Where Have All The Bees Gone??

12/21/2010

What's all the buzz about ? It's not coming from bees....

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Einstein supposedly said if bees were to disappear from the surface of the earth humanity would have no more than four years to live – whereas if we were to disappear, the rest of the planet would carry on just fine. Others argue that the quote was NOT said by Einstein, but whether he said it or not, it evidently got people's attention. And the fact is that the loss of bees will have drastic consequences for the human race. Another fact is that bee populations are diminishing at alarmingly high rates.

Owing to the lack of bees, Chinese farmer have started to pollinate their orchards by hand. Photograph: Li junsheng /Imaginechina

honey bee - by Betsy Seeton

In the Maoxian county of Sichuan, China, an area that has lost its bee pollinators through the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the over-harvesting of its honey, human workers can be seen pollinating pear and apple trees by hand. In this part of China, the honeybee has been replaced by the human bee.

The Guardian journalist, Rosie Boycott writes, " Every spring, thousands of villagers climb through fruit trees hand-pollinating blossoms by dipping "pollination sticks" (brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters) into plastic bottles of pollen and then touching them against each of the tree's billions of blossoms."

honey bee - by Betsy Seeton

Rosie's article states:
"No one quite knows why the honeybees are collapsing in numbers so dramatically but the over-use of pesticides on farms and in gardens, the mysterious "colony collapse disorder", the spread of disease like the varroa mite or foul brood, the changing climate and an increase in mono-cropping on farms, which means less food for bees throughout the summer season are all playing their part."

Here's more eye opening news from Rosie's article:

One-third of all our food staples only grow after pollination. In the United States alone, the cost of replacing this "free service" which nature has provided for hundreds of thousands of years, is put at anything between £14bn and £92bn. And that's in one country alone. If we don't wake up to the global crisis facing our pollinators, the banking crisis is going to look relatively trivial as the world runs out of food. China can, for the time being, afford to hurl this level of human labour at the problem: but short of the prospect of actual starvation, it is wholly unrealistic to imagine this happening in, say, California, where bees still pollinate orange, apple, pear and plum trees.

In Britain they are losing bees at an alarming rate. Worldwide, many beekeepers estimate that, at the current rate of bee loss, there now may be only a 10-year window to find a cause and a solution to this problem. And the British Beekeepers Association has warned that honeybees could disappear entirely from the UK by 2018.

READ FULL ARTICLE .. and learn what city dwellers can do to help!

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Click for another very good article .... below is an excerpt

From the 2 May 2010 Observer (UK): "The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26 bn [over $42 bn] to the global economy…US scientists at the ARS have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. (Source: http://www.mvtimes.com/marthas-vineyard/article.php?id=4587)