By Barbara Kessler
If you’ve be
en wondering about all the buzz over honeybees, here is some food for thought – or rather some thought about food: Bees play a role in one out of every three bites of food Americans eat.
Pollinators, mainly bees, but also butterflies, songbirds and even bats, perform such a critical function in the food chain that their absence threatens everything from the viability of vast fields of commercial corn and other crops to the tomatoes in your garden. Without the bees and other pollinators, plants can fail to produce the fruits and seeds we eat.
Which is why a San Francisco-based group called the Pollinator Partnership has dedicated itself to the survival of pollinators — from hummingbirds to small mammals to the fragile and busiest pollinators of them all, the bees. Partnership members, along with beekeepers and researchers testified before Congress last week to lobby lawmakers for more funding to research the decline of many pollinators, particularly the loss of millions of bees around the world to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
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Bee Colony Collapse: Experts Race To Unravel Mystery; Beekeepers Fear A Deepening Crisis
February 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Photo: Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium
Worker bees
By Shermakaye Bass
A year and a half ago, news of a mysterious phenomenon captured the country’s attention – something known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that was affecting up to 30 percent of America’s commercial honeybee producers, whose mobile apiaries pollinate one-third of the country’s food supply.
For months, the international media carried reports on CCD (essentially a disappearing act by America’s worker honeybees), projecting repercussions that would drive produce and dairy prices through the roof and eventually cause large-scale food shortages in the U.S.
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Tags: · Bee Colony Collapse Disorder, Beekeepers, Bees, pesticides, pollinators
