Bee stats - are honeybees in decline?

[Black Comb]

This recently published document may be pertinent to this thread.

https://consult.defra.gov.uk/plant-a...ICES_FINAL.pdf

[madasafish]

My experience of other natural beekeepers I have met or talked to is that most last for one season and the first winter kills off their colonies as they are not competent to manage them...

There are some Warre beekeepers who really object to inspections and the idea of any Bee Inspector "tearing their colonies apart " when looking for foul brood in an infected area. (they can be found occasionally on the warrebeekeeping site on Yahoo Groups.).

I would not wish to be associated in any way with such people.. they would no doubt object to human vaccination against polio as "not natural".

I suspect natural beekeepers have a natural lifespan of 2-3 years - ...

[Little_John]

There's a rather interesting talk by Marla Spivak on YouTube - runs for some 16 mins - which addresses the decline in bee numbers, which may be of interest and of some relevance to this thread. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5WzzSfJAhQ
BTW - YouTube videos can be saved with http://en.savefrom.net/1-how-to-download-youtube-video/ for viewing later.

[gavin]

..... for viewing later.

Or padding out your bee talks ;-)

Not with this one though.

RealPlayer also lets you do this.

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

[Little_John]

There are some some University of Reading stats in this report which may be of interest to the non-believers ...
http://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/f...beesreport.pdf

LJ

[Jon]

Report commissioned by Friends of the Earth.
It is mostly about bumble bees and solitary bees as opposed to honeybees.

This stat is quoted but is hopelessly out of date as honeybee colony numbers have quadrupled since 2010 according to bbka calculations.
Maybe there were other more recent ones I missed but given the age of those figures it looks like selective use of statistics as there is much more recent data available.

In particular, the number of managed
honeybee colonies in the UK fell by 53% between
1985 and 2005 (Potts et al, 2010a)