Honeybee losses threaten food security
May 5th, 2010 by Jim JustIn the United States, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honeybee colonies have failed to survive the winter.
As an article in the U.K. Guardian explains, if honeybees are in terminal collapse the world could be on the brink of biological disaster:
The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
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The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
Scientists believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies.
Losses in some commercial honeybee operations are running at 50% or greater. Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers.
The Guardian article includes a litany of the catastrophic consequences of honeybee colony collapse:
Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfalfa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.
In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.