Harvard Professor Warns, CCD is Only the First Alarm Bell from Bees

Anthony Freda Art

Heather Callaghan

While chemical corporations and critics of bee activists want people to remain focused on addressing symptoms of colony collapse disorder, and fund research aimed at that goal, one Harvard PhD stands out as he presses on pesticides.

Researcher and Harvard professor, Chengsheng (Alex) Lu,  has been outspoken about the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides and their contribution to colony collapse disorder. Especially so, since conducting his own tests for a number of years now. 

But he now warns that a pollinator drop could be the least our worries at this point. That it may be a sign of things to come - bees acting as the canary in the coalmine. That not only are we connected to bees through our food supply, but that the plight that so afflicts them may very well soon be our own.

This Secret to Massive Yields Could Rock the Farming World

According to a new study, it lies in an unpatented technique...

Heather Callaghan

What will ultimately feed the world? Is it really genetic engineering? Is it biodiversity?

What can maintain and stoke that diversity - I mean, make it really flourish with bountiful food using less land?

Of course, using this discovery might mean severing ties with monolithic Big Ag and chemical corps whose actions could block this dream from becoming reality. Monoculture fans need not apply.

Look Again: Who is Behind UK's Initiative to "Help the Bees"?

Anthony Freda Art

Heather Callaghan

With friends like these...

Recently I wrote about a large Canada-wide surveillance initiative: Look Who's Behind This Large Study to "Help the Bees". Following the money trail, one could see that Canada's government was placing "hope" for an answer unto major international biotech and agricultural companies such as Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta etc... The very same companies whose chemical products are implicated for diminishing bee populations and have everything to gain by "finding" an answer that doesn't point back to them.

Does that seem like a gross conflict of interest to you?

It may or may not surprise you to know that similar shadow puppeteering is going on in the UK.

Robot Bees Will Be Better Than The Real Thing Says Greenpeace

Heather Callaghan

This is an update to the original post on April 17, 2013. 

No, this is not a tabloid - it's real. According to several videos, which are posted below, robotic insects have made their first controlled flight. According to the creators of Robobee:

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work . . . Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, the robot was inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second.

In addition to the recent suggestion from insecticide producers that we should "plant more flowers"to aid the declining bee population, Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been working with staff from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Northeastern University's Department of Biology to develop robot bees. These insectoid automatons would be capable of a multitude of tasks: autonomous pollination, search and rescue, hazardous exploration, military surveillance, climate mapping, and traffic monitoring - to name a few.

Horrible Whodunit: Vandals Destroy Tens of Thousands of Bees

Source

Heather Callaghan

Bees are becoming as precious as lost water in the drought-stricken Western states. When millions of them die, it might be referred to as a bee 'holocaust.' Urban beekeeping has been shown to be safer for bees as it keeps them from agricultural plumes. It's no wonder then that the people who keep hives in their off time are praised as heroes. Even the government is willing to pay people in some states to raise them.

So imagine the horror of beekeeper Stephen Mantell when he went into his back yard this weekend to find his hives strewn about and wrecked. Natural or animal causes didn't add up - he found footprints on the hive boxes that contained the living cargo.

Who would have the motive to do such a thing? With or without meaning to, even the newscasters can't help but hint at whom the perpetrators might be.

HFCS Food for Bees Found to Increase Colony Collapse Disorder

Heather Callaghan

Image

A study released on Monday shows that cheaper honey substitutes such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and sugar (made from genetically modified sugar beets) are contributing to massive bee death via Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) by depriving bees of crucial nutrients, which weakens their immune systems.

Sadly, U.S. bee keepers were devastated by the loss of nearly one-third of their cross-pollinating, food co-creator colonies this past winter alone. That finding is close to the yearly average decline over the past six years, making the cumulative data a great concern for the species and crops. Scientists still like to play it safe and say the decline that's damaging the food supply is largely unexplained, but neonicotinoid pesticides have one of the biggest roles in the loss. And, they have everything to do with why HFCS fed to bees is further killing them.

According to researchers at the University of Illinois in the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 28:

Industry’s war on nature: ‘What are the bees telling us?’

