a powerful toxin. That was half a century ago. Are you also boycotting Bayer for their role in human experiments on Jewish prisoners during WWII?
So, in your mind big companies and/or the government are to blame for honeybee collapse?

I want to make this point perfectly clear that i believe the honeybee collapse is a symptom of what is going on in the human food chain, that is the bigger issue.

Collateral damage is acceptable to most people so long as it does not happen to them. The problem with the GM ignition switch probably does not get you too excited, but it would if your family members died in a firey crash. This is a direct cause and effect action but still most people will not care about it. With the poison being placed in the food chain it is not so direct, and so is even harder to prove. The containers that the pesticides come in have warning labels and most if not all a skull and cross bones.

I am saying that i think pesticides are at least playing a role in the honeybee collapse problem, and big companies and government could care less about it so long as it does not come back to roost on them financially.

Yes many companies made agent orange, none of them stood up and said we screwed up, feel free to correct me if i'm wrong. So yes it just helps prove the point about mind set of big companies. GM knew for years there was a problem with the switch, they took a gamble on letting it go and got caught, but how many died or were injured until they told the people take the weight off your key ring and bring your car in to get it fixed. It's greed pure and simple, defending the ethics of big companies, and big government is gong to be a hard sell on me.

GM ignition switches had a weak spring. Just like most things made today, ever cheaper. If you had a load of keys hanging just right and hit a bump, the engine turned off. It did not lock the steering wheel. Sort of like running out of gas. You still have steering and still have brakes. Out of millions of cars, some switches turned off. Tragedy that people lost control of their car and died. Having the engine die lead to the loss of human life is a puzzle to me. There are tens of thousands of parts in every car. Your Sunfire isn't a Rolls Royce. Cheaper parts are used to make the car affordable. Ford Pinto was criticized because the fuel tank is between the rear axle and the rear bumper, just like millions of other cars.
But the public demands protection from all danger, real and imagined.
There are some that see the Polar Bear's loss of habitat as proof that Global Warming will soon drown us all. Never mind that Polar Bear population is at a historic high population.
Likewise, if you have a bone to pick with Big Ag, Monsanto, George Bush, pesticides or frozen vegetables, you might as well connect it to the unrelated honeybee collapse.
I find it interesting that because of Big Ag's general adoption of Monsanto's GMO technology the toxic insecticides you worry about are greatly reduced. Toxic, long lasting pesticides that once were sprayed on every plant in the field as well as in the soil and the air are not needed in BT GMO corn. So the products that you fear/despise are protecting the environment from countless tons of insecticides.
No chemical company stood up and said they screwed up, because they just made the product as the government told them to make it.
Much of this country just went through the most severe winter in history (sorry, Global Warming Kool-Ade drinkers) so weather should be assumed to cause many bee deaths. There has been a steady increase in parasitic mites and bacteria that further stress bees.

But if you want something to blame that more closely aligns with your unsupported dangers of GMO, consider this: Most hummingbirds are attracted to human installed feeders. These feeders contain sugar. This sugar could have been obtained from corn syrup. Some could have come from refined Sugar Beet sugar. Both corn and sugar beets are mostly GMO. Obviously, hummingbirds are the canaries in the coal mine we call planet earth.

Wow you must be an attorney.

Referring to corn production, commercial corn is sprayed with herbicides to control grass and weeds. The Roundup Ready corn makes it possible to use a smaller dose of herbicide, but I understand there are now some roundup resistant weeds developing. Field corn normally does not need insecticides AFIK, but sometime there may be an out break of some insect pest. I'm not sure why herbicides are supposed to kill insects.

Commercial sweet corn may well be sprayed with an insecticide to prevent damage from the corn earworm. I don't spray garden corn. In my area, early plantings or sweet corn don't have much in the way of earworms; those that get on the corn do not make it past the processing procedure and if they have started damaging the ear it is simple to cut pout the small amount of damage. Later planted corn has more damage. I think a home treatment is to pour a few drops of mineral oil on the young ear. If I dusted the corn with Sevin I could well see why that would cause bee loss.

I live in fire ant country. People have to treat the ants with chemicals. I have seen a report that some of the bait type poisons have granules that bees may mistake for pollen and take it back to the hive. If anyone knows of a safe, organic, effective treatment for fire ants I would like to know about it. Early in the fire ant invasion there was an effective treatment called Mirex which the government outlawed because it supposedly killed some obscure fish I had never heard of. Loss from fire ants is huge.

COWS

Let me help you puzzle that problem out with GM, the switch shut the power off to the electic power steering, and the air bags. Loss of power steering and power brakes as well as no airbag protection. In 2005 they knew of the problem and decided to continue to produce the cars with the cheap weak springs knowing that there would be a problem. Its not hard to see how a vehicle that loses it power steering and brakes suddenly at a bad time could be a problem for most drivers and even more so with a less experienced driver add to that the loss of air bags.... Now understand that there were GM engineers that told them that it was a problem and they continued selling the vehicles as is....

You don't see that as a problem, you buy a cheap car and hey, you deserve to die. You buy cheap food and you deserve to die. And really that hits the nail on the head. Consumers want cheap food, and they get it. They are willing to pay a grand for cheap add on wood grain paneling on the interior of their car, but a buck for a burger is outrageous. The way to make food cheap is to take the cost of labor out of it, and so today we spray and use fossil fuels and fossil fertilizer to make the fake food grow. In your heart you know that it is a recipe for disaster but you are in denial of it, after all farmers feed the world. But just what are they feeding them. We can get into feedlots, and chickens and hogs on confinement.... if that's what you want to do, as well as all the problems with your GMO frankencorn. In California when the rains came the cows stood on cement feedlots and drown in their own excrement. What a way to farm.

I guess the bees work in my garden with a different schedule. I decided to take a me day and got in the garden much earlier than normal. I saw at least a dozen visiting my squash plants. I need to plant more flowers.

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Isn't it just a hoot that the add banner on this forum is genuity.... a business partner of Monsanto?????

As usual, this turned into a flaming contest about GMO's (and other related things), rather than a discussion of why farmgal's pea pods aren't filling out--which are not pollinated by honeybees........

Quite predictable.

geo

With all the discussion here I think we can all agree that bees are very important for our food. Still, we need some good science. Good statistics and good design of controlled experiments. Are there some good controlled studies on this issue of possible decline in bee numbers?

Seems like this could make for a very good masters or even postgraduate thesis.

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