EU Lawmaker Calls For Farmers To Intersperse Crops With Flowering Plants To Aid Bees - Reuters

[hatrack]

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - Honey bees, whose numbers are falling, must be given flowery "recovery zones" in Europe's farmlands to aid their survival, a leading EU lawmaker said Wednesday.

Bees pollinate numerous crops and scientists have expressed alarm over their mysterious and rapid decline. Experts have warned that a drop in the bee population could harm agriculture.

"If we continue to neglect the global bee population, then this will have a dramatic effect on our already strained world food supplies," said Neil Parish, who chairs the European Parliament's agriculture committee.

EDIT

"We're talking about less than one percent of the land for bee-friendly crops -- in corners where farmers can't get to with their machinery, round trees and under hedges."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/business/article/38683

[kestrel91316]

1. I thought this was just common sense. It is among organic growers.....

[Citizen Number 9]

2. I'm not too sure about the logic behind this...

Bees are experiencing this mysterious trouble even in areas where there are plenty of pollen-producing crops and flowers.

[happyslug]

3. I saw a lot of Honey bees in August among some knot weed

I was trying to kill the knot weed, but I avoided the knot weed in flower for the honey bees was all over those plants. I should note the area where I was at was in a rural area without much housing and no farms, i.e. along the Little Conemaugh River. This was an area with mixed growth, raspberries, blackberries, various Oaks, Maples, and other plants living in the Forests, or along the River, or along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Now owned by Norfolk and Southern Railroad).

This is consistent with other reports on bees I have read, that the honey bees most affected are either bees moved from place to place to fertilized crops OR bees kept in one place to fertilized crops AND when do to being in a Farming area exposed to nicotine based pesticides. The Nicotine based pesticides may just be the final straw against the Honey bees and thus one of many problems facing the honey bees. Dropping Nicotine based pesticides would be the first step in solving this problem (as some European countries have done) but we also have to accept that fact that moving the bees all over the country is NOT good for them not only do to the dislocation stress it causes the bees but do to the rapid exposure to various diseases do to all the bees in the country being in the same area (and this swapping diseases as their intermingle) AND spreading such diseases FASTER to other bees do to the physical act of moving the hives. This one-two punch seems to be the cause of the bee die-off, and the only way to solve the second problem is to STOP moving bees around as much as we do now, and the only way we can do that is if farmers plant more then one crop. Thus the days of miles and miles of one crop may be over, we may have to go back to the days where a farmer had to plant four or five crops just so the bees had things to gather nectar from till the main crop needed fertilized again.

My point is simple, these two factors seems to be what is doing in the Honey bees AND more in area when there are pollen producing plants then any where else. The nicotine Pesticide is sprayed to keep other insects from the plants, and the bees are often moved into the area to pollinate the crops. As I said, I saw a huge number of honey bees in an area where NOT farming was taking place so these two factors were NOT coming into play, and thus BOTH factors may have to be addressed to solved the problem of the lost of the Honey Bee.

One last comment, there are other bees that can pollinate plants, the problem with the other bees (including native bees even in North America) is none of them are capable of being moved around by moving their hives. The colonies of these other bees are smaller, harder to find and if found harder to move AND not have the queen leave the nest (i.e. most the queen will leave as soon as the nest is disturbed, thus you get nothing when you move the nest). These are the bees Europe is trying to get farmers to encourage by having more crops for the bees to have access to.