A curious phenomenon known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" or "CCD", began appearing in 2006 when beekeepers noticed an average of 60% decline in their colonies(1). This decline has since leveled off at approximately 30% annually, which is still significantly higher than the 15% that is common when a hive is infected with mites or a common pathogen(2). The term CCD officially refers to the spectacle where honeybees are abandoning there hives in large volumes, only leaving the queen, young, and the large stores of honey and pollen(2). It is as if the mature male bees go out for the day and simply never return home. This occurrence has the potential to have a very negative impact on the environment and even society if not solved. Four broad categories …show more content…
Varroa mites were introduced in Florida in the early 1980's and has always been a problem in the western bee community. Varroa destructor is native to Asia, where the Asian honeybees, Apis cerana, have a defense mechanism that works against such pests and is rarely associated with the mite's negative impacts, unlike the western honey bee, Apis mellifera(9). These organisms are external parasites that suck the blood of a honey bee, similar to a tick for humans, and can cause death or mutations to the infected colonies future generations(8). They secure themselves in between the folds of the abdomen, which protects them for the bee's self-cleansing habits. These mites may take advantage of either the immature or adult bees, however they must reproduce on the larvae of the honeybee. These mites spread easily from bee to bee, especially in occurrences of a commercial bee hive where it is easy for the infected honeybee to fraternize with a non-infected colony as they are just meters away from each other. Mites also spread from bee to bee when larger colonies will rob another in scarce conditions …show more content…
CCD threatens the integrity of over 100 different US crops including, but not limited to: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, citrus fruit, peaches, berries, melons, as well as animal-feed crops like clover(14). While nature has it's own ways of sustaining itself and bees are not our only pollinators, losing them to Colony Collapse Disorder would cause our agricultural empire to crash. Bees are responsible $15 billion of revenue in the US annually (15). The endangerment of honeybees poses such a threat that in 2015 the Obama administration set aside for $50 million for the research of CCD in an attempt to preserve our agricultural integrity. A study by the Department of Environmental Studies,EMory University, Atlanta, GA, suggests that the current decline in these pollinators could already by causing negative impacts on the surrounding
Nayan Shah is a leading expert in Asian American studies and serves as professor at the University of California. His work, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown explores how race, citizenship, and public health combined to illustrate the differences between the culture of Chinese immigrants and white norms in public-health knowledge and policy in San Francisco. Shah discusses how this knowledge impacted social lives, politics, and cultural expression. Contagious Divides investigates what it meant to be a citizen of Chinese race in nineteenth and twentieth-century San Francisco.
...l; Retired, formerly apiculturist, U.S. Department of Agriculture. BEEKEEPING IN THE UNITED STATES; AGRICULTURE HANDBOOK NUMBER 335 Revised October 1980; Pages 2 – 9
It is not unusual for bees to die or colonies to be lost, but the nature and extent reported in the year 2006 was alarming. Statistics gathered in the United States alone show that 50-90% of the bees have been lost so far, due to this scientific phenomenon (Cox-Foster et al., 2007, p. 284). Honeybees play a very major role in the pollination of plants and therefore these huge losses have become a serious concern. There are many reasons that have been floated and acclaimed to be behind CCD and they include pesticides, parasites, electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, climatic changes, and urban sprawl, among many others.... ...
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
To most, the honeybee can be an annoying insect that has a powerful sting. Yet, the honeybee is so much more than just another insect. The honeybee is arguably the most vital component in the development of our food crops. With roughly 90 percent of our food crops dependent on the pollination of our honeybees, our food system, agricultural development, and diet rest on the work and well being of these buzzing insects. Unfortunately, since 2006 there has been a major decline in the population of honeybees, and has gotten progressively worse because of colony collapse disorder. The first reported increase of CCD was documented in November 2006 in Florida. By February 2007, several states began reporting major losses associated with CCD, ranging from 30% to 90%. A little over a half decade later in 2012 the attention paid towards CCD has grown substantially with more research being done as CCD continues to get worse. The main culprit for CCD, as research has suggested, is the use of pesticides on our food crops. With major corporations such as Bayer making millions and millions of dollars in profit each year in the distribution of pesticides, it is no wonder that nothing is being done to stop this practice despite evidence linking the use of pesticides and the drastic deterioration of the health of honeybees. With the continuation of the use of deadly pesticides and the vital role bees play in the pollination and development of our food crops, both the environment and our economy will be effected directly and face the potential for catastrophic results.
What can we actively take part in to stop the collapse of bee colonies? Bees are such a vital part of our everyday agriculture production, however, colonies are diminishing before our eyes. Colony Collapse Disorder is a massive decrease of bees in hives and it is greatly affecting our crops because bees are not distributing the necessary amount of pollen to crops in order for them to grow the maximum, most nutritious produce possible. There are many solutions that may help CCD, such as banning neonics, urban beekeeping, and interbreeding honey bees with African killer bees. The most effective way to decrease CCD is by interbreeding honey bees with a stronger specie of bees labeled African killer bees.
