Goodbye bees, hello food crisis

What a difference a few decades form. Back in the 70s, we were all worried that wild “killer bees” were going to swarm by the Rio Grande and ruin the summer barbeque season. Now the disappearance of our pollinating honey bees looks like it may be about to have a much more profound impact on our way of life.

The problem of vanishing bees or Colony break down Disorder (CCD), as we wrote before, remains something of a mystery but appears to be due to a variety of converging factors including environmental chemicals, disease, and climate change. The fact that industrial farming has led to to the nearly exclusive use of the European honeybee for pollination (there are 20,000 other species of bees, but they don’t for the most part lend themselves to domestication) plus means that these genetically homogenous populations are extremely vulnerable to disease.

When afflicted by CCD, an apparently healthy hive will become lifeless within

a matter of days, with adult bees flying off and simply not returning.

The implications aren’t just depressing, but frightening. About 87% of the world’s crops, including virtually all fruits and vegetables, are pollinated by bees. Without the insects we’d be left mostly with grains and some root vegetables, suggesting a 19th century prison diet of bread and gruel. While hand pollination is possible - it’s done in parts of China where all the bees have been killed by over-enthusiastic pesticide use - it would cost the US alone literally tens of billions of dollars to hire humans to do poorly what bees do naturally.

We aren’t at that stage just yet, but 30% of US honeybees vanished by the winter of 2005-2006, and another 35% last year. According to the PBS science program Nature, at the current rate of decline the honeybee population in the US will be gone by the year 2035.

[Source] Patrick Metzger