US beekeepers fear for livelihoods as anti-Zika toxin kills 2.5m bees

‘It kills everything’: conservationist warns over threat to other animals

Regulators: ‘clear and public health crisis’ allows use of Naled chemical

Alan Yuhas in San Francisco

Sunday 4 September 2016 11.55 BSTLast modified on Sunday 4 September 201622.05 BST

Huddled around their hives, beekeepers around the south-eastern US fear a new threat to their livelihood: a fine mist beaded with neurotoxin, sprayed from the sky by officials at war with mosquitos that carry the Zika virus.

Earlier this week, South Carolina beekeepers found millions of dead honey bees carpeting their apiaries, killed by an insecticide. Video posted by a beekeeper to Facebook showed thousands of dead insects heaped around hives, while a few survivors struggled to move the bodies of fellow bees.

“This is what’s left of Flowertown Bees,” a despondent keeper says in the video. Company co-owner Juanita Stanley told the Associated Press her farm looked “like it’s been nuked” and estimated 2.5 million bees were killed.

 “This is what’s left of Flowertown Bees”, where up to 2.5 million bees were killed by an aerial spray meant to combat the Zika virus. Video: So many bees dead after the aerial spray.

In another Facebook post, South Carolina hobbyist Andrew Macke wrote that he had lost “thousands upon thousands of bees” and that the spraying had devastated his business. “Have we lost our mind,” he wrote, “spraying poison from the sky?”

Around the US, bees and other pollinators contribute an estimated $29bn to farm income. Clemson University’s department of pesticide regulation is investigating the incident.

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Evidence shows first beekeepers were Stone Age farmers 9,000 years ago

NOVEMBER 12, 2015

by Brett Smith

   

Urban beekeeping may have come to the ultra-hip sections of Brooklyn, but new archeological evidence has revealed maintaining an apiary has a long history stretching back nearly 9,000 years.

According to a study published in the journal Nature, ancient pottery found in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa contains traces of beeswax—signs that bees and humans collaborated for thousands of years in the ancient world.

"We've got the earliest evidence for man's association with the honeybee,” study author Richard Evershed of Bristol University, told BBC News. "Man is collecting the beeswax and the honey and perhaps even domesticating them."

For the study, researchers looked at over 6,000 pottery artifacts to patch together a map of the honeybee at a time when man had just came out of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago. Our way of life was transferring from hunting and gathering to agriculture and tending domesticate herds for food.

The oldest evidence of honeybee domestication dates back nearly 9,000 years, was discovered in what is now Turkey. Evidence a few thousand years sooner was detected across the Eastern Mediterranean and then at locations occupied by early farmers in Central Europe, and the first evidence for the usage of bees in North Africa was also discovered happening around the same time.

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