Where Can They Bee
OK, I’m sorry for that, but the story is interesting.
Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.
The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate US$15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees also have been reported in Europe and Brazil.
Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.
Latest research is pointing the finger at cell phones.
Bill Maher quipped that it if this theory holds up, it will make for an interesting conondrum – will we give up our cell phones to save our food supply? Or will we starve, talking on our phones, hoping that we science solves the problem?
Whooee! I gotta buddy who has a big bee operation. I was talkin’ to him a few days ago an’ he sed he lost two-thirds of his stock over this winter. He’s movin’ to Jamaica. So far, they ain’t got dead bee troublems there. I betcha they DO have cell phones, though.
The Jamaica gummint’s settin’ my buddy up to teach the bee biz to the locals. Sweet deal, sez I.
JB
“Honeybees are not the only pollinators whose numbers are dropping. Other animals that do this essential job — non-honeybees, wasps, flies, beetles, birds and bats — have decreasing populations as well.”
The common denominator is the pollen. Something in the pollen — basically their food supply — is killing them off. Weak survivors indicates that they’re starving to death.
Botanical engineers can be congratulated for doing what the world’s combined military forces have been unable to do: they have somehow developed the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and it has gotten away from them.
The dude on CBC radio who was a bee-ologist of some stripe (see what I did there?) thought that cell phones couldn’t be the cause. ‘Cuz the bees that live away from cell towers are also being affected.