Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 10:47 pm Post subject: Bees
I am worried about bees, lots of problems for these little chaps and on them depends so much.
From Lloyds List today.
France catches buzz
THOSE containerships plying their way from Asia to Europe do not always carry goodies in their boxes. It seems very likely that the Asian hornet, also known as vespa velutina, was carried from southeast Asia to France, perhaps in a container load of fruit or exotic wood.
It was first identified in France at the end of 2005. Now experts are alarmed at the spread of this varmint, unloved by all, which is said to be well established in the forests of Aquitaine.
Just a few of these hornets can destroy a nest of 30,000 bees in a couple of hours, and can give humans painful bites and stings — and can even kill.
A noted French entomologist, Jean Haxaire, who first identified the hornet in France, asked for information about sightings in the south west.
He received hundreds of calls from farmers and bee-keepers in Lot-et-Garonne, the Dordogne, the Gironde and even Charente-Maritime.
They have spread like lightning and it now seems impossible to stop them.
What do these 'varmits' look like ??.
Reminds me of when I was unlucky enough to step on a wasp nest in the ground when I was 7 ....I don't think I have ever run home so fast as they flew up my dress and every time I took a step I was stung.
Goodness knows what these critters could inflict .
Also heard about the False Black Widow Spider that has taken up residence in the South of England. Apparently they can inflict a nasty bite and if the reation to the bite is bad you need hospital treatment.
It would appear our warmer summers and winters are allowing these foriegners to breed here.
I do hope these hornets don't take over too much or it could pose a threat to one of Englands finest products...Honey.
Thanks for the info Amenity ,very interesting reading, albeit a little worrying.
This has just been picked up and if you can get to the end you'll see it's about bees.
Think it comes from the Indy
Viewpoint Michael Grey - Monday 14 May 2007
THERE is a whole genre of fictitious writing devoted to global calamity and I have always been an enthusiast, although I really do try to prevent this enthusiasm spreading into my day job.
Fifty years on and it is still difficult to better John Wyndham with his triffids and krakens and alien children, and the picture of frightful circumstances grafted on to a familiar contemporary England.
Another who was a past master at chilling the blood was John Christopher, who wrote about gigantic earthquakes drying up the seas and the grim lives of the survivors after such an apocalypse.
I thought briefly of them both as our radio stuttered into life a couple of weeks ago to inform us of the great earthquake of Folkestone, which mysteriously missed the Channel Tunnel.
Christopher was interested in botany, too, and weaved a particularly gruesome tale about what would happen to the earth after all the grasses withered and died.
It is a long time since I read this book but I seem to recall that Death of Grass began with a failure of a grain crop in the old Soviet Union, itself not that remarkable but which assumed catastrophic proportions once this disease spread across the world.
It was a man-made calamity but nothing, I hasten to add, to do with genetic manipulation which, like environmentalists, had still to be invented.
But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Who, for instance, in the 1960s or 1970s, when this fiction was hugely in vogue, would have looked at a ship’s ballast tank and considered that it was a vehicle for transmitting alien species around the world?
Creatures and pathogens, moreover, which would cost billions to control before we ever got around to producing effective counter-measures.
I can still recall the late 1960s when articles were being written, more in curiosity than in panic, about the strange phenomenon of a species of Japanese seaweed, which had been identified by marine biologists plodding around the Solent shores in their wellies.
The theory was, if I recall, that the spores of the seaweed, which conveniently grew near several thousand sushi restaurants around the Sea of Japan where they delightedly ate the stuff, had adhered to the bottoms of the new class of containerships, which were something of a novelty at the time.
And it was spreading like wildfire.
The obvious question as to why conventional ships, or even tea clippers for that matter, had not imported the same seaweed from the Orient was easily answered.
First, there was the speed of the containerships, which were far faster than the fastest Blue Flue, which would have probably stopped in more wayports where the bottom of the ship would have been licked clean by barnacles and little fishes.
Even more convincing was the fact that the Far East general cargo liners in the pre-container days would arrive in the great enclosed dock systems of London and the Mersey where the water was so foul that it would kill any living thing in seconds.
Heavens, sailors who regretted having signed on a ship due to sail from London not infrequently fell into the dock, knowing that the consequence of this “accident” — assuming they were fished out before their clothes were eaten away, or worse — was a three-day stay in the Dreadnought hospital in Greenwich, being studied assiduously by experts in diseases and ogling the nurses.
Japanese seaweed would not stand a chance amid this turgid, toxic soup.
The Japanese seaweed story reached my antennae by way of a story in the Southampton Daily Echo — little more than a “nib” in that it is really just a tiny page filler which failed to impress the news desk team but was, hugely attenuated, slung in to record the fact of its existence.
Just imagine, however, if we knew then what we know now, about the zebra mussels which must have been on passage at that very time to their new and nutritious home in Great Lakes.
They were the spearhead of an invasion in the ballast tanks of ships, spreading all over the world — all the dinoflaggelates, the striped wrasses, the Chinese mitten crabs, the extremely nasty diseases all hitching a lift in the bulkers and tankers and car carriers which were bringing industrial shipping to the world.
