Bees are Going Extinct

When a bee flies toward you, your first reaction might be to run in the other direction screaming with your arms flying high in the air, but bees are not as scary as you think and we need to prevent them from going extinct.

I read an article in The Guardian that said "more than a quarter of American honeybee colonies were wiped out over the winter, with deadly infestations of mites and harmful land managment practices heaping mounting pressure upon the crucial pollinators and the businesses that keep them."

During the 2015-2016 winter, 28% of bee colonies were lost in the United States. From April 2015 to March 2016, "beekeepers lost 44% of their colonies." Up until six years ago, annual figures were not kept because everyone thought that bee colonies were only lost in the winter. Now, there are declines year round.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a University of Maryland bee scientist stated that "one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by bees. If we want to produce apples, cucumbers, almonds, blueberries and lots of other types of food, we need a functioning pollination system."

There are a couple of different reasons why bees are declining. One reason is the "mass conversion of pollen-rich meadows into heavily farmed land for staples such as corn and soy beans." Another reason is pesticide use.

According to The Guardian, there were about 5 million bee colonies in the United States in 1940. Now, only half remain.

There are queen bee producers in the United States that supply them to beekeepers. "The queens, which are created when a female bee is fed royal jelly during the first three days of her life are placed in tiny cages and sent in the mail to beekeepers." Queen bees are now being artificially replaced.

VanEngelsdorp said that "it costs around $200 a year to keep a colony alive and replace a queen. You're lucky if you make $200 a year through the honey produced, so a lot of operators aren't even breaking even. There are a lot who are really hurting."

Obama's administration created a taskforce last year to look at the bee issue. "The plan is largely based around restoring traditional bee-friendly habitat and analyzing the role that pesticides play in bee health."

The Guardian Article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/11/bee-colony-deaths-environmental-problems