For weeks I have been reading about the sudden, mysterious loss of honey bees around the country…but after noticing that Yahoo had finally picked up the story and then, reading a report in my local, small town paper of yesterday, I realized it was time to speak out.
Of course, the big environmental story of the year is global warming, as it should be but probably just as important... or at least a close second is the revelation that our little buzzin’ friends, the European honeybees are suddenly disappearing from hives across the U.S., with similar reports coming from Canada, Brazil and even the other side of the “big pond”, in Europe.
Although many ignorant people would simply laugh and say “good riddance” to the little stingers, others realize the mammoth importance the honeybee plays in the production of our crop pollination and the great possibility of massive food shortages that will accompany the honeybees’ demise.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture states that approximately one third of our diet comes from insect pollinated plants, with the honeybee being credited for 80% of that pollination. Included in that realm of flowering crops are fruits and vegetables such as apples, peaches, cherries, berries and a host of others, including melons and soybeans.
As stated in the Yahoo article, University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed. Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.
Scientific guesses range from parasites to fungus, having already discarded pesticides as being suspect, while others venture into more extreme scenarios of microwave damage due to the gigantic increase in cell phones and other microwave devises, because bees have always been know to act strangely around electrical power transmission lines. Yet other scientists are blaming genetically modified {GM} crops for the massive bee kills.
The truth is that no one has a definitive clue as to what is really causing the sudden collapse of the colonies. What few dead bees are being found seem to have multiple afflictions, leading some to surmise that the bees are losing their immune systems, therefore labeling the unknown source of the problem as “bee AIDS”.
Adding to my concern is the article published yesterday in my small local newspaper? It told the story of our local firefighters destroying two swarms of bees, each numbering in the thousands, discovered this week within two miles of town. One swarm was suspected of being Africanized “killer” bees, which migrated into our area two years ago, as they were “swarming around a hole in the ground”, while the other group was “attached to a trailer.” Both swarms were killed off with Class A Foam used by local firefighters over the last few years, although no one had been attacked by either swarm.
Even I have a diverse theory, as to what may be behind the disappearance of our little pollinating friends that I will reveal in a later article…but whatever is responsible for the CCD {Colony Collapse Disorder}, scientists and laymen alike should take note of what one famous scientist had to say about the bees, some decades ago, when Albert Einstein told us, if we lose the bees, we will follow them in four years.
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