I know what"s killing honey bees, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news91990483.html

http://www.physorg.com/news91990483.html

Could it be genetically engineered crops that are killing honey bees? Let"s think about what"s happening to them logically. I don"t claim to be an expert, just a lay man, but I read the news and here"s what I think.

It"s my understanding that the die off really started about 6 to 8 years ago, maybe a bit longer, and has increased exponentially in the last few years. Apparently honey bees are falling victim to natural predators and are severely weakened overall. Pesticides and other environmental toxins could be to blame but there have been pesticides around for some time. We must ask then, what is new to the equation? We should also ask, if bees are being imported from Austriala to take the place of native bees, why hasn"t Austraila and other countries been effected?

This would suggest that as opposed to something global, the problem must lie in something local, something uniquely north american. Now, I dont know for a fact, but judging from the response in Europe to genetically modified crops, I"d bet that Austriala probably doesn"t widely use genetically modified crops either.

Now, it"s also my understanding that these genetically modified crops can include pesticides right in the genetic material, to naturally ward off predators. I also understand that it"s possible for genetically modified crops to spread their dna into other plant life and other non modified crops via pollen and other ways beyond my limited understanding.

Isn"t it possible that the low levels of pesticide in genetically modified crops could be weakening the bees immune systems somehow, in ways that scientists behind these gene modifications couldn"t have predicted?

I"d be willing to bet that if you looked at a chart, you"d see that genetically modified crops have grown in scope about at the same exponential rate that the bee deaths have been occuring. The levels of whatever is harmful in these genetically modified crops may not be enough to outright kill bees, thus scientists wouldn"t have picked up on the problem, but it would be enough to weaken an individual bees immune system over time so that eventually the bee cannot cope with natural predators.

The bee would basically constantly have a cold because it can"t deal with whatever new genetic material exists in the pollen it"s harvesting from the crops.

Therefore, healthy bees brought from Austrialia will eventually get sick and die too, and if genetically modified crops spread to other areas of the world in the same broad scope we have embraced them here in the States, then you"ll see a dying out of bees there too.

Now, another interesting question to ask is, what"s happening to other pollenators like butterflies? Are they dying out too? Is it more gradual becuase maybe butterflies have tougher immune systems or has nobody even bothered to pay enough attention to tell?

Just by watching discovery channel I"ve figured out that genetically changed material can spread beyond the original target crops. Is it possible that it"s spread to what farmers and scientists thought were "organic" crops and nobody has even noticed, except of course the bees getting sick and dying?

It would be interesting to learn if bees were getting sicker or dying out more in areas that contain genetically modified crops. Frankly, I"m surprised nobody on the net really seems to have picked up on this connection yet.

It would be ironic if that in our efforts to improve crop yield by using genetically modified plant dna, we sealed our fate by getting rid of the pollenators we need to have those crops survive.

It would be especially ironic if the genetic material potentially killing these bees has spread beyond control and has now severly contaminated the environment in ways that cannot be contained. What that would mean very shortly s a very different way of life without many of the things that make life so beautiful, like busy little bees.

I really know very little on this subject, I"m just bringing it up for discussion. I hope people a lot smarter than I am pick the subject up and investigate further.

L

I live in Pa. where this is major news. There is no evidence that genetically altered crops have anything to do with the die-off. There are three major factors contributing to this:

1) the well-known one - the varroa honeybee mite, which has been plaguing them for some years now. Experimentation in Australia and New Zealand with the essential oil from the neem tree, a relative of the mahogany and a beautiful tree, has yielded the best bee/mite death ratio so far; about 1 bee in 10 dies to effect a clean sweep of the mite infestation.

2) the lesser known one - the pesticide imadacloprid, which has been shown to heavily interfere with the bees' sense of direction. Bees get lost, can't return to their hive, and since honeybees are a social creature only, unlike some wasps and hornets, they cannot live on their own and die. The hive bereft of bees also dies. We need to stop using this pesticide Yesterday; as it may be that it's effects are cumulative and is only now showing.

3) the least known one - beehive architecture has not enjoyed any modernization since it's inception in the 19th century. The hives are built to hold population densities in excess of how the bees live naturally, which probably increases the likelihood of all sorts of infections to prosper, something that has been ongoing to a lesser degree but chronically since we started keeping bees.

