Where do you want to measure from though, 1945, 1965, the arrival of varroa in the early 90s, the arrival of seed treated crops late 90s.Originally Posted by AlexJ
Again it is another case of lies, damned lies and statistics.
You can show what you want to show up to a point.
Uk colony numbers are of course lower now than in 1945 but considerably higher than in 2008.
The pollinator org PDF has a lot of the stats from Europe and worldwide.
Although a little off topic I think it would be interesting to see how many nuclei the top 5 (in quantity) suppliers are sending out each year (5 is a totally arbitrary figure off the top of my head -but is probably close to the number of large scale nuc suppliers) and then, to see how many of those colonies are still viable after a couple of years. The thing is that there still appears to be a lot of people wanting to get into beekeeping and buying these nucs which I'm sure must scew the figures one way OR the other on a yearly basis.
Time will tell, once the bee (gold?) rush has calmed right down and maybe a few of the nuc suppliers have moved onto greener pastures but for the time being I'm not sure that I'd place too much weight on the stats -unless they're restricted to colonies going into a minimum of their second winter.
Just a thought.
So is this how it works Doris? You make a statement suggesting something untoward is going on, in this instance on BEE-L, someone asks you to justify it, and you "respond" with a stony silence? Like they say: "silence speaks volumes"
When the science suits, it gets quoted, when it doesn't, you make innuendos about the independence of the researchers, and who has funded the research.
Curiously, Bayer actually funded some of the studies which have not shown their products in a good light.
I think it was a Bonmatin study which Graham White used to quote all the time.
It is a tried and trusted modus operandi of most of the anti pesticide campaigners for some reason or other.
Re. Bee-L, there were a lot of disgraceful slurs made against Jerry Bromenshenk when he suggested in a paper last year that a novel virus was associated with ccd cases. Peter Loring Borst frequently gets accused of being a Bayer lickspittle. His problem is that he reads too much so he can cite dozens of papers which suggest that at field realistic levels, these products are relatively benign for honeybees.
I've heard of those -- Italian suppositories I believe
I don't know for sure about colony numbers but I do know the Aberdeen beekeepers association had more members in the 1930s and 1940s than the SBA has today.
That's according to old copies of the SBA mag.
Another thing worth noting was in relative terms hives were reasonably cheap but bees were pretty expensive and the cost of setting up was high.
Now if I take a guess I would say there are less bee colonies now but that is most likely due to less interest in beekeeping until recent times.
Adverts from the time said that you would recover the setup cost in the first year.
I don't think that would stack up these days for various reasons partly due to monoculture and loss of forage but also the hardware cost of hives frames etc and cheap honey imports
Adverts for bees almost always concentrated on their honey getting ability and hardiness , less stress was put on temper
Last edited by The Drone Ranger; 16-06-2012 at 10:28 PM.
I think when it comes to the BBKA There is also an element of context that has to be considered around this years winter losses. 16% doesn't seem that unreasonable. As far as I'm aware the Bbka has never stated what it considers acceptable. It's also trying to secure funding for research. If it states that 16% isn't that bad, not far off pre varroa levels then the desire to put money into investigating problems might go away so it doesn't surprise me that they're describing 16% losses as "unacceptable"?
I don't know the picture in Scotland, I'm a member of the SBA but I don't have a feel for what the SBA is saying, nor what the appetite is within the Scottish parliament to fund research
Last edited by Neils; 17-06-2012 at 02:48 AM.
You post some perceptive stuff at strange hours.
The Scottish Government chipped in £0.5m into the Insect Pollinators Initiative pot of £10m or so and for that investment there are a couple of projects with limited Scottish involvement and one lead by - ahem - the University of Dundee. Whether there is an appetite to find much more is not something I know about.
One of my past bee inspectors, Julian Johnston, wrote a small book titled 'Nomad amongst the Bees' in which I'm sure he documented winding up his commercial operation during the '80s. Although I don't have a copy to hand (so I may need correcting on this point) I'm pretty sure he stated that he destroyed most of his colonies because there simply wasn't a market for bees at the time.
The recent stories about bees all dying out because of CCD and varroa generated a lot of interest
Certain groups people who got interested in beekeeping at that point became experts very quickly
They were saving the bees from certain extinction mostly from dangers the rest of us been ignoring
That included phone masts, electricity cables, fixed frame hives, foundation ,varroa treatments, gm crops etc.
So the new gurus found that top bar hives,no intervention ,no varroa treatment, long hives, tall hives were the key etc.
I realised I had been living in cloud cuckoo land beekeeping was a whole lot more complicated than I thought,
I wasn't losing any hives but surely it was only a matter of time .
I had my electric cut off, moved into a cave, bought a pushbike, and a solar panel and that's how I saved my bees from certain destruction
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