Winter Losses 2011/2012

[Jon]

Mullen et al

Check out what pesticides were found and who put them there. Was it Bayer?
Doh! It was the beekeeper responsible for the highest levels.

Schneider et al

We compared several groups of bees, fed simultaneously with different dosages of a tested substance. With this experimental approach we monitored the acute effects of sublethal doses of the neonicotinoids imidacloprid (0.15–6 ng/bee) and clothianidin (0.05–2 ng/bee) under field-like circumstances. At field-relevant doses for nectar and pollen no adverse effects were observed for either substance. Both substances led to a significant reduction of foraging activity and to longer foraging flights at doses of ≥0.5 ng/bee (clothianidin) and ≥1.5 ng/bee (imidacloprid) during the first three hours after treatment.

[Stromnessbees]

The question I replied to was whether German beekeepers had big losses over the winter.

The answer, taken directly from the beekeepers' mouth, is that there are some massive losses, with beginners as well as with very experienced people.

They treat for varroa, they know how to feed bees for the winter, but they can't keep them alive anymore.

Many are at their wits end and consider giving up.

A friend of mine in Austria lost all his 10 colonies, it happened in late autumn, I inspected the beehouse with him at Christmas.

[Jon]

I don't doubt the losses or the veracity of the beekeepers.
Surely the important thing is to find out what caused the losses instead of jumping on the 'I cannot believe it's not pesticides' bandwagon.

Of course it 'could' be something to do with a pesticide or a pesticide interaction with something else but assuming guilt without evidence is daft.
Colony loss is not evidence of pesticide kill which seems to be what you are saying.

The very worst of the research which has been carried out recently such as the harvard study has started out with the premise that it 'has' to be neonicotinoids and the study then becomes a witchhunt rather than a scientific process.

One of the problems is the way we move bees around as we could be moving novel pathogens from one population to another.
Lest we forget, varroa is a natural parasite of apis cerana which jumped species. Nosema ceranae is relatively new in our bee population as well.

I live on a big island, bigger than yours anyway!, and someone brought in bees with varroa in 2002.

If you read from the start of the thread, beekeeper after beekeeper is reporting hardly any losses and a good winter. This seems to contrast sharply with the experience in Germany. There must be a reason for that. Pesticides? Management? Pathogens? sugar feed?
We use the same neonicotinoids in The UK Ireland and Germany. Clothianidin, Thiamethoxam and Imidacloprid. So why the difference in colony losses between the different jurisdictions?

[Rosie]

Since when does sugar kill bees?
I have never fed anything else but sugar, here in Scotland and previously in Austria, and never had any problems with it. All colonies alive and well.


It's sad that anybody should be discouraged from keeping bees.
If they really feel there are too many hives in one area then they should rather limit the number of colonies per beekeeper than the number of beekeepers.

It's a wonderful experience to even have one or two hives, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it, and nobody has a right to stop your son to get himself a hive if he wants to go ahead anyway.

That's exactly what I thought but advised him not to antagonise the association by ignoring their advice but to try to open up a dialogue. He might then find out the real reason for them not wanting more bees.

Rosie

[Neils]

The various LBKA's have been fairly widely quoted around the place that in their view London is "saturated" with bees I'll try and dig up some of the responses around boris' bees for London scheme.

Jon, it's not just the UK where there are reasonably reliable figures showing increases in colony numbers. Spain, for example, is also showing an increase in colonies since 1990. The US appears to be on a general slow downward trend while the numbers I saw for Germany did indicate a fairly sharp decrease.

Again I think the question is what's different about Germany?

[Jon]

I didn't know Spain was on the increase. They had problems with losses a few years ago as Higes et al were looking at Nosema Ceranae as a possible culprit for CCD.
Sunflowers seem to produce higher levels of neonicotinoids in their pollen and they grow a hell of a lot of sunflowers in Spain. Not sure about the levels in nectar.
Someone on Bee-L suggested that US losses have not been as bad this winter and that some of the commercial guys have losses below 15% whereas other are still losing up to 50%. Because they are competitors for pollen contracts they are not pooling information about what works and what does not. They are all exposed to the same stuff but some are handling their colonies differently.

