Foreword
Europe's bee-keeping industry could be wiped out in less than a decade as bees fall victim to disease, insecticides and intensive farming, an international bee-keeping body said yesterday. Gilles Ratia, president of Apimondia, said: “With this level of mortality, European bee-keepers can only survive another eight to ten years. We have had big problems in south-west France for many years, but also now in Italy and Germany.”
Last year, about 30% of Europe’s 13.6 million hives died, according to Apimondia’s figures. Losses reached 50% in Slovenia and as high as 80% in south-west Germany. With 35% of European food crops relying on bees to pollinate them, it posed a big threat for farmers, said Ratia. “It is a complete crisis,” said Francesco Panella, who tends about 1,000 hives in Piedmont, northern Italy. “Last year, I lost about half my production. I can’t survive more than two or three more years like this.”
Mystery has surrounded the recent decline in bee numbers, but most keepers blame modern farming methods and the powerful new pesticides used on crops such as sunflower, maize and rapeseed. According to Apimondia two main factors have been responsible for weakening bee colonies: insecticides and the parasitic mite varroa. Once weakened, the hives are then decimated by viruses and other diseases.
Evidence of farming’s impact came from the fact that French honey output had suffered in intensive sunflower farming areas but had remained steady in mountains and chestnut forests, said Henri Clement, president of the French bee-keeping union. Bee-keepers are perplexed about why so little attention is given to an industry that supplies 58% of Europe’s appetite for 340, 000 tonnes of honey a year. “If cattle were producing 30% less milk each year, it would not be acceptable. But that is what we have had to put up with,” said Josef Stich, a beekeeper with 200 fives near Vienna.
Earlier this year, the EU voted to phase out the most toxic pesticides after years of wrangling. “Politicians are more susceptible to the big lobbying of the chemical industry,” Ratio said. “We bee-keepers can talk and talk, but we don’t receive much consideration.”
Reuters, Brussels; 28th April 2009
Honied Facts
The honeybee is a three-gender insect: the worker, the queen (female) and the drone (male). The queen mates with the drone in the air (on the wing) and stores sperm in a gland near her tail. When the time comes to lay her eggs she does one of two things:
(i) The queen lays an unfertilised egg which later becomes a drone (male). The egg develops through parthenogenesis (virgin birth). The males are in fact clones of the queen, twin brothers as much as sons.
(ii) The queen lays a fertilised egg. As she lays the egg inside a bee cell the queen releases some of the drone sperm onto the egg. Normally the egg will develop into a worker.
When an established hive becomes overcrowded, the queen of the colony stops laying worker and drone eggs in cells and stops releasing pheromones that control the activities of bees in the colony. When this happens, worker bees construct a few (4-12) new queen cells hanging vertically down from the comb.
The queen then lays baby queen larva into these few cells and leaves the hive, together with around half of the bees, to start a new colony elsewhere; this is the ‘swarm’.
The first queen to hatch from the new queen cells has a choice. Either she swarms herself taking more of the colony with her. Or she stays, stinging the remainder of queen larva to death before reigning supreme in the hive.
Something peculiar happens if the queen of the hive dies, perhaps through an accident. Then the worker bees drag a worker pupa from its cell, enlarging the worker bee cell downwards, at right angles to its original position. Sixteen days later a new queen emerges from the old worker larva.
As the only difference between the once-to-be-worker and the new queen seems to be its diet, magical properties have been attributed to royal jelly because of its ability to determine the size, shape and gender of the honeybee. But a closer scrutiny of the evidence suggests a different hypothesis.
When a worker pupa is seconded to become the new queen, a worker cell containing an egg or larva is enlarged downwards at right angles to its original direction. The prospective queen hatches from the egg three days after being laid and is immediately fed on rich bee milk - royal jelly - for the next five days. The larva grows quickly, fills the bee cell and is capped by workers to incubate. Eight days later a new queen emerges. She then feeds only on royal jelly for the rest of her life.
Prospective worker eggs are laid in worker cells, hatch on day 3, fed smaller amounts of royal jelly on days 4 and 5, and then on a diet that gradually changes over days 6, 7 and 8 to honey and pollen. The cell is capped and a worker emerges 14 days later, which is 21days after the egg is laid [1]. The question is: how can just three days of different feeding alter the coding of genes in such a way that radically changes the physical and behavioural traits of the honeybee?
