The honey bee continues to disappear at a dramatic rate worldwide. Many beekeepers estimate that, at current rates of loss of bees, now may be only a window of ten years to find a cause and a cure for this disease. In fact, the British Beekeepers Association has warned that honeybees could disappear completely from Britain in 2018.
This mystery of the disappearance of the honey bee is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). CCD is unique, as it leaves to the bee hives with a queen bee, some newborns adults, and plenty of food, while all the worker bees responsible for pollination simply disappear. The truth is that the number of disappearances of bees across the world is pretty amazing.
In the United States, beekeepers lost 35 percent of his hives last winter, after losing 30 percent last year. Internationally, similar widespread losses of bees have been reported throughout Canada, Brazil, India and China as well as throughout Europe
In general, government agencies and international organizations like the United Nations have done little to resolve this growing problem. In the United States House of Representatives held an emergency hearing in June on the situation of bee pollinators in North America. The result of that hearing was an allocation of $ 5 million for bee research linked to the farm bill. However, that funding was later cut in half during the past year. So far in 2008, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made just $ 4 million to a consortium of universities for research on the problem of disappearing honey bee.
Unfortunately, politicians international focus more on the potential effect of global warming CO2 emissions on the planet during the next century. This apparent proactive approach to climate change hidden global environmental threat more immediate CCD poses to our health, food and food supply. In fact, a world without the pollination of the honey the bee would be really devastating to the national and international agriculture and this can happen in the next decade.
In fact, bee pollination Honey is responsible for the growth of all the many fruits and vegetables, and livestock feed. It is estimated that bees pollinate one third of Americans food and three-quarters of the plants, including crops, fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, even cotton that is used in fabrics.
With the current lack of government response, the complexity of research on the problem, and the rate of annual loss of bees, it may be time for us to look the world of agriculture without pollination by honeybees.
For an immediate view of this uncertain future, we can look at Maoxian County, Sichuan, Porcelain. It is an area that has lost pollinators through the indiscriminate use of pesticides and overexploitation of their honey. The result is that hand pollination of pear and apple has become a common practice. In this part of China, the honey bee has been replaced by the human bee.
Note that each spring to the last two decades, thousands of villagers have gone through fruit trees, flowers pollinated by hand dipping "pollination sticks" (brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters) into plastic bottles of pollen and then touching against each of the billions of flowering trees. Can this method of pollination that a vision of our future? Humans replacing bees from pollinating trees and plants in a attempt to produce a third of our staple foods.
Of course, humans will be expensive to hire bee pollinators. Remember that nature uses to provide this service in the past for free. Note that the cost of the loss of pollination of honey bees has been estimated at anywhere between the fourteen thousand million ninety-two billion dollars in the U.S. alone.
In fact, many farms may not be able to go to advantage in the cost so high for consumers, resulting in many food products that are no longer cultivated. Food supply that will remain, the price inflation is left out of reach for many worldwide. The increased global hunger and allowances will change. The result will be a dramatic devastation to human health internationally.
In the future, other types of bees could be trained as pollinators. However, to date, the experiment has not proved very effective. The result of the CCD can mean the honey bee is replaced by the human bee. Unfortunately, the human pollinator is an expensive agricultural response and does not offer a feasible solution to the environmental problem of disappearing honey bees.
Wild Canada
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