There will no doubt be other culprits as we intensify the effort to figure this all out, since our welfare depends on it. Nothing else we know of other than the honeybee can pollinate our crops so effectively.

On the GE theory. Some GE crops have been developed to be resistant to certain herbicides. Where these crops are used, it is likely that the amount of herbicides used will be higher. This could affect bees.
Greater herbicide use will also decrease the diversity of plants in the area. This might affect the overall health of bees, as their diets would not be as varied.

......solution: create genetically modified bees, making them resistant to their new dietry enviroment.

I THINK HONEY BEES ARE DISAPPEARING BECAUSE OF ALL THE LAWN CHEMICALS USED TODAY THROUGHOUT THE U.S. PEOPLE NEED TO STOP CUTTING THEIR GRASS EVERY WEEK AND DO IT EVERY 2 AND A HALF WEEKS. THAT WAY THE WILD FLOWERS LIKE DANDELIONS AND SUCH HAVE TIME TO GROW AND THE HONEY BEES CAN FEED. WITH THESE NEW LAWN CHEMICALS, PEOPLE ARE PUTTING THEM IN THEIR LAWN AND IT INSTANTLY KILLS ALL THE DANDELIONS AND OTHER WILD FLOWERS FOR THE WHOLE SEASON. THE PIONEERS BROUGHT THESE FLOWERS FROM EUROPE TO THE U.S TO SERVE A PURPOSE, NOT TO BE ELIMINATED! WE NEED TO GET BACK TO THE GOOD OLD FASHION WAY OF TAKING CARE OF OUR LAWNS.

THANKS,
BRYAN

Hey BRYAN, are you related to Nick?

This is a bad omen for America. An A (America) without a B (bees) means America is up the *** creek without a paddle, no plan B. Good luck with your (non)progress in addressing global warming and global politics. You can't escape karma on your SUVs and Hummers!

I go along with Bryan. People put lots of filthy poisons on their gardens to make them look 'pretty'. They also get rid of the wild flowers which bees like (stinging nettles are great for attracting butterflies), hedgerows which protect gardens and which birds live in, the same birds who eat mites and other insects which are harmful to bees. The same birds who are also being poisoned in gardens.

Is there anything more ugly than a billiard table lawn which needs to have water wasted on it every hot day?

Also a huge increase in air pollution and rapid weather changes could affect this, but yes in general honey bees have a very weak genetic struction that is pretty specific, it collapses if there is usually a massive genetic leap or mutation

Agree with all of this. Ironic that the creature most valuable and necessary for our crops, livestock, and therefore ourselves, is also a fragile creature, and one that is completely ignored in our continued myopic mindsets in developing more and more unnatural ways to produce higher yielding crops for the express reason of greater profit, while consumers dump untold amounts of crap on their yards to force a perfect picture. One is supposed to shave their face not their lawn.

Get rid of your grass; plant gardens; call your state representative and demand accountability: nearly every lawn/crop chemical we use is harmful. Go to a nurseryman's conference and you see all these elderly fellows shaking all over from the Parkinson's and other diseases, just from years of inhaling all those foul fumes. Walk through the garden section of the store - do you think it smells like that and is always located at the end of the store for nothing? The only place where the names of the chemicals are longer than in the pharmacology industry.

Unlike glacier melting, or rising temps, or loss of species in the rainforest, the approaching giant loss of honeybees, if it happens, will produce a domino effect that won't take decades for fruition. Won't even take years. It will take a couple of seasons. In Pa. we are projected to lose more than 50% of our cultivated bees this year alone. Maybe you should stock up on your vegetable seeds now before they inflate to 10,000% of their price. And maybe learn how to be a farmer - and a bee...

Bees are the 'Canary in the Mine' for our existance on this planet. Its time to wake up and not only take notice of the changes we have caused but to actually start doing something positive about it. Its a sad state of affairs that we have used our planet like a toxic trash can and easily forget that our lives depend on the health of our planet. Actually our (humans, animals, insects, plants, eco-system) complete existance as species depend on its health. The earth has been dying for quite some time now. Bees are dying now and we are still arguing over cause but no one seems to be in a panic to change their life styles. If the bees go completely, we go completely. Its time to take big steps to fix this and to move fast. Good luck everyone. This is scary times.