Honey Bee/Wikimedia Commons image

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

While industries continue to pollute the planet with their toxic chemicals, toxic waste and toxic spills, Earth’s pollinators sing a swan song that leaves no doubt as to the folly of modern civilization.  Our ability to hear and appropriately respond to the crisis of declining pollinators will determine humanity’s survival.

“In 1923, Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian scientist, philosopher and social innovator, predicted that in 80 to 100 years honeybees would collapse.”  Queen of the Sun

Steiner believed the industrialization of bees would lead to their demise. It looks like he was right. In the past two decades, the United States has lost 100-300 billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and beyond. But several factors above industrialized beekeeping operations contribute to this massive die-off.

Are We Witnessing the Death of Our Planet?

Howard Beale
Activist Post

It seems that we are witnessing the death of our planet right before our very eyes. The extreme weather, Gulf oil disaster and use of deadly dispersants, to decades of agrichemical and synthetic medicines leeching into water ways, and general human pollution resulting in having to now map the North Atlantic Garbage Patch (not to be confused with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) --  has resulted in major breaches to our interdependent life system. 

Here are a few recently-reported disturbing indicators that our life support system may be nearing critical condition:

• Hundreds-of-thousands of dead fish washing up on the Northeast shores of the U.S. 
• Millions of fish and thousands of alligators, turtles, dolphins and other river wildlife died during a record cold snap in South America.
• Fifty whales dying in New Zealand.
• Bee colonies dying off in staggering numbers.
• Extreme weather severely damaging global food output at a time when the population is booming.

Do the controllers not see how it is all connected? Do they not care? Or was the circle of life meant to be broken? Either way, it is foolish to think humanity will not be intimately effected by these recent catastrophes, with more approaching.  Incidentally, the elite Rockefeller Foundation predicts this will be the "Doom Decade."

Many scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders have long predicted apocalyptic events in the near future, yet some of these figureheads surely knew the true nature of our profound interconnectedness.  The world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking's recent declaration that humanity must "abandon earth or face extinction" is the modern equivalent to ancient prophecies.

So, it stands to reason that if they know a certain cause will have a certain effect -- especially as it pertains to our environment -- then predicting the cumulative effect becomes quite simple, even obvious.

Is it much of a stretch then to believe that Earth's demise could be engineered by those with the resources to do so? Or, perhaps, it is simply a natural Earth cycle trying to cleanse itself in an epic battle between Mother Nature and Humanity.

There may be too many variables to blame a specific event or establishment for the festering disease that endangers our planet, but evidence is mounting that Humanity's current course will ultimately destroy our life-giving habitat.  In other words, if the vital links in the food chain are broken, as the oceans and the bees die off, then surely many human deaths will follow.

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Honeybee collapse due to toxic combination of pesticide chemicals

David Gutierrez
Natural News

Researchers from Dundee University, Royal Holloway and University College London are set to carry out a £1.5 million ($2.3 million) study into whether continuous exposure to a cocktail of pesticides is interfering with the brains and nervous systems of bees and other pollinators, possibly explaining their recent drastic decline.

"The landscape has changed considerably over the last 30-40 years; we've seen well-documented changes in our birds, our flora and also in some of our insects," said Andrew Watkinson of the Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), "but now there's a growing concern that our insect pollinators are also in decline, whether that's in terms of the number of honeybees, number of bumblebee species, butterflies and hoverflies."

The researchers have hypothesized that pesticides, many of which are neurotoxins, might be blocking the electrical signals of insect nervous systems. This could produce effects such as making it harder for bees to communicate with each other, preventing them from identifying food sources or making it hard for them to find their hive again at the end of a foraging trip.


It would take only subtle neurological changes to produce severe brain disorders, the researchers have warned.

The IPI is a £10 million program that has enlisted ecologists, computer scientists, molecular biologists and mathematicians to research the causes of pollinator decline. It is funded by the Scottish government, the U.K. department of the environment, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Wellcome Trust.

Insect pollinators are essential for the cultivation and quality of a third of the world's food crops.

"We can take for granted the variety of vegetables, fruits and flowers that we can enjoy every day, but some of the insect pollinators on which they rely are in serious decline," said Alan Thorpe of the NERC. "Understanding the complexities of environmental ecosystems is a priority that will help to ensure the survival of pollinators and the benefits they provide."

Sources for this story include: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environme....

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