Honey Bee Crisis extends from US to Britain and Netherlands

Honey Bee Crisis extends from US to Britain and Netherlands

http://vegetablegardens.suite101.com/article.cfm/science_news_article

Sally Morton

Sep 28, 2006

Science News: A study by Jacobus Biesmeijer and William
Kunin (Leeds University), showing declines in pollinators and
insect-pollinated plants in Britain and Netherlands.

In July of 2006, an article appeared in La Monde, entitled,
"The Number and Variety of Pollinating Insects in Europe
Are Diminishing Significantly." It was written by Christiane
Galus. Rating hardly a blip on the radar of the
international mainstream news, this article passed through the maze of
media sources without notice by most of the world's
inhabitants. Since I was following the Honey Bee Crisis in the US
as well, I paid attention.

Here is an excerpt:

"A study conducted by Jacobus Biesmeijer and William Kunin
(Leeds University, United Kingdom) and a team of British,
German, and Dutch researchers and published in the July 21
issue of Science confirms that the threat is serious. By
studying different areas of Great Britain and the Netherlands,
scientists observed that wild bees have paid the heaviest
toll, with a 52% reduction in their diversity with respect
to their situation in 1980 in Great Britain and a 67%
reduction in the Netherlands"

Now, those are two disturbing sentences, and it prompted me
to go search current science news and read the scientific
study cited. In conducting the investigatory scientific
study, the team of scientists considered more than one million
data points. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

"We found evidence of declines (pre-versus-post-1980) in
local bee diversity in both countries? pollinator declines
were most frequent in habitat and flower specialists, in
univoltine species, and/or in nonmigrants. In conjunction with
this evidence, outcrossing plant species that are reliant
on the declining pollinators have themselves declined
relative to other plant species. Taken together, these findings
strongly suggest a causal connection"

See "Parallel Declines in Pollinators and Insect-Pollinated
Plants in Britain and the Netherlands" (Science, 21 July
2006: Vol. 313. no. 5785, pp. 351 ? 354).

You may listen to the Science Podcast, "Pollination in
Trouble," an Interview with Dr. William "Bill" Kunin,
University of Leeds, a co-author of the study.

A transcript excerpt from the interview:

"there were not only fewer species, there were different
species, and that?s part of what raised concern" they tended
to be losing habitat specialists, diet specialists, all the
sort of specialist bees and hover flies, and the
generalists were increasing. And then we started looking at plant; we
were surprised to see a pretty strong pattern of decline in
the vast majority of the insect-pollinated plants, while the
wind-pollinated plants and the self-pollinated plants were
either stable or increasing"

When asked, "How worried should we be about this?" Dr.
Kunin said it did not imply a global pollinator crisis,
however:

"It's the first time anyone's looked for national-scale
declines in pollinators and in both the countries we looked
for it, it was there?I?d be surprised if there aren?t some
similar patterns elsewhere, but again, people have to go
look for them."

One can only hope that similar studies will immediately
commence in the US, Canada, and other countries.