Synthetic honey and GMO bees - Part II

A French governmental report confirms suspicions of a mass poisoning of bees involving hundreds of thousands of colonies of honey bees. According to the report of the French Scientific and Technical Committee, Bayer's seed treatment GAUCHO pesticide is to blame - at least in part.
Earlier this year, I published an article by French journalist Michel Dogna, who had investigated the ecological catastrophe and pointed a finger at Bayer's toxic product. His article - Synthetic honey and GMO bees? - can be found here.
Coalition against Bayer-Dangers, as well as French and German beekepers' unions are calling for an immediate ban of the pesticide.
France: Governmental report claims BAYER-pesticide GAUCHO responsible for bee-deaths
Coalition against Bayer-Dangers is calling for a ban
November 25th, 2003
The report on bee-deaths, published by the French Comité Scientifique et Technique (CST), shows that the use of the pesticide GAUCHO is jointly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of bee colonies. Environmental activists and beekeeper unions are calling for a ban on the agricultural toxin.
The summary of the report states: "The results of the examination on the risks of the seeds-treatment GAUCHO are alarming. The treatment of seeds by GAUCHO is a significant risk to bees in several stages of life." The 108-page report was made by order of the agricultural ministry of France by the universities of Caen and Metz as well as by the Pasteur Institute.
The use of GAUCHO on sunflowers was prohibited in France four years ago because of the high risk to bees. However after this step, the bee-deaths did not decrease noticeably - beekeepers are blaming this on the extensive use of agricultural toxins in maize cultivation. The concluding-report of the CST agrees, stating: "Concerning the treatment of maize-seeds by GAUCHO, the results are as alarming as with sunflowers. The consumption of contaminated pollen can lead to an increased mortality of care-taking-bees, which can explain the persisting bee-deaths even after the ban of the treatment on sunflowers".
The pesticide GAUCHO (containing the active substance Imidacloprid) is produced by the German BAYER-group. With an annual turnover of more than 500 million Euro this is the group´s top selling agricultural agent. Critics assume that the high sales figures are the reason why the company is contesting a ban on its use.
The thesis, as stated by bee institutes, that infestation by Varroa mites was responsible for the bee deaths, appears to be an excuse, according to Fridolin Brandt of the Coalition against Bayer-Dangers: "We have been concerned with Varroa mites since 1977, and for decades they haven't been a danger. It is the extensive use of pesticides and the accompanying weakening of the bees which is leading to the bee-deaths." Brandt has been a full-time beekeeper for more than 30 years.
Maurice Mary, spokesman of the French beekeepers union Union National d'Apiculteurs (UNAF): "Since the first application of GAUCHO we have had great losses in the harvest of sunflower honey. Since the agent is staying in the soil up to three years, even untreated plants can contain a concentration which is lethal for bees." The UNAF representing about 50.000 beekeepers is calling for a total ban of GAUCHO, following the presentation of the CST report.
The German beekeepers united in the Deutsche Berufsimkerbund (DBIB) and the Coalition against Bayer-Dangers are also calling for a ban on its use. In Germany, Imidacloprid is used mainly in the production of rape, sugar beet and maize. The situation in German agriculture is comparable to the French: In the past years almost half of the bee-colonies have died, which led to a loss of output of several thousand tonnes of honey per year. Furthermore, because bees do the most pollination, there are also losses of output on apples, pears and rape.
We would be pleased to send to you the 108-page report of the Comité Scientifique et Technique (in French) and a statement by the Coordination des Apiculteurs de France (in English)
Coalition against BAYER-dangers ?www.CBGnetwork.org ?CBGnetwork@aol.com ?Fax: (+49) 211-333 940 Tel: (+49) 211-333 911
See also more recent (Feb. 2004) articles:
France bans use of six Fipronil insecticides PARIS, Feb 23 (Reuters) - France said on Monday it would ban the use of six insecticides containing Fipronil, an active ingredient notably used in the Regent TS insecticide produced by BASF Agro , because it is suspected of killing bees. Fipronil was marketed under the trade name Regent for use against major pests on a wide range of field and horticultural crops but it is also marketed under other names for insecticides against fleas, ticks or mites (Reuters AlertNet, UK).
Bayer shares fall on insecticide, Roche bid worries
French ban pesticides sold in Australia
Update May 2004:
26 May 2004 - France suspends use of Gaucho insecticide for corn
French Agriculture Minister Herve Gaymard on Tuesday announced it planned to stop use of the Gaucho pesticide to treat corn seeds until it is reviewed by the European Commission in 2006.
In January last year, Gaymard had already extended for three years suspension of the use of Gaucho, a chemical produced by the German chemicals and pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, for treatment of sunflower seeds.
Gaucho, like another pesticide Regent TS produced by German chemicals giant BASF, has been accused by French bee-keepers of causing a high mortality rate among bees. Sales of Regent TS was suspended in France last February.
An agriculture ministry report deemed that the government's decision to give farmers till June to use up their remaining stocks of pesticide was much less costly that destroying the crop seeds already sprayed. But the national association of bee-keepers says massive damage is being done to bee populations, which are crucial to plant pollination.
Subisidiaries of Bayer and BASF, which sold Regent TS, are under criminal investigation in France for selling an agricultural product that is toxic to humans or animals. (sourche: AFP)
French beekeepers say about 90 billion of their insects have been killed over the last 10 years by a pesticide.
The chemical, used on crops including maize and sunflowers, damages the bees' sense of direction so they become lost. It is used in the UK on several crops, though not in exactly the way it is used in France, and British beekeepers have been urged to be on their guard. UK apiarists say the value of bees to the agricultural economy is immense, and they fear bees are becoming rarer.
The chemical implicated in the loss of French bees is imidacloprid, marketed under a variety of names including Gaucho. It is slowly released in the plants, protecting them against insect attack by destroying their ability to find their way.
A London newspaper, the Observer, reported: "Almost immediately after the chemicals were introduced 10 years ago, beekeepers reported that their bees were becoming disoriented and dying.
Used in UK
"Within a few years honey production in south-west France fell by 60%. According to the chairman of the national beekeepers' association, Jean-Marie Sirvins, a third of the country's 1.5 million registered hives disappeared. "As a result, France has had to import up to 24,000 tons of honey annually." The pesticide companies say their products are not responsible for killing the bees.
There are no reports of any ill effects from applications of imidacloprid in the UK, where it is licensed for use on beet. There are restrictions on its use when the plants are in flower, or for spraying the foliage. But Richard Jones, the director of the International Bee Research Association, told BBC News Online: "Beekeepers here have to be on the alert.
More needed
"The verroa mite, which feeds on the bees' blood, arrived from mainland Europe, and we know that bees' nests can travel a long way on container ships.
"People hear about bees and think only about honey, but it's the other side of the problem that's worrying. "They add billions of pounds to the value of the agricultural economy every year because of their work in pollinating crops like apples.
"We don't have enough bees in the UK, and we have very few feral bees. Every time a hedgerow is destroyed, that means the loss of nesting places for bumblebees."
By Alex Kirby, 1 March 2004 ?BBC News Online environment correspondent
From: Coalition against BAYER-dangers ?CBGnetwork@aol.com ?Fax: (+49) 211-333 940 Tel: (+49) 211-333 911

