At the risk of being extremely self-centered, my self-experimentation is related to this depressing news:
The decline of [America’s] estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter.
The bees vanish from the hives. What has surely happened is that their navigational systems have malfunctioned. Bees have dozens of things that must work for them to live, all of which need a certain environment. The bees live in a degraded environment. Which system will fail first? A neural system turns out to be the most sensitive to environmental degradation.
No one predicted this, nor did I predict that my self-experimentation would find many ways in which our environment, like the bees’s environment, has come to lack crucial stuff. But one reason for the two outcomes (colony collapse disorder, discoveries of my self-experimentation) is the same: The nervous system is especially sensitive to the environment. I’ve studied stuff controlled by the brain: sleep, weight, mood, arithmetic. Just as bee brains are the first part of bees to be crippled by a bad environment, our brains are the first part of us to improve when given a better environment.
I love this!
Seth,
What could possibly justify this level of certainty about what happened to bees, when the quoted section says the cause is unknown?
“What has surely happened is that their navigational systems have malfunctioned.”
Jeff
Jeff, the quoted section means that the environmental cause is unknown. I know of no plausible alternative to the navigational explanation. It explains why the dead bees are never found in their hives.
Seth,
Possible causes on wikipedia include mites, infectious disease, environmental changes, pesticides, or malnutrition. Only some of these causes are the environmental reason you are so sure about. There are many examples of an infectious disease decimating a population absent any change in environmental factors. You refer to a “degraded environment” with no indication of what this refers to or how it would affect the bees.
I think you would do a service to your non-scientist readers if you emphasize the amount of evidence that is necessary to believe a hypothesis to be true. There has already been some study of colony collapse disorder and there will be much more in the coming years. You give no indication you have read any of this literature and you give no indication of why any particular reason should be favored based on this literature. That you have discovered deficient aspects of the human diet says very little about the cause of a disease in bees. People shouldn’t believe things because “they seem right.” (not quoting you there) That is absolutely not science.
I think your blog is excellent in general and I have made changes to my diet because of your writing. But, I think you write much to casually at times for a blog that is about the scientific method, among other things. You preach being a skeptic somewhat selectively, depending on what the subject is.
Jeff
above is me, the log-in was saved on this computer
I used to have a few bees, at one time I had 17 hives. Then most of my bees just vanished also. I live in South Carolina in a somewhat rural setting away from any extensive farms and pesticide areas.
Thing is pesticide and those ideas simply does not seem to be very intelligent reasoning, I have read many reasons and viewpoints on the reason why. No one takes the following into consideration.
When you find a hive with no bees it is as if they have just all swarmed. All of them.
However the whole hive does not swarm.
There are simply no bees.
None on the ground
None away from the hive that I could find dead
The queen never leaves the hive and some workers do not either, so that kinda blows the they got lost idea.
Actually I think they do just leave, I noticed that with the use of some of the comb base I had purchased, the bees simply did not like it, would not build on it, and then they just were gone. So maybe they did all swarm at once, I do know each and every one of them were gone. That alone to me does not lend itself to disease, or pesticide as I used to check them weekly and it was always the entire colony gone, with not a bee to be found.
Kit
Also my reasoning is quite simple, I meant to include it above. If pesticide or sickness then some bees would still be in the hive. If not alive, they would be dead on the bottom of the hive. Thing is there is not one single bee to be found. Not one.
Kit
Another thing, been awhile since I thought of this. If one or two colonies of bees were gone, for one thing normally the honey stores and brood would be a bit slack, but the other bees in other hives would not raid the empty colony.
Seems they know something is in there that is harmful. Normally they would raid the hive and steal all the honey. They do not do that.
So I think for whatever reason, something in the hive is known to the bees and they just leave. They always clean the hive and toss out a dead bee, so maybe they clean house and then just go.
that’s very interesting. I agree, if the queen never leaves the hive under normal conditions and is found to have left the hive, it’s hard to explain that with the lost explanation. Jeff is right, I was too certain.