Population bottleneck is an evolutionary event in which a large part of a population or species is died or otherwise cannot reproduce, which increases genetic drift that can cause big losses of genetic variation for small populations. However, the amount of drift is inversely proportional to the population size, population bottleneck result a smaller population with reduced genetic diversity. Dropped genetic variation implies that the population will most likely be unable to adjust to new selection pressures, such as a shift in available resources (food, shelter, etc.) or climatic change, because the genetic variation that selection would act on may have already drifted out of the population. This genetic drift can affect the proportionate distribution of an allele and even cause to fixation or damage of alleles. Also, population bottleneck increases inbreeding and genetic homogeneity as there are some animals left in the gene pool which lead to unfavorable alleles can accumulate. Due to the smaller population size after a bottleneck event. population bottlenecks inform us that intraspecies diversity is similarly very vital
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.” This statement questionably from the brilliant scientist Albert Einstein may evidently be right. In my class we were asked to pick an issue to research about, so I chose colony collapse disorder because I believe this an overlooked epidemic. UDSA reported “Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a serious problem threatening the health of honey bees and the economic stability of commercial beekeeping and pollination operations in the United States. Despite a number of claims in the general and scientific media, a cause or causes of CCD have not been identified by researchers.”
In the years since African bees invaded the United States, hybridization has become common. This has been problematic to beekeepers, as hybridized bees have heightened defensive behavior that may lead to serious injuries, and they produce less honey than European bees. However, due to scientists using genetic testing and morphometry, it has become possible to distinguish between different species. These scientists have been able to solve real world problems and help others deal with problems that may result when speciation occurs. This lab also provides an example of how invasive species may create damage when introduced to unnatural environments. The aggressive nature of the African honeybee presents danger to other organisms in the surrounding ecosystem. The European honeybee species have suffered due to the African honeybees’ habit of taking over their colonies and creating hybrids. This incident remains a warning to scientist to take care and consider the consequences when releasing a species into a new
In Europe and even in China honeybee populations are decreasing. This has an impact on everyone in the market. It effects how they food gets to the dinner table and how much it cost to put it there. Fresh produces will eventually end up being fresh produce from across the ocean or fresh produce made in a lab. It wasn’t until October 2006 when Hackenburg came public about his bees vanishing that anybody noticed that the bees were dispersing, but still scientist can’t prove the exact cause to CCD. In America nothing has really been done yet to help the honeybees. Other countries, like Europe did at least tried to maintain the current population of honeybees by amending a law that prohibited certain types of pesticides that many be harmful to honeybees. The most important thing that could be done to protect the honeybees is stop using pesticides that are harmful to important creatures like honeybees. Just like Europe did, put a ban on harmful chemicals to honeybees, until the honeybees numbers start to increase. Another logical way to help the honeybee population is to give a tax credit to people who decide to become bee keepers since bees are very important to the US economic
The worldwide eradication of honey bees may not be too far away. The reasons the honey bees are dying are linked to a number of things. The most common causes are linked to industrial agriculture, parasites/pathogens, and climate change, according to the article entitled “The Bees in Decline” on GreenPeace’s website, SOS-bees.org. However, bee-killing pesticides pose the highest risk to the pollinators (the Bees). Honey bees are not the only form of pollinators.
"Related Topics." ARS : Honey Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. Department of Agriculture, 2 Dec. 2013. Web.
High declines in adult bee numbers in some colonies have been reported and this decline is known as colony collapse disorder6. These declines are higher than normal and can go unnoticed by bee keepers because the bees do not generally die in the nest, so the decrease is not immediately obvious. The problem addressed in this paper will be the decline of bees and the effects this decline has on the environment. The solutions proposed for this problem are increasing research, managing farming and spreading awareness. It is important to conserve the bee populations before the problem of decreasing pollinator numbers becomes too great to fix.
The film Contagion was a very interesting film because it was about a present-day outbreak, which was interesting to me because it was similar to several points of view of morbidity and mortality. The contagion disease causes many injured people in the population to get sick. This film related to what I have learned in epidemiology and it taught the world about how the diseases can cause skin effects and kill. According to the film, it indicates how the CDC involves itself in trying to solve the disease that injured and killed people in the population. The CDC uses different strategies to investigate people who were affected by the disease. They followed the place
Over the past decade bee populations have been dropping drastically. A 40% loss of honeybees happened in the U.S. and U.K. lose 45% of its commercial honeybee since 2010. This is a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear in a short time. These data are definitely not meaningless since bees are a crucial part of the reproductive cycle of many foods. The impact bees have on the agriculture and the environment is far more crucial than we may think. Crops rely on bees to assist their reproduction and bring them life. Bees are renowned in facilitating pollination for most plant life, including over 100 different vegetable and fruit crops. Without bees, there would be a huge decrease in pollination, which later result in reduce in plant growth and food supplies. On the other hand, without the pollination progressed with the assistance from bees, the types of flowers According to Dr. Albert Einstein, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination…no more men”. That’s why bees’ extinction affects people more than we ever think, and could even forebode the doom day of human race.