Honeybee die-off threatens food supply: We MUST act NOW!!

BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the

mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could

have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing

us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the

tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados,

soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really

sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries,

cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from

insect-pollinated

plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that

pollination, according to the U.S.

Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse

worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said

Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination

program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale

bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling

and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their

colonies ” or about five times the normal winter losses ” because of

what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem

started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar

collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees,

and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of

disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble.

Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip

them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their

gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their

close cousins.

"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this

perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back?

We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at

USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed

Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings

on the matter.

"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on

bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary

Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in

value to our food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees

are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American

crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many

types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the

honeybee is nature's "workhorse” and we took it for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book

"The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press

on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find

no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs,

where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just

disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the

detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and

money to look into them.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070502/ap_on_sc/honeybee_die_off

Imported from external blog