Some Wise Words on Bees and CCD

Felicia Gilljam recently made a great post on her blog about Colony Collapse Disorder. She is a beekeeper and biology student, and offered her perspective on the problem from that point of view.

An American problem because beekeeping is much more industrialized there? Bad weather? The result of breeding for docility, repressed swarming behaviour and increased harvests? These are all things she discusses.

As was touched on in the comments, my personal opinion is that CCD is more than anything a result of the general degradation of the environment caused by global warming, intensive agriculture and mono-cultures and the ongoing loss of global biodiversity. It’s not that very serious attention shouldn’t be paid to CCD, and effort shouldn’t go into understanding it better, but the only real solution is going to be to address the underlying problems.

The Oddities of Google

Google seems to be a popular blogging topic. Mostly because Google seems to be quite broken right now, but also there are always people around amused at the search terms people use to find their blog or other strange things about Google.

Robin of Bumblebee Blog had a good idea. She suggested her readers post some of the the search terms people use to find their blogs, then she would then make a post linking to them after December 5th, so we could all compare. Here’s my contribution. I’ve been meaning to post about this anyway.

Of course people find us for the ‘right’ reasons, by searching on topics relating to this blog, but I’m going to give some examples here of some unexpected things.

The first thing to realize is Google has really changed a lot over the last few years, and search terms people were finding us with before are not the same as now, with one exception. Before and now, the single most common term people use to find this blog is ‘weed burner’. I made a post about weed burners very early on, and I seem to have become the main Internet information resource for weed burners.

As a result of using the word ‘weed’ in a popular post, and posting a little later about cannabis, we also have no end of people who find us wanting information on this:

pics of weed

weed

cheap weed

I also made a post about my 325 year old wooden house foundation needing to be repaired, and a lot of people started finding us looking for information on foundations:

Why is my house sinking?

sinking house foundation

How do I know if my foundation is bad?

What does a bad foundation look like?

For a long time, people were finding us searching on information about carrots:

Can you grow carrots in a bottle?

What do carrots look like when they are underground?

What types of carrots are there?

history of carrots

pictures of carrots

how do I grow carrots

To be clear, I’ve never particularly posted much here about carrots.

For a while a number of people were finding us searching for missing bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. The popularity of the topic led me to write a number of followup articles afterwards.

A number of people have found us recently looking for pictures of different kinds of garlic. This was part of the reason for posting the pictures recently, because there aren’t many pictures of garlic on the Internet.

By far in a way the biggest ‘Google event’ happened when Steph made this post on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

For those of you not familiar with this beer, in recent years it’s probably become the most popular ‘alternative’ beer in the US, and it’s particularly popular among students. When Steph and I were students in Chico, California, where the brewery is located, we went on a tour of the brewery while it was still in a garage. A few days ago we bought our first bottle in Amsterdam! It still tastes the same after all these years. At 15 euros (about US$21) for six bottles it’s not going to become our daily beer again anytime soon, but it was still a nice treat.

Anyway, after Steph made this post people started ‘borrowing’ the picture by linking to it within blog posts, forums, myspace pages and so on. It’s all over the Internet now, and a search on Google images shows it’s now the most popular image above even those released by the brewery itself! The picture itself is probably the single largest source of Internet traffic for our domain, I think more than everything else combined.

Like I said, Google is broken now, but until recently it was including all of these links in our page rankings. I like to think I’m popular for other reasons, but surely this has had the greatest impact on our Google rankings!

More CCD and Bee Rumors

The Daily Green has published another article with an explanation of the causes and reasons for Colony Collapse Disorder.

This seems to confirm what I posted about a few weeks ago, and was announced by Spanish scientists. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the ‘official’ announcement from US scientists confirming they have discovered the cause in US bees.

The Daily Green article is interesting in that it goes a bit further and explains the underlying greed that caused the problem in the first place.

The good news in all of this is if the underlying problem has been discovered, it may be possible to do something about it!

Asian parasite killing Western bees

Spanish scientists claim to have found a very important clue behind Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the mysterious problem beekeepers in many countries have been having.

According to this article in Reuters Spanish scientists have discovered a parasite common in Asian bees is now infecting bees in large parts of Europe and the Americas. Asian bees apparently have a high degree of natural resistance to this microscopic parasite, so it’s not normally a problem there.