(Newswire.net — February 24, 2014) —
The current honey bee crisis arose during the fall of 2006 as beekeepers around the country reported massive losses—more than a third of hives on average and up to 90 percent in some cases. Bees were flying away and simply not coming back; keepers would find boxes empty of adult bees except for a live queen. No bee corpses remained to tell the tale. The losses were unprecedented and fast.
Why keep worrying over the fate of a bunch of irritating stinging insects?
The answer is that you can thank the humble Western Honeybee, for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you’ll eat today. Bees in their crucial role as pollinators are paramount. Western nations rely heavily on managed honeybees, the “moveable force” of bees that journey in trucks from farm to farm to keep commercial agriculture productive. About a third of our foods (some 100 key crops) rely on these insects, including apples, nuts, all the favourite summer fruits (like blueberries and strawberries), alfalfa (which cows eat), and guar bean (used in all kinds of products). In total, bees contribute more than $15 billion to U.S. crop production, hardly small potatoes.
They are the “glue that holds our agricultural system together,” as the journalist Hannah Nordhaus put it in her 2011 book The Beekeeper’s Lament. But that glue is failing. Bee hives are dying off or disappearing thanks to a still-unsolved malady called colony collapse disorder (CCD), so much so that commercial beekeepers are being pushed out of the business.
No, we wouldn’t starve without their services—much of the world lives without managed pollinators. But we’d lose an awful lot of good, healthy food, from cherries and broccoli to onions and almonds. Or we’d pay exorbitant costs for farmers to use some other, less efficient pollination technique to supplement the work that healthy natural pollinators could do. Plus, bee health can tell us a lot about environmental health, and thus about our own well-being.
So what’s killing the honeybees? Pesticides, including a new class called neonicotinoids which seem to be harming bees even at what should be safe levels. Biological threats like the Varroa mite are killing off colonies directly and spreading deadly diseases. As our farms become monocultures of commodity crops like wheat and corn — plants that provide little pollen for foraging bees — honeybees are literally starving to death. If we don’t do something, there may not be enough honeybees to meet the pollination demands for valuable crops. But more than that, in a world where up to 100,000 species go extinct each year, the vanishing honeybee could be the herald of a permanently diminished planet.
People need to understand that bees are ‘More Than Honey’ and that the world has to start saying ‘NO’ to apathy and ‘YES’ to apiculture (Bee Keeping) if we want the honey bee and the human race to survive!