Dennis vanEngelsdorp: Where have the bees gone?

[admin]

Great video!

[ckswank]

Thanks for posting this, Clark. Very informative & interesting. Gives you a lot to think about, especially keeping a grass lawn instead of a meadow. Wish I lived in the country!

Charlie

[anthony]

Very informative and well done. Thanks for the posting

[timsbugs]

Happy to report the bee population here in central Canada is way up from last year.

Tim

[Rev. Redmond Farrier]

This guy is an excellent speaker! I wasn't aware that the bee problem extended beyond honey bees until this year. There have always been hundreds of bumblebees around my house each summer, but the past couple of years I haven't been seeing as many. This summer, I have actually only seen one.
When I was a kid, I would take a plastic bat and kill as many as I could to try to stop them from boring holes all through the wood in our porch and sheds. I would wait near a hole in the wood listening to the scraping sound and watching saw dust fall out of the hole which would let me know that a bee was inside it. The bee would soon emerge and I would start swinging my bat wildly.
For me, the loss isn't just one of the ecosystem, but it is almost like losing part of my childhood. It just doesn't feel like summer without them around.

[ckswank]

I've notice fairly high populations of bees & wasps this year in my yard. It's probably due to the fact that I keep my flowering plants watered whereas most of my neighbors & other natural habitats have dried up due to the drought we are experiencing. Hardly any butterflies at all this year where I live in Texas. Night collecting was extremely good early this spring, but dropped off dramatically about the end of May, when it turned really hot. In August we had high temperatures over 100 degrees F on 30 of the 31 days and about 1/2 inch of rain all month! North & west of Houston, has been getting hit with huge wildfires which is bound to affect insect populations and other wildlife for quite some time. Hope we get some rain soon! Going to venture out tonight to see if anything is out, but I'm not very optimistic.

Charlie

[starlightcriminal]

We have experience similar depressed populations in Florida, I also noticed night collecting declines about that time. I hear reports of the same thing from several countries in Latin America as well. We are down for annual rainfall this year as well but nothing like you over in Texas. I hope you all get some decent rain in a non-hurricane form soon too!

I would be interested to hear what the populations look like after fires subside and rain returns, probably new plants will be temporarily favored by the clearing of land and fire/smoke treatment so there could conceivably be some interesting shifts in population densities for some correlated insect species.