If we only knew what we know now, it would not be a “news in brief” in the Echo. It would be eight pages in the Daily Mail, while the New York Times would be producing double-page spreads on the environmental menace facing the world, demanding instant action and mobilisation of all possible resources to combat the terror.
Water ballast would become the new menace to freedom and democracy and it would be banned in a trice, to be replaced with sand and coal slag and bricks just like the old days.
Shipowners the world over could curse and swear, weep and collectively protest, but it would avail them little.
They would have to get their heads down and come up with something rather more environmentally friendly to keep their ships upright and their propellers buried.
The novelists of doom would have to seek a new career in non-fiction, which would be far more gripping than anything they could have constructed in their fertile imaginations. But if we did wake up much earlier to the problems being exported around the world in the ballast tanks of ships, would anything really have been very different?
By the late 1960s marine biologists in the Great Lakes were sufficiently alarmed about alien growths blocking up cooling water inlets, to have alerted the US and Canadian governments.
By the 1970s there was a good deal of evidence which associated the transfer of alien species categorically to the ballast tanks.
But every year we became more dependent on industrial shipping, the tankers and bulkers ever bigger and the quantities of ballast transported around the world became ever greater.
As the problem grew exponentially, any solutions became ever more problematic.
This was no little local difficulty but a real crisis of global proportions, which required more innovation and colossal expenditure to roll back.
Well, we have come a long way since those times, but every year there is more evidence that the aliens have been exported to new places where they had never been hitherto reported.
The excellent publications of IMO’s GloBallast Organisation year in, year out, report fresh contaminations.
Ever so slowly, there has been progress with the ballast convention, and patient research undertaken on various means of terminating the alien life on passage.
But there is still a vast majority of shipping which will exchange ballast at sea, which is mostly effective but ludicrously inefficient and sometimes downright dangerous.
If you are gazing out of your wheelhouse windows in a North Atlantic gale and see what appears to be a small cloud approaching on a collision course, it is best to do something about it.
For it will be an empty bulker motoring along in a vast cloud of spray as they try and exchange their ballast before they reach the US economic exclusion zone.
They cannot see you, and you cannot see them through the spray cloud. We still do not yet know how a full car carrier fell on its side in the Pacific last year, but most people are putting money on some sort of ballast problem.
You feel that gradually, but ever so slowly, some better ideas are emerging.
The IMO itself, which has a review group looking at progress as the January, 2009, implementation date of the ballast water conventions creeps closer, cautiously suggests that by that time it is possible that there will be viable technology to treat ballast water.
There is some good work being done with flue gases, heat, ultra-violet, even benign chemicals. There is a splendid Japanese project underway to design a big bulkerwhich will not need ballast at all,another design for a ship that willsuck in clean ballast at the bow and discharge it at the stern, swilling out the tanks like your bath, without running all the pumps 24 hours a day for weeks on end and melting the impellers.
Gradually, you have to acknowledge, we are getting there.
But you have to feel in retrospect that, if we really were worried about the menace which began all those years ago we might have moved a little faster.
The fact is there was a lot of inertia building up against any dramatic changes which could menace the operation of ships, almost regardless of the long-term consequences to the environment.
It is tempting to look at other supposedly clear and present global threats with much the same sort of attitudes being exhibited.
Climate change? The search for sustainability? I am as guilty as the next man, never quite sure what I should believe, but always tending to the line of least resistance.
Just last week I espied, in London’s Evening Standard, on my way home, another “nib” on an inside page, sandwiched between items about celebrities and complaints about the horrors of London Transport.
“United States beekepeers,” it succinctly noted, “have lost a quarter of nests to colony collapse disorder”.
It is something serious because it menaces world food supplies, so it was well worth the two inches of print.
I read somewhere else that German scientists had proved that the emissions from mobile phone masts had completely distorted the bees’ direction finding facilities.
The choice, as I see it, is the complete destruction of the world’s food crops and probably mankind, or the banning of mobile phones.
No prizes for guessing the probable choice. As the hymn reminds us, “The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide...”
Ministers are drawing up plans for genetically-modified crops to be grown in secret and more secure locations to prevent trials being wrecked by saboteurs.
They may ask the police to target opponents of GM crops in the way that they have cracked down on animal rights protesters. Another option is for the controversial crops to be grown at a secure government site such as Porton Down near Salisbury, which carries out military research and includes a science park where they could be securely developed away from the public.
We had an absolute invasion of bees this summer.
Unusually, they avoided the lavender ,verbena ect ,that they are supposed to love. The bees seemed to enjoy my Hebe bushes , not the lilac or blue ones ,they swarmed on the white variety.
The downshot of losing our indigenous bees is they pollenate so many plants. looks like next year I shall have to run round the garden with a small paint brush doing my own pollenation.
So , this autumn I have planted another half dozen white Hebe bushes ,cardoons (watch out for these plants they seed like mad but are wonderful archtectural plants, I have lots of seed if anyone wants some) and some white lavender.I shall be watching them next year a little more closely and see what plants they prefer.
I think also, because I do not use any sprays ect I am lucky that they like my garden.
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