[Stromnessbees]

Again I think the question is what's different about Germany?

I am not sure Germany is very different from other countries:
As I wrote earlier, it's not easy to establish how many colonies are lost every winter.

It's a well known fact that bees do better in towns, away from intensive agriculture.

I wonder if the commercial beekeepers in the USA and Spain have learned from the past and move their bees away from intensely farmed areas to recover and prepare for winter.


Germany has experienced a massive increase in mais production, and small villages, where most of the beekeeping takes place, are often surrounded by green deserts, devoid of all life but mais.
Those beeeepers usually can't or don't want to move their bees elsewhere, as they mainly do it as a hobby.

645587_m1t1w300q75s1v58806_mais.jpg

So habe sich in den vergangenen sechs Jahren die Anzahl der Biogasanlagen im Land auf rund 700 Anlagen mehr als verdoppelt.

- The number of biogas plants has more than doubled in the last 6 years.

http://www.ka-news.de/region/karlsru...art6066,563754

The contaminated pollen might be all that's available for the bees at certain times.

[Neils]

The data I saw started from 1990 to 2010. There is an obvious question as to how much of that colony increase is due to imports/queen rearing efforts, the removal of which from the numbers might give a more pessimistic view as we saw a few years back here with the media reporting 30% year on year losses and ignoring even splits from artificial swarming.

Might the difference in colony numbers/losses be attributed to a difference in how the raw data is collected/collated between the varying countries?

If it were possible to exclude imported bees/queens from the uk figures, for example, what would our colony growth/loss numbers look like?

[Neils]

Germany has experienced a massive increase in mais production, and small villages, where most of the beekeeping takes place, are often surrounded by green deserts, devoid of all life but mais.
Those beeeepers usually can't or don't want to move their bees elsewhere, as they mainly do it as a hobby.

The contaminated pollen might be all that's available for the bees at certain times.

Is there a variety that is insect pollinated? i was under the impression that it was wind pollinated. If that accounts for their sole source of pollen that might be a worrying indicator, but I'd suggest that the wider issue is the dearth of other forage resulting in bees resorting to collecting from maize to begin with.

If we were to look at the UK, if bees only had OSR, rather than as part of a"balanced diet" would we begin to see issues around colony losses because their sole source of food contains levels of Neonicotinoid rather than the situation we see currently where bees do well enough on it that beekeepers deliberately place hives to forage it, presumably once the OSR has finished other, uncontaminated food sources give bees enough time to metabolise and be rid of the pesticides so there overall effect is minimal?

So can you posit a potential difference between Germany and other countries as possibly being that much of the areas where bees are kept are effectively monocultures growing a crop that isn't great for bees to begin with with potential exposure to presticides on that crop making a bad situation worse?

[Jon]

It's a well known fact that bees do better in towns, away from intensive agriculture.

That's true but more likely to do with better forage.
Did you know they use neonicotinoid products in parks and gardens as well?

http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=16699

Billybonkers was calling to have these products banned in gardens just last week.
I would actually tend to agree with him as these products are quite unnecessary for home or garden use.

But in spite of this we can all see that bees do well in gardens.

I got 100 lbs of honey and 4 nucs from one in my garden last summer. That's the kind of beekeeping problem I like!

Nellie hit the nail on the head when he mentioned the dearth of forage. This is the problem with intensive agriculture/monoculture rather than pesticide use imho.

Nellie, maize is wind pollinated but bees will collect the pollen especially if there is little other pollen available. I have watched my bees collect pollen from my sweetcorn plants on the allotment but it is unusual and it is not a particularly attractive pollen. Obviously there was no agent orange or whatever on my allotment. Where maize is grown you tend to get thousands of acres of it with little other forage. If herbicide is used with it as in 'roundup ready' varieties this eliminates any weed forage for the bees.
Monoculture is bad for bees. No doubt about that at all.
LOL just remembered that concept of roundup ready threads which were suggested due to Eric's deviation from the topic.

Germany has experienced a massive increase in mais production

Where did you get that from Doris. I thought they had always grown a lot of maize in Germany. Has there been a significant increase in the last year or two?