Is it true that the honeybees are dying out?

Question

I saw a documentary or heard a rumor from Bill Maher that the bees that are essential to pollinating fruits and other plants are catching a nasty virus and therefore, dying out. So now they import bees from Australia or pollinate the flowers by hand.

Answer 1

Yes. A friend of mine was a bee-keeper.  It is called "colony collapse disorder".  They still don't know if its pesticides, mites, parasites, virus or even malnutrition.

A hive can go from active and seemingly healthy to dead in just days. Beekeepers have gone from thousands of hives to just a hundred or two and losing their homes and businesses.

As for importing from Australia, I don't know about that.

Answer 2

Yes they are, for a number of known and unknown reasons. One known reason is a parasitic mite that is running rampant in the USA and giving beekeepers fits. The industry has lost millions of dollars.

Answer 3

It's true and they do know why. For years it was thought that "global warming" was killing them. But, the bugs have a virus that is killing them.

It wasn't man after all.

Answer 4

It is true. Nobody knows why, but bees are dying off at an alarming rate.

Answer 5

Yes. Part of the problem is in the way bee-keepers use the bees, transporting them around the country and having them interact with other colonies in the process of pollinating various fields. If one colony is unhealthy, that will obviously be spread rapidly thru other colonies so a quick solution would be to stop that practice and prevent colonies from mingling this way.

Honeybee populations have declined like this before, usually due to a parasite or illness that is rapidly spread. Since most of the infected or damaged bees simply don't return to the hive, it's hard to know exactly what's causing the decline but it's probably something that periodically reduces bee population.

Pollinating flowers and flowering plants by hand is a monumental task for anything but a colony of bees so if they became extinct that would be bad news for most animal life on Earth as well as the affected plants. That's very unlikely since populations have fluctuated in the past but always rebounded eventually.

Importing bees from elsewhere won't help if they continue to let colonies mingle since the disease or parasite will just spread to the new colonies. Some way of segregating them seems essential in stopping this problem.

Answer 6

Yes, true.  They realized this more than a year ago.  Here is a good site about it:

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/105/b...

Answer 7

yes.  and i think they still don't know why.

but i think they're doing the correct research.

Answer 8

Yes it is true.  These incidents are called colony collapse disorder.  Nobody is 100% sure what is causing them to die out.  Many crops are highly dependent on bees for pollination.  I think I read almonds and cranberries are highly succeptible.  Less than 10% of corn is pollinated by bees, but considering how large the corn crop is this is huge amount of agricultural product to lose.  Some think it is caused by an AIDS like virus, parasites, or pesticides and fertilizers.