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/30/164859/442

Here is a very good and recent article on the issue, which now has a name - Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Recent evidence indicates that poisons other than Merit are also contributing. http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=12073

If things keep getting worse for the bees, maybe community - owned hives for the express purpose of strengthening the species could be something to explore. Yes the agro/chem companies need to be inspired to develop much safer products (if that's even possible), but I don't anticipate many lawyers blocking communities from building hives. Education is needed: i.e., can this be done without increasing varroa mite infestation?, etc.
Some encouraging news on the mite. A fungus that attacks the mite (these mites are really tough creatures) is being researched. Hopefully that doesn't turn into it's own nightmare.


http://www.beesource.com/

hive-mind.com/bee/

http://outdoorplace.org/beekeeping/citybees.htm

www.beekeeping.com/ This is a great site.

www.hcn.org/silence_of_the_bees/

Try googling "beekeeping" and "beekeeping regulations" followed by your state

I think it is still too early to say the bee Colony Collapse Disorder is due to this or to that. So to those who question genetic engineering please keep in mind that we have been engineering life for probably 10 thousand years. Corn, rice, tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, houseplants, flowers, cows, pigs … etc., and your dog have all been modified to bring out the traits we deem valuable. The method may be different today but in general, I am not suspicious of the results. I will add one caveat to this; if we have selected the bees so they have lost enough genetic diversity then the species would become more vulnerable. Similar to the potato famine in Ireland, everyone was growing the same potato, which made everyone vulnerable to the blight.

