American Athens

I do not want to be an alarmist about this one, but this whole “missing bee” thing sounds as if it could be a really big deal. In the last few months, I’ve heard reports about the bees on NPR, CNN, and even Real Time with Bill Maher who passed along the link some scientists are making between the bee disappearance and cell phone usage. A quote has be circulating around saying that Einstein claimed that if something eliminated bees from our planet “man would only have 4 years of life left.” Regardless of the truth behind that quote, the biggest story in Anthophila right now is that in Europe, Brazil and especially North America, billions of bees are leaving the agricultural fields they are supposed to pollinate and “scientists” have no idea why. That’s right, billions of bees and yes, they are leaving, not dying. If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, or something in the like, their bodies would lie around the hive. Also, if they were deserting because of some threat they wouldn’t leave without the queen, which they all seem to be doing. Why this is a really big deal is because one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of which is performed by honeybees–everything from cherries to blueberries, peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.

According to Reuters:

Experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder.

“What we’re describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn’t expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring.”

The problem has prompted a congressional hearing, a report by the National Research Council and a National Pollinator Week set for June 24-30 in Washington, but so far no clear idea of what is causing it.

“The main hypotheses are based on the interpretation that the disappearances represent disruptions in orientation behavior and navigation,” said May Berenbaum, an insect ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

There have been other fluctuations in the number of honeybees, going back to the 1880s, where there were “mysterious disappearances without bodies just as we’re seeing now, but never at this magnitude,” Berenbaum said in a telephone interview.

In some cases, beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder, with some suffering even higher losses. One beekeeper alone lost 40,000 bees, Pettis said. Nationally, some 27 states have reported the disorder, with billions of bees simply gone.

Though I do not believe that we have a little over 4 years left, I am a little nervous about this one.

Further reading on the subject:

Science Daily

Globe and Mail

Bay Area Indy Media

BBC

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 9:46 and is filed under lecollye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.