Ladies and gentlemen, the bees are dying. This is not a myth. Bees are going through alot right now! Their populations’ are dying off in tremendous declines, showing a serious risk in our agricultural future.
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay)
Let’s start with some background on bees. With over 4,000 different species of bees living in just North America alone, domesticated honey bees in specific are being seen with a declining life rate. Now, these little pollinators perform about 80 percent of all the agriculture we eat worldwide. A single bee is able to pollinate more than 300 million flowers each day. And at least seventy out of 100 top “human food” crops are pollinated by bees. Without these little guys, our agricultural section faces impending doom.
(Photo Courtesy of Tero Vesalanian Studios)
The problem today seems to be a complex mixture of many factors; pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, air pollution, and many other climate change effects. Due to how many of these problems are interconnected, the two biggest reasons point to pollution and climate change. In past years, we’ve seen a 5-10 percent decline over winter colonies over the course of the 3 months as worker bees die off and get replaced, but in our times, we see 15-20 percent and even 30-50 percent declines over the same winter months.
Both native and domesticated bees account for nearly 90% of our total produce we find in grocery stores. But as we grow as a population, we demand more food and thus ruin bees’ habitats as we expand for more agricultural land and in order to meet demands of billions of people, we pump our produce with pesticides and herbicides in order to speed up growth. The damage of these chemicals cause lethal effects in pollinators as what we use for herbicides are neurotoxins to these little guys.
(Photo Courtesy from Pixels)
What you can do to help our agricultural future and the future of pollinators is to get involved in legalities behind banning harmful pesticides. By protecting pollinator health by preserving habitat from becoming infertile from overused pesticides, pollinators don’t run the risk of becoming poisoned by our overused chemicals.