http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?act=Pos...=13797&p=194022

http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?act=Pos...=13797&p=194022

If built-in pesticides were the cause, it'd be pretty obvious. Bee-keepers check which pest-control methods are being used ( including built-ins ), before they rent out their bees, because they need those hives back to rent again. It's pretty obvious when an agribusiness uses gen eng pest control, because they cut back on spraying or drop the concentration, or they go to spot-treatment with pheromone-based insect control.

Built-in pesticide is generally specific to a plant's natural enemies. Most plants don't produce wide-spectrum insecticides to avoid killing off their own pollinators. Hence, when a pest-control gene gets transplanted, its specificity also gets transplanted.

If what you're proposing is true, the bee die-offs should be traceable to culprit-crops. Yes it can take awhile for stressors to cause colony collapse, but honeybees work themselves to death in just a few months. Hence, each colony's collapse would be in part traceable to the last couple of places that hive had been rented out to. The colony collapses should show more clustering geographically, and also seasonally by crop. There should be more connections of the form "George and Sam both rented their bees to Acme, and now they're all dead, but nobody's bees died at Agron".

Yes SOME gen eng seeds can crossbreed with weeds and infiltrate, but the takeover and spread are gradual. These die-offs suddenly spiked just since October, all across the US. There's no vector, no movement across the map like a weather pattern. If this was man-made, it'd need to be in something DISTRIBUTED simultaneously, AFTER last year's growing season. The only other way for something to spread that widely that fast is if birds carry it, but not if the culprit is seeds. Birds carry seeds in their gut and droppings, but they dump their load after at most a couple of hours of flight. Birds in flight have terrifically fast metabolisms; what they eat constantly comes out the other end constantly to make room for more food.

Also, built-in pesticides leave pesticide residue in the dead bee. There should also be genetic patent markers in the pollen on the dead bee. Patented genes generally have multiple patent tags, so the farmer can't duck the royalties by cross-breeding the seeds. Some gen eng plants can't breed at all -- the seed is sold sterile, so the farmer has to buy new seed each each year - and if the seed is sterile, the farmer isn't renting bees to pollinate it. Rented bees don't range very far afield -- they stay within a few hundred yards of the hive.

There's a more likely possibility, which has been a continuing problem with selective breeding AND direct gene transplants: they make a crop plant bigger, juicier, faster-growing, resistant to drought and to pests X, Y and Z. The tradeoff ends up being near-zero resistance to something else -- day, a benign fungus that doesn't hurt the plant but kills bees. Crop testing might not catch that, if they over-control the test environment and keep sending in fresh bees to control that particular variable.

Bad selective-breeding tradeoffs were very obvious when big yellow ears of selectively bred corn lacked the hardiness of maize. Genetic engineers claim they now know what they're doing, but they're still stuck with an inconvenient fact of nature -- genetics isn't one gene, one trait. Genetics is more like one gene, 3 traits on average. What do the other 2 do? They code for proteins. Even the simplest organism has 15,000+ proteins which interact with each other in complex protein-synthesis chains. Are any of those harmful to bees in the food chain? Who knows. Who cares in the rush to market? A plant may suddenly CHANGE which proteins it's producing, in response to some environmental condition the designers didn't test for. Any one of thousands of macrobiotic bug-types in the soil may provoke an immune response from the plant, which produces something unexpected because some multiple-use gene got replaced.

News stories mistakenly claim that geneticists have "cracked" the code. That's half true. They can print out the code but they can't interpret most of it, so they focus on traits they get paid to locate and transplant. "Marketing says make the color more appealing".

There's also cytoplasmic DNA and RNA. Loops of genetic material called plasmids ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid ) float around in the cell fluid and control an organism's development, including its immune system and pest-defenses. Plasmids aren't part of an organism's nuclear DNA ( genome ). Genetic designers ignored plasmids, until the Soviets darted using drop-n plasmids to enhance the lethality of biological weapons like anthrax. Crop plasmids CAN'T be inventoried because they're a hodgepodge of different loops scattered throughout the cell, like old files on a PC. The cytoplasm is like the cell's 'operating system' -- it reads the genetic code and carries out the instructions, but can also turn genes on and off in response to developmental stages or environmental challenges. A simple organism's immune system, for example, can respond to an amazing variety of potential threats.

