3:34pm June 8, 2014

➸ Report: Honeybee Death Rate is Currently too High for Survival of the Species

ursulavernon:

A government report released last week surprisingly admits that the honeybee species are dying off at a rate too high to ‘guarantee their long term survival’.

It has been well proven that the primary factor leading to this extinction is the presence of neonicotinoid poisons, of course present in insecticides sold by and/or used by corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dupont and their products. A recent study from Harvard, published on March 27th of this year, has definitively confirmed what scientists outside the US have been saying for years: neonicotinoids are the [emphasis added] cause of colony collapse disorder(CCD). The study showed that 50% of colonies populated by bees who had been in contact with these pesticides collapsed, compared to only 1 in 6 who were not in contact with neonicotinoids.

The European Union understands that the death of honeybees is an unprecedented death for human beings and mother earth, as they have banned neonicotinoid poisons.

However, American powers refuse to believe the problem is neonicotinoid insecticides and they continue to be in use here.

These corporations with armies of lobbyists and politicians bought and paid for, like Monsanto, are playing dumb and suggesting that ‘mites’ are the cause for the death rate of honeybees, a problem so bad that it means their extinction if they continue on this path. This is dangerous anti-science rhetoric, borderline scientific denialism from the American agro-chemical establishment.

Well, did mites cause the honeybees to go extinct in the approximate 14 million years they survived here before humans invented neonicotinoid chemicals? Of course not. It seems only things as foreign to Earth as neonicotinoids can cause such a drastic loss of crucial life on our planet and the solution is obvious; inform people that if we keep allowing the honeybees to die at this rate, we will be literally without almost all of the fruits we enjoy. Oh and stop using neonicotinoids.

If we don’t seriously stop this soon, then a corporation like Monsanto would likely take advantage of the lack of bees to pollinate and create fruit, and attempt to monopolize the products of nature because the fruits will then require individual, manual pollination or more complex measures. While this may seem far fetched, in the absence of honeybees and acknowledging that manual pollination is highly labor intensive, micro pollinator drones may be in our future if something is not done to save the bees.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance absolutely none of this information is new. If the bees are not nursed back to health as a species, say goodbye to these things- (unless you want genetically modified, manually pollinated products of Monsanto in the wake of the extinction of the honeybee): Apples Mangos Rambutan Kiwi Fruit Plums Peaches Nectarines Guava Rose Hips Pomegranites Pears Black and Red Currants Alfalfa Okra Strawberries Onions Cashews Cactus Prickly Pear Apricots Allspice Avocados Passion Fruit Lima Beans Kidney Beans Adzuki Beans Green Beans Orchid Plants Custard Apples Cherries Celery Coffee Walnut Cotton Lychee Flax Acerola – used in Vitamin C supplements Macadamia Nuts Sunflower Oil Goa beans Lemons Buckwheat Figs Fennel Limes Quince Carrots Persimmons Palm Oil Loquat Durian Cucumber Hazelnut Cantaloupe Tangelos Coriander Caraway Chestnut Watermelon Star Apples Coconut Tangerines Boysenberries Starfruit Brazil Nuts Beets Mustard Seed Rapeseed Broccoli Cauliflower Cabbage Brussels Sprouts Bok Choy (Chinese Cabbage) Turnips Congo Beans Sword beans Chili peppers, red peppers, bell peppers, green peppers Papaya Safflower Sesame Eggplant Raspberries Elderberries Blackberries Clover Tamarind Cocoa Black Eyed Peas Vanilla Cranberries Tomatoes Grapes

Ok, I have a pet peeve here and I’m gonna vent it for a minute, so bear with me.

I love honeybees. Love ‘em. I’d keep them, but my neighbor has three hives, so I basically just try to make my garden as hospitable as possible.

However.

European Honeybees are not the only pollinators on the planet, nor even the only bees.

Some of the plants on that list are native to the Americas. Somehow they grew just awesome and fed a whole bunch of peoples with, y’know, civilizations and everything! before the European honeybee showed up.

(In the 1600s. Shakespeare had been dead like five years when the bees showed up. Not before.)

Potatoes? The Inca had 3000+ varieties. They did not, until after the Spanish showed up, have European honeybees.

Tomatoes? I don’t doubt many modern cultivars are indeed pollinated by honeybees, but at the risk of anecdata, I have native bees all up in mine. And they grew somehow. Chili peppers too. All those centuries, and nary a honeybee in sight.

Prickly Pear? Article, did you, with a straight face, just tell me that goddamn prickly pear is honeybee pollinated? For the love of the Incan potato goddess, NO. LONG-TONGUED NATIVE BEES. And that’s just my local variety—they got some in the desert pollinated by BIRDS.

Look, colony collapse sucks. I will sign any petition you like to get the damn pesticides banned—I think they’re monstrous. There’s a No Monsanto sign on my garden fence.

But get your damn facts straight. The situation is bad enough with dressing it up in more panic. Humans lived for thousands of years in a European honeybee-free continent. Those were real people eating real meals made of real food, pollinated by real native pollinators.

There are more bees in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your apiology.

I agree it’s important to acknowledge and support native bees in the Americas, and recognize other pollinators besides honey bees (I’m raising some mason bees now in my yard to supplement the work our wild honey bee hive does). But, you’re still missing an important complication.

Though we love European honey bees, they’re an invasive species. There’s debate about how much they affect native bees, but studies have shown that native bees aren’t as successful when they’re competing with European honey bees. This could mean that the populations and coverage of native bees is much reduced from pre colonial times. So if honey bees go extinct, native bees may not be ready to take over the work for them.

And, while honey bees have become the poster children of bee decline, they’re not the only species at risk. In China, some orchards have to be hand pollinated, because bees and other insect pollinators have been killed off by insecticides.

And, yes, there are birds and bats that pollinate some plants, but they are also in danger. Their populations have been severely reduced by humans. If you take all this and add to it the fact that there are a lot more crops being grown in the Americas, and lot more people to feed, then it is not unreasonable to be pretty panicky about the potential extinction of honey bees.

If we don’t address the honey bee problem, then we won’t be doing anything to help other bees and pollinating insects. I’m totally OK with the majority of people out there not understanding that the issue is bigger than just honey bees, if it means they’ll do something about it. If people are boycotting Monsato products, signing petitions, contacting their representatives, or whatever else to help honey bees, with no understanding that there are native pollinators out there, then I’m not going to complain.