Fig. 1: This is a bee. Hopefully future generations will get to see one in person.
We’ve talked before a bit about bees when we discussed neonicotinoids and adulterated honey but let’s take a moment to talk specifically about what we are doing to bees. Over the last few decades, the global bee population has dropped by about 30%. In the last five years we’ve heard of beekeepers losing more than half their hives to mites and pesticides year over year. We now spend hundreds of millions of dollars transporting bees around the country throughout the year to pollinate our crops. During this rotation, some keeps are losing as much asd 75% of their colonies. Millions and millions of bees at a time when the bee population is at its lowest. There are already places where we have begun manually pollinating in place of the bees but that is not feasible for the world’s crops.
We are dumping millions into robotic bees and tiny drones, pollination guns and mechanical pollinators but what if we just tackled the core issue of this problem. Namely, the toxins we are spraying on our food!! We’ve talked about Monsanto before but they are not the only company that insists on spraying their crops with chemicals and pesticides that destroy local bee populations. They are simply one of the largest. Bees travel within a 1-2 miles radius of their home. Sometimes they can travel as far as five miles but they mostly make their home near a consistent food supply. When a beekeeper is located near to a big ag grower and they spray their plants with pesticides, the bees will still try to pollinate those plants. They will not die immediately but will bring the pesticide back to their colony. Scientists have tested the impact of neonicotinoids and found that it negatively impacts the bees that survive by affecting their mating, fertility, ability to navigate home and more even when diluted 8 million times.
Pesticides, limited, clean food sources and mites are the main reasons we are looking towards a future that might be without bees. This is such a simple solution when you consider the consequences of doing nothing. The below video gives a picture of the international situation. Please take a look! We need to act now as the U.S. is the main producer for a number of the world’s agricultural crops. Is a world without bees really the future you want?
How you can help save the bees.