Maybe it's not the genetic engineering at all. Soil bacteria, like other bacteria, can develop resistance to antibiotics ( including built-in antibacterials ) often within DAYS of exposure. So if a gen eng crop has a new weakness in, say, a defense that protects its pollinators from a soil-borne infection, the bacteria may well adapt to that weakness and move into that niche. That'd be a local development though -- it'd show up someplace first and then spread.

These colony collapses have TWO modes of spread, a slow decimation that happened over years, and a sudden fast decimation. The slower spread could have been via the bees themselves -- a hive gets rented, maybe picks up something, then gets rented out to another farm several hundred miles away and poof, the resistant bacteria or whatever has jumped several hundred miles and can infect any subsequent hive rented to that vicinity. That could maybe explain the increased mortality over years, but that leaves the dubious explanation for the sudden die off -- that all these hives more or less simultaneously hit their cumulative stress limit and collapsed all at once, though much of the country had a fairly mild winter.

So while gen eng crops could conceivably provided a 'foot in the door' for some pathogen to selectively gain a foothold in North America, the outbreaks seem too homogenous ( evenly spread ) to be coming from gen eng crops NOW. I'm not an ag specialist, but I do know statistics. The first thing you look for in any outbreak is a pattern, however faint, leading back to a route of introduction. It's very difficult for something to spread this evenly this suddenly, whether it's spread by an industry, or by fast-moving birds, or by terrorists. It's also very unusual for something this new in the food chain to be so widely successful so suddenly -- most sudden shifts would succeed well in some habitats and poorly in others. CCD is more PREVALENT in some regions, but there's no clear pattern to the regions by climate, or seasonality, or type-of-soil chemistry, or bird mobility -- all those analyses have drawn a blank.

Anyhow, keep thinking / looking for clues -- SOMEBODY'S got to spot it before the crop season goes down the drain across the board.

One oddity intrigues me -- the queen bees don't appear sick, but they're not laying eggs. Their attendants are just standing around, as though idle -- as if a command had gone out to stop producing more workers. It's conceivable that some environmental contaminant spoofed their scent-command structure, though it's sort of inconceivable that the queen doesn't know she's in an empty hive. The queen's scent-commands can normally over-power anything else in the hive, and one of the top priorities is normally to produce guard bees for the hive entrances to protect the queen. If the queen can reproduce sufficiently to maintain a supply of attendants standing around, why isn't she at least producing the drone males to supply the sperm, and enough worker-bees to at least tend the larvae? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeybee

The other oddity is that the collapsed-colony hives aren't full of dead bees, and they're not piled outside. The ASSUMPTION is that they're all dead, but are they dead, or just gone? It'a conceivable that something environmental messed up their navigation and over time they got lost, didn't find their way back to the hive. That would stress a hive, and could even burn out the queen trying to keep up with attrition. Bees get their flight plans from each other by a kind of dance -- fly THAT direction for so many beats, then turn left at the big red silo-thing; nobody's cleaned out the food there yet.

It occurs to me that IF the queen senses something irreparably wrong with her own reproductive cycle, or senses some unmanageable stressor connected to the location of the hive, she might stop laying and send out virgin queens to start new hives somewhere else, particularly if the hive can't pin down the stressor and all they can try is new hive locations. That would explain the seemingly orderly shutdown of hives -- workers would keep working until they're used up and keel over in the field, as they normally would anyway. Everybody's afraid the crops won't get pollinated, but is anybody sure yet that they're NOT being pollinated where a colony has recently gone empty? There are normally SOME rogue bees in any given field; the farmers just rent more to make sure they've got more than enough to pollinate several times over. I'm watching for reports that either the crops definitely haven't been pollinated, or that they mysteriously did get pollinated.

Also, we keep reading about Africanized bee traits showing up in honeybees. The usual assumption is that crossbreeds succeed simply because they're fiercer but aggression is generally fine-tuned already in native bees. I'm wondering if 'slightly africanized' honeybees could have a recessive trait allowing transfer to another hive, if they don't like their hive moved over and over to pollinate different crops. It must be somewhat stressful for a hive to suddenly find itself in a new location several times per year. Granted there's a superabundance of food at each new location -- perhaps too much. Their honey gets taken away from them to force them to work over and over to make year. Every year, beekeepers get better at figuring out how to get more work out of each hive, without having to maintain or ship too many hives.

