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Happenings in the insect world
Comments:
by Noah
on February 13, 2014 at 6:18 PM
I must differ when you say that the bee was evolved 14 million years ago and say instead that the earth was CREATED about 6 to 10 thousand years ago and that the bee was CREATED by GOD at the same time.
by Tim Dickinson
on February 17, 2014 at 9:18 AM
is the non native honey be a threat to native bees or is it a more benign invasive?
by David
on June 27, 2015 at 10:14 AM
Noah, only someone blind will believe the earth was created several thousand years ago. The bible's main purpose is to give us a guide to live a life for God. When prophets were being given the word of God, do you think they would have had any understanding of true science. Of coarse God does as he created the law's of physics. Please don't take Genesis literal.
by Ryan
on May 15, 2016 at 5:35 PM
Noah, if that is his real name, speaks from ignorance.  
He and people like him reject the scientific method in favor  
of a collection of faerie stories in a book compiled from many,  
many cultures' wisdom literature. That's why the story of  
Noah's Flood sounds strikingly similar to the Gilgmesh Epic  
of the ancient Sumerians: the writers of the Bible borrowed  
It from the Sumerians.  
 
My question for Noah is: Which is it, pal? 6,000 years?  
10,000? That's a pretty wide margin of error you're  
claiming.  
 
This from the same guy who believes that Charleton  
Heston throwed down his walkin' stick and it become  
a BIG ol' SNAKE.
by Charlie Sommers
on May 22, 2016 at 11:57 AM
Dear Noah, You are right. The earth was created only a few thousand years ago but as a joke God made lots of fossils and sprinkled them around. That gives him carte blanche to walk all over us and burn us in hell when we reject the truth made so manifest in his great book the Bible. What a jokester the big guy is. Gotta love him.
by Lisa
on August 7, 2016 at 2:07 PM
Is there anything which plants the ancient bees pollinated? What effect did the vanishing of bees have on the flora? Did the ice age weather change cause the bees to decline which caused their pollinees to decline? Or did the ice age weather cause certain plants to decline which caused their associated bees to decline? Or did the ice age weare cause any number of plants and bees to individually decline due to the cold?
by Kathy Keatley Garvey
on August 11, 2016 at 2:59 PM
Lisa,  
According to Robbin Thorp, distinguished professor of entomology at UC Davis: "Ancestral honey bee reached North America 14 million years ago" but we don't know "how long it may have persisted, what its roles were in relation to the bee and plant communities that existed at the time and what happened to it. Perhaps future plant and bee fossils will provide cues to help answer these interesting questions."
by sindhukk
on January 6, 2017 at 9:30 AM
Your site looking too good.. And your writing skills, so good, keep it up. Regards
by William
on March 26, 2017 at 8:43 PM
Noah,  
Your name is fitting. In that story they scoffed at Noah as the rain came down.
by jack
on April 6, 2017 at 3:49 AM
Perhaps Noah might care to read Mark Twain's account of the flood in "Letters from the Earth." In it, the ark. after casting off to sea, has to turn around and head back as they realize they have forgotten to bring on board the (malarial) mosquito.
by Elizabeth
on August 7, 2017 at 5:37 PM
Nothing in this article proves that bee fossil made honey or lived in a large colony, as Apis mellifera does.  
 
Fourteen million years ago isn't really the same thing as saying there were honeybees here before Europeans. Humans didn't even arrive here for millions of years AFTER that bee had come and gone. (Humans arriving in North American only like 10,000 years ago.)  
 
Humans hadn't even evolved yet 14 million years ago. (That was still many millions of years away as well!)  
 
 
Now there actually WAS (and is) a honeybee in the Americas before the colonists arrived. That would beethe stingless honeybees that live in the jungle area of southern Mexico. They live in large colonies and make honey. They can be kept, much like Apis mellifera.
by David Crosley sr
on November 12, 2017 at 3:45 AM
I grew up in Kansas.  
It filled my heart with love to read the story about (the first bees in America)  
 
I am a beekeeper in Va.  
I thought that the second charter from England to Jamestown brought the honeyee  
I love the honey bee
by Donna Vazzoler
on December 3, 2017 at 6:36 AM
Elizabeth I love your answer. I just discovered this site and I'm just learning that honey bees are not native.  
 
Now, could the bees in Mexico be the native bees for North America that perished with the ice age?
by Zero
on February 27, 2018 at 4:24 PM
How can religion debunk science?
by Belushi
on March 11, 2018 at 7:41 AM
Whereas religions are confined to reservations  
and hide in the past with ignorance;  
science is afflicted by claustophobia, the future,  
and hubris.  
 
