Now It's the Bumblebees

First it was the honeybees that were disappearing...now it's the bumblebees.

Wild bumblebees worldwide are in trouble, likely contracting deadly diseases from their commercialized honeybee cousins, a new study shows.

That's a problem even though bumblebees aren't trucked from farm to farm like honeybees. They provide a significant chunk of the world's pollination of flowers and food, especially greenhouse tomatoes, insect experts said. And the ailments are hurting bumblebees even more, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"Wild populations of bumblebees appear to be in significant decline across Europe, North America, South America and also in Asia," said study author Mark Brown of the University of London. He said his study confirmed that a major source of the decline was "the spillover of parasites and pathogens and disease" from managed honeybee hives.

Bumblebees probably pick up diseases when they go to flowers after infected honeybees, Furst said. And sometimes bumblebees invade honeybee hives and steal nectar, getting diseases that way, he added.

Bumblebees can be nearly twice as big as honeybees, can sting multiple times and don't produce surplus honey, like honeybees.

The latest research shows bumblebees are hurt more by disease, Brown said. In general, the average wild bumblebee lives 21 days, but the infected ones live closer to 15 days, he said. And while honeybee hives have tens of thousands of workers and can afford to lose some, bumblebee hives only have hundreds at the most.

"It's like Wal-Mart versus a mom-and-pop store," Berenbaum said in an interview.

Studies have shown that bumblebees provide $3 billion worth of fruit and flower pollination in the United States, while honeybees are closer to $20 billion, Berenbaum said.

Here;  http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/bumblebees-stung-bad-honeybee-sickness-22583939

What the heck??  If the bees all start vanishing...who is going to pollinate all our food?

Hey!!...maybe we can pay millions of people the new minimum wage (proposed by Obama) of $10.25 an hour to walk through the fields and trees groves and let them use little paint brushes to pollinate everything?

Seriously though, we said it before but we will say it again...Albert Einstein famously predicted that if the bees vanish that human life would only last on planet earth for 3-4 years.

I'm just gonna take a wild guess and say that the bees are ALL gonna vanish during The Tribulation...which many signs are suggesting may be just around the corner.