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Care2 Earth Month: Back to Basics
This year, Care2 decided to expand Earth Day into Earth Month, since there is so much to explore when it comes to the environment. Every day in April, we’ll have a post about some of the most important topics for the environment, exploring and explaining the basics. It’s a great tool to help you get started with helping the environment — or help explain it to others. See the whole series here.
Where have all the bees gone?
What is causing colony collapse disorder, when hives suddenly lose most of their worker bee population, with very few dead bees found nearby and only the queen and brood remaining?
Bees are worth about 1.8 billion pounds (about $2.9 billion) a year in the U.K., according to new research about the cost of hand-pollinating the many crops that bees do so for free. As Damian Carrington writes in the Guardian, hand-pollination is already a necessity in places like China’s pear orchards while in the U.S. bees are “routinely trucked around… to compensate for the loss of their wild cousins.” In the U.K., Carrington describes a virtual “bee-calypse”: “Half the UK’s honey bees kept in managed hives have gone, wild honey bees are close to extinction and solitary bees are declining in more than half the place they have been studied.”
Carrington cites the loss of meadows full of flowers and parasites and diseases. But pesticides are routinely cited as a factor and three recent scientific studies offer compelling evidence linking pesticides to global declines in bee populations.
Related Care2 Coverage
Parasite Drives Honey Bees to Doomed Zombie Flight?
Study Links Honey Bee Deaths to Corn Insecticide
Mild Winter, Early Spring: Bad News for Butterflies and Bees
Photo by expom2uk
Read more: bee, bees, bumblebees, care2 earth day, causes earth day, CCD, colony collapse disorder, earth day, Earth Day 2012, honeybees, imidacloprid, neonicotinoids, pesticides
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Awful.
wow took a genius to figure that out eh. Look at the back of any pesticides and it says harmful to bees.
Unless we want to view our food supply as a pest, maybe we should start rethinking non-organic pesticide procedures...
WHAT are GMOs doing to the bees?
Tell the students this is already known. So what is going to be done about it? You kill off the bees and you're as good as dead yourself. I tell you, wherever man goes, death and destruction follow.
This should scare the hell out of every living being. I scares me. Their fate is our fate folks.
No bees = no life. It's as simple and as complicated as that.
Are YOU scared? You SHOULD be................................
Why is it that in today's world we have all of this crap? We/ve gone centuries without these life destroying chemicals, It makes me sick to go and buy fresh vegetables and fruits wondering what has been sprayed or added to their soil. In my own garden, I have seen less bees coming around for the past three years. It sadden me. I try to grow lots of flowers to bring them around to help pollen my vegetables and fruit plants. I have been signing all sorts of petitions to put a stop it it. I hope they do, before they kill us all. Thanks Kristina
We have known for years that pesticides kill the bees. Lets have more ACTION......ban pesticides!! What effect are pesticides having on birds and even us humanes??
There is the potential for a huge worldwide famine in the next few decades that promises to affect America as well as every other country. And human activity is central to this possibility. Climate change is negatively altering the growing cycles of agriculture around the world. Super fires, floods, and other disasters destroy crops. Farm land is becoming more and more salty dues to irrigation practices. Genetic modification of crops promise the creation of foods that have increasingly toxic effects on consumers. We are over fishing our oceans and many species are on the verge of extinction. The oceans are becoming more acidic during this same time. Population numbers are now over 7 billion people and climbing. Add to this colony collapse syndrome, and we have all the elements for a huge decline in food production leading very quickly to worldwide famine. We simply do NOT have the luxury of waiting for further research on the devastating effects of these types of insecticides.
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