What is Digg?Sponsored by Travelzoo
Take Advantage of Ridiculously Low Holiday Airfares view!
travelzoo.com - Flights $52 and up for Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Year. But move on it now.
10 Comments
- billricardi, on 05/21/2009, -0/+5I watched the 90 minute full presentation (see below the viewer for options). This guy really knows his stuff in the field of farming and land use. I don't agree with all of it, but he really opened my eyes in the area of fossil fuel use in modern farms. Well worth a watch.
- Abatrour, on 05/21/2009, -3/+8There are less bees because of the genetically modified crops. All the new crops are now engineered to release pesticides themselves.
These pesticides kill insects, including good ones like bees.
Companies like Monsanto admit that their crops naturally produce an unnatural pesticide, that is why they are so resistant to insects.
Hasn't anyone noticed the direct connection between fewer bees and more GM crops? - inactive, on 05/21/2009, -0/+4One day farmers might get it. A little permaculture goes a very long way. There are other crops aside from Almonds that produce flowers at differing times. Combine these with herbs like Lavender and what not and the bees will be busy all year round. Plant trees around the place to provide wind breaks and under them plant native species to provide shelter for beneficial predators as well as more flowers. In the rows plant bulbs and tubers that flower in Autumn just before the Almonds flower. Then the bee colonies will be pumped and ready for Spring.
Some farmers deserve to go out of business especially when paying an Apiarist 100k a year for that ***** is mandatory. What a waste. - Swipecat, on 05/21/2009, -2/+5Yes. I think Monsanto are scumbags too. But promoting obviously false facts doesn't help the bees, so please desist. The pesticide-producing crops are still confined to small trials and are irrelevant to the current bee problem.
- maclauk, on 05/21/2009, -0/+3Sorry, wrong... we don't know what causes it. When a colony collapses it doesn't leave a load of dead bees to analyse... they bugger off somewhere and leave a largely empty hive to analyse.
Some of the potential causes are parasite spread diseases and systemic pesticides. GM is an unlikely cause as we have similar problems in Europe and we don't do GM crop here. It could be that the European problems are due to two unusually dull and wet summers in a row.
In short we have a few possibilities but no proven cause. - dnesbitt, on 05/21/2009, -0/+2The engineered organisms do not 'release' toxins into the air. The plants produce the toxins internally, and it only affect insects that would try to eat them. The GMOs have been designed such that production of the toxin is high in the leaf and in the roots while very low in the flowering regions.
Furthermore, toxins, such as Bt, are specifically targeted at pest insects like boll weevil. Bt, as the most commonly engineered toxin, has been studied for its effects on bees and monarch butterflies. It does not affect the bees even if they ingest pollen containing high levels while a Nature paper (1999) concluded that the pollen does kill monarchs. Nature later printed a retraction on that study given additional evidence that concluded that although the toxin could kill the butterfly it is never ingests Bt in the wild.
I am not necessarily a supporter of GM, as a life scientist the decrease in genetic diversity is of particular concern to me, but I do take issue with FUD spread about them. - SlumDogMillions, on 05/21/2009, -0/+1Agree
- Oldsmobile, on 05/21/2009, -2/+1If I remember correctly, the reason for colony death syndrome has already been discovered, it's just some kind of disease that can be easily cured with antibiotics.
- Afrochu, on 05/21/2009, -8/+1This story needs more Ariel porn.
- DefaultGen, on 05/21/2009, -11/+3***** bees!
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is