Bee Colony Collapse

On Feb 17, 2007 the Zetas were asked about Bee Colony Collapse, spreading across the US and appearing in other countries.

Mystery Killer Silencing Honeybees
Feb 5, 2007

Something is killing the nation's honeybees. While a few crops, such as corn and wheat, are pollinated by the wind, most need bees. Without these insects, crop yields would fall dramatically. Agronomists estimate Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees. As dead or dying insects are collected, dissected and tested, several possibilities are emerging. The most recent mite problem - the varroa mite - compromises a bee's immune system, so a virus might be the new culprit. Or it could be a new fungal pathogen. Honeybees are not natives. Last fall, workers transported managed hives - about 450 per tractor-trailer - to California from colder areas such as the Great Lakes and the Dakotas. Now, hives are coming from Texas, Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In all, about half the country's managed hives are needed for the mass pollination.

The Zetas stated that it was depressed immune systems, and the fact that man moves colonies around to pollinate fields, a practice that encourages the spread of infection from one hive to another.

We mentioned at the start of ZetaTalk that increasing illness would occur, in wildlife as well as humans, as the time of the passage approached. This has certainly occurred, with weakened immune systems due to emanations from the Earth core as it swirls about in response to having a giant magnet, Planet X, nearby, or due to migrating opportunistic germs as the erratic weather allows migration into new territories where resistance to these germs has not built up, or due to simply due to depression as the stress of the Earth changes takes it toll. For wildlife, which includes insects, worry is not a factor as they don't watch the nightly news or the stock market trends. Recently, we have explained that waves of nausea and vertigo, experienced by humans and reported at the start of 2007, was due to the effects of gases in the tail of Planet X which is increasingly wafting over the Earth, as well as magnetic variations as the Earth's magnetic field becomes erratic. For bees, several factors are affecting their ability to thrive. Their immune systems have been compromised by a mite, which is passed among the hives of the nation by the practice of hauling hives about for polination, cross country. This spread the mite, and is spreading several microbes too. The failure of the honey bee population to thrive is entirely a man-made problem. The answer is to isolate healthy hives, which will probably be done too late to affect the crops dependent upon these pollinators. Man has largely killed off the natural pollinators who could replace the honey bee by pesticides. Thus, in the short term, there will be crop shortages, another of our long ago predictions.

ZetaTalk: GodlikeProductionLive, written Feb 17, 2007

By Jun 10, 2007 the studies were reporting their results. Depressed immune systems, allowing pathogens to flouish in bee colonies.

Suddenly, the Bees are Simply Vanishing
June 10 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-bees10jun10,0,1027860.story?page=3

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria. The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections. The idea that a pathogen is involved is supported by recent experiments conducted by VanEngelsdorp and USDA entomologist Jeffrey S. Pettis. One of the unusual features of the disorder is that the predators of abandoned beehives, such as hive beetles and wax moths, refuse to venture into infected hives for weeks or longer.

To test this idea, VanEngelsdorp and Pettis set up 200 beehive boxes with new, healthy bees from Australia and placed them in the care of Hackenberg. Fifty of the hives were irradiated to kill potential pathogens. Fifty were fumigated with concentrated acetic acid, a hive cleanser commonly used in Canada. Fifty were filled with honey frames that had been taken from Hackenberg's colonies before the collapse, and the last 50 were hives that had been abandoned that winter. When VanEngelsdorp visited the colonies at the beginning of May, bees in the untouched hive were clearly struggling, filling only about a quarter of a frame. Bees living on the reused honeycomb were alive but not thriving. A hive that had been fumigated with acetic acid was better. When he popped open an irradiated hive, bees were crawling everywhere. This does imply there is something biological. If it is a pathogen or a parasite, honeybees are poorly equipped to deal with it, said entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The honeybee genome has only half as many genes to detoxify poisons and to fight off infections as do other insects.