Cotterell's Sunbeam Hypothesis
It would seem that one of two things is happening. Either a diet of royal jelly speeds up the metabolism, with the increased amount of food aiding development and growth, which results in a shorter gestation period; or a mixed diet of royal jelly, honey and pollen slows down the metabolic rate, with the reduced amount of food restricting growth and prolonging gestation. In either case, the reduced gestation period of the queen means limited amounts of mutations from solar ‘radiations’, whereas the longer gestation period of the worker leads to more extensive mutations from radiations.
To use another analogy, the queen experiences only 16 days in a ‘microwave oven’, whereas the worker experiences 21 days. It is the ‘electromagnetic roasting’ that causes the mutation, changing the worker into a queen through a process of ‘electrochemical transduction’[2].
The fact that the queen cells and worker cells are displaced on the comb by 90 degrees provides a clue to the mutational forces at play. Electromagnetic radiation is made up of two components, one electrical and the other magnetic. These two components are displaced by 90 degrees.
This suggests that the queen pupa and worker pupa are mutated by different mutational forces, one electrical, the other magnetic. This explains why the queen-to-be worker pupa cell is enlarged downwards at right angles to the original worker cell whenever a new queen is required.
That honeybees are controlled by the sun is not news; they are known to navigate using the sun. Their behaviour also becomes highly excited and erratic during electrical storms and in the proximity of electrical appliances.
But according to Maurice Cotterell…see Appendix 1 of The Tutankhamun Prophecies (Headline Publishing, London, 1999, ISBN 0 7472 6050 8)…the honeybee cell itself encodes the solar magnetic fields in tangible form.
The diagram above taken from Cotterell is annotated as follows: ‘The angles of 30 degrees, 60 degrees, and 90 degrees correspond to 7 days’ travel of the sun’s magnetic fields with respect to the earth.
The analysis shows that every 7 days (corresponding to the period of polarity changeover of the equatorial fields scanning the earth), the angle of the sun’s polar field, in relation to the earth, is 90 degrees. The polar field in respect to the equatorial field is close to 30 degrees (actually 29), and the equatorial field in respect to the earth amounts to 60 degrees (actually 61).
Afterword
When quizzed on Farming Today about the newly announced £10 million for research into the decline of honey bees and other pollinating insects, environment secretary Hilary Benn said bees’ big problems were diseases, bad weather and loss of habitat. “We haven’t seen any evidence that [pesticides] have an adverse impact on bees,” he insisted.
There is in fact already enough evidence of harm to bees for some pesticides to have been banned in several European countries, including France, Italy and Germany. Scientific papers dating back to at least 2003 have linked honey bee problems, such as becoming disoriented and not finding their way back to the hive, to a group of pesticides called neonictinoids. Last year millions of bees died along the Rhine after German farmers used the neonictinoid clothianidin on crops. Manufacturer Bayer CropScience blamed farmers for not correctly sticking the compound to seed coats.
Presumably Benn is not up to date either with the latest development in the US, where the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Pesticide Registration (DPR) have begun re-evaluating hundreds of pesticide products after receiving an “adverse effects disclosure” about the neonictinoid pesticide imidacloprid from Bayer itself.
The DPR says that, according to data in the disclosure, high levels of the chemical have been found in the leaves and blossoms of treated flowering plants. In some plants the levels were more than 20 times the lethal concentration for bees.
The notice of re-evaluation also reveals that research still to be published by a scientist at the University of California found imidacloprid residues in eucalyptus nectar and pollen of up to 550 parts per billion; 185 ppb being fatal to bees. How much more evidence does Mr Benn need?
Private Eye Nr. 1235 May 2009
Endnotes
[1] This represents three seven-day E fields of solar radiation, whereas the human gestation amounts to three ‘long-term’ E fields of radiation, nine months.
[2] This process is discussed in http://sundance.blog.co.uk.
Thanks for sharing fine information. It has lots of benefits such as
1. Honey is nature’s energy booster.
2. Honey is a great immunity system builder.