photo credit: Jaroslaw Pocztarkski
If you haven’t heard about it yet, you will over the coming months: Bees are disappearing and the implications for our food supply are a whole lot scarier than you probably think.
Eat apples? check
Eat carrots? check
Onions? check
Blueberries? check
Garlic? check
Broccoli? Tomatoes? Squash? Cherries? Almonds? What about oranges?
Each of these foods among countless more, require pollination by bees.
Truth be told, my knowledge about the role bees play in putting food on my table only extended as far as honey on my toast. I didn’t realize they played such a keystone role in so many other foods that both humans and livestock require. In economic terms, in Canada the value of honeybee pollination is estimated at $1.2 Billion a year.
30% of all bee colonies in the USA have died in the past couple years. And similar numbers are being reported from all over the world. No one really knows why. They’re just dying off every year.
So while we’re increasingly anxious about peak oil and climate change, it could be the demise of this tiny little creature that does us in.
Haagen-Dazs has created a site with further info, a wee bit lite in tone: www.helpthehoneybees.com.
What does all this have to do with money? Not much, directly, but everything indirectly if our food supply suffers a catastrophic breakdown. So if you’re able, #HelpHoneyBees !
Yo, Nancy — not only are bees disappearing, but I guess it’s even becoming hard to find photos of them: that picture in your post shows a fly, not a bee. How can I tell? Bees have four wings, flies have two. While honeybees’ wings are coupled so it almost looks like they have just two wings when at rest, a close look shows the difference. This baby’s definitely a fly.
@brad rotfl – I stand corrected! And I’ll try to upload a *real* bee picture later
I thought the reason for colony collapse had more-or-less been found to be travel stress… but I see that (according to Wikipedia) that’s just one of the current theories.
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Yeah, I don’t think travel stress could be the only explanation because even wild populations of honeybees (which don’t travel except when they need to make a new hive) have been affected.
Plenty of other insects serve as pollinators, but few are as effective as bees. One look at the fly in the picture helps explain why: no pollen baskets on the legs, a lot less hair to trap pollen grains, etc., and no social organization or communication methods to effectively deploy the troops to a patch of flowers.