No doubt the decimated bee populations will have dramatic affect on US AG production. See latest article in Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,473166,00.html GC
======================== Gcanadate/thanks; Interesting ,McNeil Leher news hour had a extensive segment on this tonite.Not likely anything to do with gene modified plants; as that newswriter headline guessed. Pres of California Bee keepers assoc said he thinks it is mites; medication solved it for him. He is a big beekeeper also. ======================================== Also they said it had NOT affected almonds crop at all; and apples are still real cheap, bees pollinate these also, and plenty of pollinators besides honey bees. And i agree with part of your article; monocrop may be part of problem.News segment said bees may not be getting enough or variety to eat. ====================================== Got plenty of pollinators around my place, plenty of variety of flowering trees/plants. NO monocrops Wisdom is profitable to direct
There is a piece in the Independent which gives a possible explanation. I am just surprised that there is no interest in this topic among traders. This is potentially big and immediate. http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece
oh there is interest you just need to remember that ET is largely filled with unemployed and unemployable real traders, smart enough to trade successfully are usually very informed bunch of people
I think the free market will sort this out. This colony collapse phenomenon has caused bee prices to skyrocket over the past year, which naturally encourages beekeepers to step up production efforts to replace the dead hives and keep up with demand. The new high price of bees is also encouraging new beekeepers to set up shop as well. Survival of the fittest will also kick in- Strains of bees resistant to whatever is now killing them will emerge strong. They'll multiply and spread at the expense of the weaker, non-resistant strains. Other possible solutions include offering Nicolas Cage burnt alive as a human sacrifice upon a giant man-shaped wicker altar. Bottom Line: This is a complete non-event, and will be all but forgotten in ten years from now. Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
The Independent and Der Spiegel, I guess the further you get from Iowa the bigger the story. Of course participants know about bee shortages. The pollination process in Corn's development is as important as in any other seed plant. That's to say very crucial. Bee colony's in Iowa are experiencing the same issues as hives out west. Empirically one senses less bees about. Until disappearing bees actually impact crop yields it's nothing more than a fun, speculative story.
Um... wait a second. Would any of you happen to know if the Papaver Somniferum in particular can survive without bees?
I thought thats why we have markets for - the price mechanism is tells us (mostly true) stories of the world. If bees are dropping like flies and we can't come up with an alternative way to get plants to have sex, then the price of watermelons should creep up. (http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/AA091) So go to your supermarket and see where this story is going by the price of your melons. The good news is wheat and corn are mostly wind pollinated and soy doesn't need pollination. Maybe what we need is a bee bank to ensure we keep more species of bees alive than the market can economically support at present. They provide future insurance value that falls through the cracks in a classic long term/short term market failure problem. I understand there are seed banks in Scandinavia where we freeze seeds in vaults, just in case we do something incredibly stupid to our global food supply like drop nukes on it. A sort of "restart" or "play again" button for world agriculture. Apparently flies are going through genetic changes as well, as a result of rising temperatures it seems. But unfortunately they aren't dying, just a rearrangement of the "top dog" strain. Which is the likely outcome for bees as well IMHO. One more important thing to note : bees have been around for longer than humans have. They used to annoy dinosaurs. As a species, they survived multiple ice ages, intercontinental drift, comets hitting the earth with gigaton impact, reversing magnetic polarities - all the shit God threw at Planet Earth for the past 100mm years. They've outlasted a lot of other species. So lets try to keep a 100 million year perspective here - so far the bees have a better track record for survival than humans.
http://environment.newscientist.com...-billions-at-risk-from-wheat-superblight.html This is a great article that is in this weeks New Scientist, the most reputable and progressive Science Magazine on Earth. Interesting parallels to decimated Bees- the fact that nobody is doing anything about it. And in this cases, there is no more line between the haves and have nots in this world. Without a cure for this blight, we are all inevitably, have nots.
take it as an opportunity. if that's the case i will... good reason to get clean. still, i think yours is a complete synthetic so u got nothing to fear.