Orobouros...
by Aaron
on May 25, 2018 at 5:33 AM
Give a man some honey he eats for a day. Teach a man to keep bees he eats for a lifetime. Give a man religion, he dies praying for honey
by rich littlefield
on June 16, 2018 at 3:41 PM
Growing up in Utah, we found some fossils in the brick yard. Well, we gave one to a local college student, who took ot to college and had it carbon dated. Millions of years old, we were told. They came by to see where it was from. Well, turns out the brick yard allowed left over material to ooze out a pipe into the river that ran through there. The actual age of the fossils, maximum 40 years. The explanation given was that the lye in cement created heat which made the fossils appear to be older. Why would the bees leave the New World unless, of course, there was a worldwide flood, or something?
by Leona Henry
on November 28, 2018 at 12:35 PM
There is written information and we are all left to our own hypotheses. Take it down a notch guys....Maybe Noah is not an adult. Even if he is, let’s not crucify him. Maybe Noah hasn’t got the secondary education that some of you have...get it? Come on, let’s be nice and teach him and not alienate him for his opinion. Pssst...we were born knowing all this stuff and I’m not a genius, either. I’m just glad he spoke up at all. Teach don’t preach.
by Iztok
on December 2, 2018 at 10:40 AM
I suppose that Noah was kidding, but I accept the assumption that he represents the American literally orthodox religious community. This prompted me to comment. I come from Slovenia, Europe, the country of the father of modern beekeeping, beekeeper at the court of Maria Theresa, Anton Janša. His birthday was chosen by the UN as World Bee Day.  
 
I know that until recently there were no bees in Iceland, and the beekeepers there are now struggling to settle them permanently. It is also known to me that the white man brought the European honeybee to America, but I did not know that in North America there was no such autochthonous bees. I knew about indigenous Mexican bees, and the killer bee is a Crossbreed between European, African and South American species. CCD? Of course, because in North America mountain ranges run north-south and not east-west, as the Alps in Europe. With the sudden arrival of the Ice Age, nothing prevented polar air masses to access to far south. This meant a CCD for bees, as well as a collapse for all the rest of life, insects, animals and plants. There was no time for gradual adaptation and retreat to the south. At the time, lions were also present in North America. The broken lion's tooth, found in a frozen prey, testifies that the prey was so frozen so quickly that their fiding was no longer possible. The reason for the CCD today is quite different: the varroa and man's devastating impact on the natural environment. Today's insecticides and herbicides are 1000 times more toxic than DDT decades ago. Kemofarmation boasts themselves that it suffices for the insect to just pass by, but is doomed to collapse. Man is the reason that today the rate of extinction is faster than that of the Permian extinction, 240 million years ago when 97% of living species extinted.  
 
There is much talk about beekeeping technology and good beekeeping practice at our beekeeping lectures, but nothing about the origin of bees. On request to prepare a lecture on bees, I therefore chose this topic, on the evolution of bees and on the history of beekeeping. In my preparations, I discovered some fascinating attractions.  
 
Einstein is attributed to the statement that mankind will die a few days after the last bees die. I do not agree with this statement myself. The ancestors of bees appeared immediately after the Permian extinction, which means they survived. The oldest ancient wasp Xielide fossil is 240 million years old. It is interesting that the wasp has remained unchanged as a living species to date. In the tree trunk holes of the 220 million-year-old petrified forest in Arizona, fossil nests were found, with cells similar to bees, which testify to the fact that at that time some insects were taking care of the breeds (larvae). 110 million years ago an explosion of flowering plants occurred. In 100 million-year-old amber of Burma (Myanmar) the earliest fossil of bees has been preserved, which has several wasp features. This shows that the bees developed from the predatory wasps that were feeding with the first pollinators. Fossil bees in 50 million years younger amber have fully developed characteristics of the genera of the modern honeybee. This and genetic researches proves that the honey bees survived the extinction of dinosaurs. For the species that survived 2 mass extinctions, the Permian, survived by only 3% of the living species and the Cretaceous in which the dinosaurs extincted and survived 27% of the living species only, I am not afraid. But I'm not sure that humanity will survive the next 100 years. A Croatian astronomer and popularizer of science is convinced that man is a dead end of evolution. He is convinced that the future belongs to eusocial species, such as bees, wasps, termites and ants, in which the whole community acts as a single organism. A man is like a dumb virus that kills his host. I'm 67 years old. During the years of my primary education, 2.7 billion people lived on Earth. Today we have more than 7 billion. Such uncontrolled reproduction will kill the planet. I do not know the recipe for a humane reduction in the global population, for example in the next 50 years back to 2.7 billion, which would also reduce the pressure on the natural environment and climate changes. Unfortunately, nobody mentions these topics. In my opinion, the development of humanity should be based on science based on ecology and humanity and not on greed.  
 