I'm wondering if hive-transfers could be a possibility for 'slightly africanized' bees, because it DID happen when South American fire ants spread to North America ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ant#Introduced_species ). Initially they were highly territorial -- but when farmers started carpet-bombing them with ultra-pesticides, the fire ants adapted by connecting up their underground tunnel systems with adjacent colonies, so they could evacuate. The adjacent colonies started accepting refugees without killing them, like a mutual defense pact. When the pesticide washed away, refugees would re-occupy territory that they'd scent-marked, including the farmers' tractors, from which the scent markers couldn't be removed without COMPLETELY dismantling the tractor and soaking EVERY piece in solvent. The adaptation worked, because farmers couldn't live with continuous high levels of pesticide needed to kill the fire ants, which simply hid out on vacant lands.

Colony-sharing by fire ants was ASSUMED to be a mutation, but the sharing ants were physically indistinguishable from non-sharing ants, with no sign of species divergence. As far as I know, nobody did a complete genome-diversity workup to find out if there really WAS a mutation, which would be interesting because the colony-sharing behavior suddenly appeared in several states. The assumption was that colony-sharing fire ants were hitching a ride with migrant farm workers, which didn't really explain how they could take over suddenly from dug-in colonies of NON-colony sharing fire ants who were fierce competitors to say the least. Some animal species can switch from mutually competitive to mutually cooperative when their survival depends on it, or when it's simply advantageous. Another possibility is that some fire ants mi could conceivably change their ID-scent to mimic a rival colony.

What's interesting about red imported fire ants ( RIFAs ) is that their colony-sharing / defection ability showed up after they were moved around to several successive habitats where they weren't a top predator, and where the trick of evacuating to another colony actually worked. US farmers eventually caught on that pesticide overkill wasn't going to work, so they imported natural enemies of the fire ant such as the ant-decapitating phlorid fly, which the ants can't run from. The phlorid fly uses a Night of the Living Dead tactic -- the flies get inside the ants' heads, and the larvae slowly consume the ants' live brains while the ant is still responsive to evacuation orders. Then the flies emerge and infest the shared colonies. Fire ants are a perfect example of a pest that took over BECAUSE there was reliance on pesticides exclusively, while ALL benign flies and whatnot were killed off as 'pests'. Over-reliance on built-in pesticides has the same inherent Achilles heel -- it INVITES pests ( whether insect, bacterial or fungal ) that can take over given the simple absence of natural enemies, wherever farmers try to eradicate all life but their crops. Recognizing and tolerating a few benign insects can be a LOT easier than dealing with what moves in to replace them -- especially if it's adept at concealment, as many species are.

It's important to realize that when fundamental changes are made to a wide-area ecosystem ( such as changing which species can survive and which natural enemies can survive ), the ecosystem starts adapting to that in various ways. The soil bacteria adapts, a wide range of insects try to adapt, EVERYTHING starts trying out adaptations - across millions of square miles of crop-lands. Nature may dredge up adaptations that have been dormant for millions of years, or may revive adaptations infrequently used for something else. Some species change their behaviors when they find themselves in a sparse ecosystem ( e.g. where one crop plant covers the landscape and everything else has been killed off, as though a forest fire had just come through, or as though a volcano had just created a new island. Some species can elevate their rates of mutation when their environment favors opportunistic expansion. Some species STOP producing chemical defenses against natural enemies or pathogens not currently present, and genetic engineers mistake those capabilities for junk genes, because they haven't thoroughly studied the plant's genetic background in the wild, and aren't paid to. They treat traits as isolated traits, because that's how their employers view traits, each as a separate commodity to be patented and packaged -- or withheld to be packaged separately. Profit priorities are simply DIFFERENT from responsible stewardship of genetic diversity -- though there's profit in that too, for the farmer who can't get their crops pollinated because the Law of Unintended Consequences has bit farmers yet again . One wonders whether Europe's caution will pay off in the long run over US eagerness to make a technological leap. The line between courage and foolhardiness is easily obscured by unknowns.