In article ,
FragileWarrior wrote:

He seems unalarmed that the bees are disappearing and
seems to think that other pollinators will replace the missing bees and/or
we will engineer a better bee from this.

Great! First frankenfood and, now, frankenbees, just spiffy. Remember,
if you keep your head while all those around you are losing theirs,
perhaps you don't really understand the problem.

There have been other scientists that have long preached that technology
will save the day, such as Edward Teller (aka Dr. Strangelove) or those
knuckleheads that tell us that we can safely store "nu-cu-lar" (to quote
our President) waste for 20 thousand years. Uh-huh.

Those of you who are old enough, will remember that it took 3 years to
get thalidomide off the market, when babies were being born with out
arms and legs. Cigarettes were a clear and present danger but, you
couldn't PROVE that they were causing cancer. The FDA is over regulated
and underfunded and if you think they can quickly find something as
subtle as immune suppressing chemicals in the environment . . .

Why is everyone looking at me like that? I always foam at the mouth like
this and it was a perfectly good rant.

Anyways, check out
http://news.independent.co.uk/enviro...cle2314202.ece

The part of the article that caught my eye was:

The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not
seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist.

One(-O)* was that the bees left the hive and flew away to die elsewhere,
over about a week. Another (Two-O)* was that the few bees left inside
the hive were carrying "a tremendous number of pathogens" - virtually
every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and
some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal
infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees' immune systems
were being suppressed in some way.

Professor Cox-Foster went on: "And another unusual symptom (Three-O)*
that we're are seeing, which makes this very different, is that normally
when a bee colony gets weak and its numbers are decreasing, other
neighbouring bees will come and steal the resources - they will take
away the honey and the pollen.

"Other insects like to take advantage too, such as the wax moth or the
hive beetle. But none of this is happening. These insects are not coming
in.

"This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which
is repelling them." . . .

------

And so it goes.

Yesterday I had four carpenter bees buzzing my wisteria and a Common
Buckeye butterfly flitted around the tea-rose. At least Pandora didn't
let hope out of the box.

- Bill
Cloribus gustibus non disputatum (mostly)
*Boy, I miss Molly.