A few words about ice age. Your autochthonous North American type of bee has collapsed due to sudden climate change, the onset of the Ice Age. Our indigenous Slovenian bee, the world-famous Apis Melifera Carnica, was finally formed at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. It is characterized by modesty. It overwinters in a small number. Winter bees live 6-8 months, as opposed to summer bees that live for only 45 days. This allows them to survive long and cold winters. With this type of bee, they also have beekeepers in Lapland, in the far north of Europe.  
 
Since I mention Perm extinction, let me describe it. The speed of extinction of animal and plant species today is faster than that at the end of Perm (every 20 minutes one is lost), and climate change is very similar. Note that only 3% of the living species have survived! Study material is modest, and theories contradict the explanation of the cause. I succeeded in linking the causes that the theories have to do with a single theory. 240 million years ago, a 50-kilometer asteroid collided with Antarctica. It was five times bigger than the one that had fallen to Yukatan 55 million years ago and exterminated the dinosaurs. This was such a shock for the entire Earth that a strong tectonic and volcanism activity throughout the planet and the pouring of the lava on the entire Siberian plate were triggered. The ancient super-continent of Pangea broke and continents have been also led to a path that has not yet been completed. The fall itself brought huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere, and the accompanying phenomena caused an enormous increase in greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere. The global warming followed, which together contributed to the acidification of the oceans and the lack of oxygen in them. The global temperature on Earth has risen by 5 ° C. When the temperature of the water at the bottom of the oceans rose by 5 ° C, methane lakes evaporated from the bottom of the oceans, which is 5 times more greenhouse gas than CO2. As a result, the global temperature on Earth has risen by another 5 ° C. On the geological transversal in Slovenia, a 5 m thick Permian earth layer of red desert sand is visible, with no fossil remains. I assume that similarly American ground layers from Perma look. It took 70,000 years for the climate to stabilize and enable the restoration of life. It took 1 million years to re-develop the tree species and not less than 5 million years to make life on Earth normal.  
 
Before the Perm, there was another great extinction, Devonian, 370 million years ago. In contrast to Permian extinction, it was due to the global subcooling in Devon. The hypothermia was due to an abundance of oxygen in the air, 36%. At that time, the polar ice caps reached almost to the equator. This in the oceans under the ice caps caused oxygen deficiency. An Italian scientist who studied the extinction found that no great extinction had survived species whose specimens exceeded the size of 2 dm. She discovered that Sharks, for example, who survived the extinction, only reached half a meter, but they have shrunk to 2 dm after a million of years. I assume that such an adaptation is incapable of man.
by Jond985
on January 16, 2019 at 7:38 PM
I will not dispute Noah's comment. I believe in the Lord and his word 100 percent. I will share my belief on the subject. I believe God created all things. He spoke them into existence. I believe he did it long before 6,000 years ago. Man, however I believe has existed only 6000. A man with a soul that is. I believe there was a preadomite man. Nothing more than a animal and soulless. These are what we refer to as caveman. I know the bible put all existence being created into only 6 days, however, we must understand that it was a different kind of timeline than we use today.
by Donna
on May 1, 2019 at 6:36 PM
I don't care about anyone's religious views. I want to learn about HONEY BEES.  
If the honey bee was introduced and the U.S. area did not have a native one, does anyone know what the primary pollinators were? Maybe that's why there were only crab apples. I wonder if the European honey bee displaced something.
by Jan
on June 29, 2019 at 9:40 AM
Noah,  
 
That's idiotic at best. Moses died 10,000 years ago. So the Earth couldn't be 6,000 years old. That number was derived by someone who couldn't do math and just added the ages of the figures in the Bible together without accounting for the huge gaps between their births and deaths.  
 
Jond985,  
 
Man has been around several million years. According to the "Bible," a person gets a soul and is considered a human being when they draw their first breath after being born and it is mentioned multiple times throughout the "Bible." The Bible is philosophy not science. Philosophy is personal truth, not objective truth and it is not science. The "Bible" was revised in the 9th century and was based on superstition and proverbs. Most of it is ignorance. Over millennia, it has been edited and changed numerous times, mostly to maintain control of the gullible.
by T.j.
on December 15, 2019 at 3:34 PM
So what pollinated North America plants if the honey bee didn't exist? Does that mean if they go extinct again that we will be just fine without them?
by Paco
on July 13, 2021 at 12:03 PM
Thank you Noah for starting this argument. I found it highly entertaining.
 
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