ON A SERIOUS NOTE AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO FIGURED OUT GMO SEEDS ARE KILLING THE BEES?

Good call.

If you wanted to build better beehives or improve crop pollination, you'd probably talk to beekeepers and biologists. But mathematicians? At the University of Guelph, experts in bees and numbers are working together on studies of hive design, pollination webs and disease transmission.

“This may be the only math apiculture working group worldwide," said mathematics and statistics professor Hermann Eberl.

He and other department members are now helping researchers in U of G’s School of Environmental Sciences to solve problems in hive geometry, viral disease infection and pollination webs. Their work may assist everyone from beekeepers tending hives to ecologists protecting threatened pollinator habitat.

Make happier bees, goes the thinking, and you'll produce happier beekeepers — not to mention healthier consumers and a healthier food industry largely reliant on bees and other pollinators to help produce each year's harvest.

Eberl, post-doc Rangarajan Sudarsan and Cody Thompson, a biophysics master's student, are modeling air flow in beehives. Bees keep their hive temperature at a just-so range around 35 degrees by vibrating their wings to generate heat. A couple of degrees higher and the developing brood will die. Too cool and the brood may still develop but the bees will take longer to mature. "The brood chamber is held within very narrow constraints, like human body temperature," said retired environmental sciences professor Peter Kevan.

Air flow also alters concentrations of oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapour. It may also impact transmission of disease, such as viruses carried by parasites that scientists believe have devastated bee colonies in North America in recent years.

Guelph statistics professor Ayesha Ali is studying interactions between plants and pollinators through pollination webs. Pollination involves thousands of species of plants and animals, including bees. Teasing out which insects work with particular plants quickly becomes a complex problem, she says. “That’s where the math challenges lie. It’s a huge network."

Ali hopes to develop models to help biologists understand how problems such habitat loss, forest fragmentation or non-native species introduction can affect plant-pollinator interactions.

Worldwide, insect pollination is worth about $217 billion a year in food and fibre production. Researchers from across Canada belong to the Canadian Pollination Initiative (NSERC-CANPOLIN) based at U of G.

Funded by a five-year, $5-million grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the organization aims to stem the growing problem of pollinator decline in agricultural and natural ecosystems in Canada, said Kevan, scientific director of the national research group.

The Guelph bee-math research collaboration began when Thompson, then an undergrad in environmental engineering, started a co-op placement in environmental biology. Working with Kevan, he adapted computing software for simulating building airflow to study air circulation in beehives.

Thompson is now studying the problem with Eberl. Referring to occasional visits to beehives on campus, he said: “I've been stung a few times but it's worth it."
[link to www.uoguelph.ca]

See my post....

Thread: Bees, Brass Sundials, and The Sun which is Not were it should be in the Sky. PLEASE PAY ATTNETION FOLKS!


I think it's possible....

Content aside,you're to stupid to be serious.

Articles
Finally, a suspect in bee decline
2/9/2010


Mites in carcasses cited by University of Guelph entomologist
Chantal Braganza
Toronto Star – January 24, 2010

Everybody loves a bee story these days, it seems.

Especially if it's about Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious vanishing act that's decimated almost 30 per cent of the northern hemisphere's honey producers and pollinators since late 2006. In the past two years alone, hundreds of books have been published on the plight of domestic honeybees.

And if, as the saying goes, the sunny little insects are responsible for one forkful of every three bites of food you eat, that doesn't bode well for the myriad crops in Canada that rely on them for pollination.

Despite this, Ernesto Guzman, an entomological researcher at the University of Guelph, is skeptical that CCD actually exists.

"CCD is an arbitrary name," he says, "designed by U.S. scientists to define a high mortality of colonies that have no explainable reason.

"Radio waves, even terrorist plots" are among some of the theories.

Bees across Canada have declined by 30 to 40 per cent every spring since 2006. After a busy fall of stashing nectar and pollen for the cold months to come, bee colonies get swathed in thick, black wrap for winter hibernation, only to be found dead in the first melting weeks of February and March.

"If you're a dairy farmer," says Tim Greer, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association, "imagine losing between 30 to 40 per cent of your dairy cows each year. That's a significant loss."

Guzman acknowledges that we have a problem. But the Mexico-born bee expert suggests scientists are stuck in nomenclature.

Canadian officials, meanwhile, insist our bees aren't suffering from CCD for one main reason: they aren't disappearing.

"The main symptom among CCD cases described in the States is that they don't find corpses," says Guzman. "It's like they have died in the field and they never came back.

"We don't see that in Canada, I believe, because in the winter they cannot fly out."

A good thing for us, says Guzman, because corpses can be studied, and since the fall of 2007 he has been doing just that. He followed 413 Ontario bee colonies for a year and recorded their fates, studying up-close the 27 per cent of hives that didn't survive winter. In a report to be published in the journal Apidologie, Guzman identifies what killed them: the varroa mite, a crab-like parasite the size of a pen dot.

Abetted by poor bee populations and low food reserves for the winter, Guzman says, the bee bloodsucker is without question why colonies in Ontario, at least, are dwindling so fast.

Ed Nowek of Planet Bee apiaries in Vernon, B.C., ventures the same conclusion for his side of the country. "I've never seen it so hard to keep bees alive than in the past four to five years," he says of his 30-year run in the business."

Though the mite isn't new, beekeepers say what's most disconcerting is the probable cause behind its sudden explosion: a built-up resistance to the chemicals used to kill them. For the same reasons some hospital patients succumb to antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA, varroa has become the superbug of Canada's bees.

And though Apivar, a miticide used in New Zealand and Europe, seems to do the trick on Varroa, it's strictly regulated by Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency. Perhaps rightly so: there's no telling how long it will be effective for.

But, as Greer says, "there's nothing else we can do. Other than wait another winter and see what the results are." Last November, as temperatures dipped in Ontario, the bees began to cluster. He sprayed them with the Apivar, fed them a little extra sugar syrup and tucked them in for the winter, hoping that by spring they'll be buzzing when he comes to unwrap them.

[link to www.orkincanada.ca]

Seems pretty truthy to me, and makes me despise humans a little more.

Where'd you read that?

wow..now thats a g1...and possibly correct...

good job A/C....we need more thinkers like you because the planet is running low on them, ecspeicailly in our society.

opps..im sorry..your not a A/C...

Captain HERO!

[link to maarec.psu.edu]

So you dont read his retarded,attention whore threads?

Some of the problem has been traced to a fungus locally but it could well be that the GM seeds and crops stress the bees causing them to become susceptible to the fungus.

I'd say worth an inquiry.