Sometimes it doesn't look this way but, human society is as complex as it is fragile, built upon several pillars and one of them happens to be the very existence of bees, I mean, 1 out of 3 meals eaten by people is possible because of the honey bees, they are so extremely important that if they die out all out of the sudden, thousands and thousands of plants and crops will follow, which could lead to millions of people starving in the following years. On top of that, honey bees have a tremendous economic impact, since the value of the plants pollinated by them each year is above 260 billion dollars, so all the food we so easily find or buy or in other words, we take for granted, will stop existing if bees were gone forever, or in the best case scenario, there will be a massive decrease in productivity of all crops, including apples, onions, cherries, pumpkins, and plants that are used to feed livestock, this way meat and milk will also be gone forever or at least too expensive for a regular guy to buy.
In Australia, some crops rely completely on honeybees for pollination, the most representative and dependent is the almond. It was estimated that the value of honeybee-reliant agriculture is between $4 - $6 billion American Dollars and rising.
Here is a list of the crops that rely completely or partially (means that would become absurdly expensive if bees weren't around) on honeybees pollination.
Oftenly, Albert Einstein is quoted as having said that "if honeybees died out, humans will follow a few years later". As a matter of fact, he would probably never said that but, this statement is true from top to bottom. Now, nobody knows for a fact why are bees disappearing as the years go by, and this is happening really fast, millions of hives have died in the last few years. Information gathered from beekeepers in the USA would see an annual loss of 30-90% of their colonies. We can see a steadily declining on the honeybees population in the USA since 1988, when there were 5 million hives compare to 2015 with 2.5 million.
Since 2006, a phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder" has affected honeybees in several countries and although nobody knows for sure what is causing it, what we do know us that is pretty serious. This "colony collapse disorder" plus the natural and artificial foes of the honeybees have lessened the bees population greatly. Let's take a closer look at these foes.
Natural Foes
Parasites that look like the monsters of a horror movie have come to destroy as many bees as possible.
Acarapis Woodi
The Acarapis woodi, a microscopic mite that infects the trachea of bees, laying its eggs and feeding on the fluids of its victims, weakening them considerably and spending their whole life inside the bees.
Varroa Destructor
The Varroa destructor gets its name (a very fitting name) because it only reproduces in a honey bee hive, therefore becoming one of the bee's greatest enemies. The female mite enters the honey bee brood cell, laying eggs right on top of the bee's larva before it is about to pupate and before the hive bees cover the cell with wax. Then the eggs hatch and the new-born mite and their mother feed on the developing bee inside the capped cell. Normally, the bee is not killed (they still need it after all), but weakens greatly, leaving it with just enough strength to chew its way out of the wax capping, and release itself from the cell. When the young bee gets out, it releases the mother mite and its new offspring from the cell too, therefore letting them free to spread across the hive, starting the process over and over again in a cycle of approximately 10 days, growing their population exponentially and after a few months, this can lead to the collapse of the entire beehive. But wait, there is more, once, outside the cell, the adult mites can suck the bodily fluids of bees and weaken them severally. Even more, they can also transmit horrible viruses to bees that harm them even more, leading to birth defects like useless wings.
Viruses and Fungi also attack bees, but under normal circumstances, all the above phenomena should be manageable and are clearly not enough to explain the horrendous amount of bees dying every year. This is why we need to take a look at the artificial foes of bees.
Artificial Foes
Insecticides
Over the past years, insecticides have been developed and sold on the agricultural market that are deadly to bees, let's check out the worst.
Neonicotinoids
Yeah, you guessed it, it's from the same family of nicotine which was approved back in the year 1990, as an alternative to DDT. The Neonicotinoids attack the nervous system of insects and today, they are the most widely used insecticides in the world, selling 1.5 billion Euros in more than 120 countries only in 2008 (it constituted back in 2008 nearly 80% of all seed treatment sales). Here are the top 7 most sold nicotinoid insecticides on the market in 2011.
In the US only, back in 2013, 95% of the insecticides used in corn and canola crops were nicotinoids and also in the vast majority of fruits and vegetables such as, tomatoes, leafy greens, apples, cherries, oranges, peaches, berries, potatoes, cereal grains, grapes, rice, nuts and much, much more.
What happens is that bees come into contact with this poison while collecting pollen or contaminated water, they bring the contaminating material to the hive, where it accumulates and slowly kill the whole colony.
The toxins harm bees in a variety of ways, in high enough doses, bees convulsion, get paralyzed and finally die. In small doses, it can be fatal too, since it leads to bees forgetting how to navigate the world, therefore flying into the wild, get lost and die alone, far away from the hives.
It is clear by now that we need urgently an alternative to nicotinoids but there are billions of dollars yet to be made, so mass production studies have been delayed. Now what is interesting is that studies carried out and sponsored by major chemical industry giants magically appear to prove that there are alternatives with a much lower toxicity to bees that can be used as an alternative like the Flupyradifurone.
But there are several other factors contributing the demise of bees such as, too much genetic uniformity, crop monocultures, poor nutrition due to overcrowding, strees due to human presence and activities, and pesticides (other than neonicotinoids). Each of this factors is a big problem for bees but if you put them all together, they account for "Colony Collapse Disorder"
So, what if they lose this fight?. This is a conundrum we have to sort out, that is if we want to continue living on this planet with a relative abundance and diversity of food. Remember that human life is deeply interconnected with other life forms on the planet, no matter how fragile and useless they might appear or even if we pretend that we don't. This is a wake-up call to take better care of our surroundings for the beauty of it, and if we decide that we care not for its beauty, we need to do it for our own survival.
Sorry for the long post, check out this awesome unsettling while illustrative video.
Cheers,
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