Bees Death

I keep reading online how there are millions of bees dying around the world and no one is really batting an eye about it. First of all, if there are millions of animals dying around the same time there must be something wrong. Secondly, the animals that are dying are one of the major role players in putting food on our table. Bees are a pollinating species and without them plants will start to die. Have you ever seen Bee Movie?

As I was looking up information about how the bees are dying I came across an article  in the Washington Post about it. The scientists behind the investigation of the bee’s sudden death are not quite sure what is killing them. They think it is due to the Varroa mite, which prey on honeybees. These mites are mainly found in honeycomb, which is why they are so commonly found on bees. The mites kill the bees by attaching to them and sucking their blood. Once a mite has infected a bee, the mite gives off a virus, which affects a bees DNA.

Since scientist are still not sure if these mites are the reason for the sudden increase of bee’s death, they do not have a cure to save them. The scientist and researchers must hurry up because the bees are not dying at an alarming rate. In this article it is said that in just one month alone, 37 million bees died in Canada. In another instance, close to 25,000 bees were found dead in an Oregon bee farm. If these bees keep dying off, our world coanthidium_february_2008-1uld be in serious danger.

If you are asking how bee’s dying will affect your life then you must have forgotten they are a main pollinator in our world. Bees are one of the best pollinators that nature has given us. This article explains how bees spend most of their life collecting pollen from flowers because they use pollen to feed their young. They collect the pollen through an electrostatic force their legs give off. When they land on a male flower the pollen is attracted and dead-almond-treesattached to the bee’s legs. Then when the bee lands on another flower some of the pollen falls off.

Bees tend to only go after one specific flower when they are collecting pollen. This way they will spread a single species of flowers male pollen around to all the female flowers of that species.

Without bees pollenating our land, a lot of flowers and tress would start to die off and affect our ecosystem and us. As stated in this article, almost every bite of vegetarian food you eat has been pollenated by a bee. If all the bees in the world were to die off then we would have to find a new way of pollinating our food, and do it quickly. The Bee Movie might have a comical storyline to it, but it still shows the affect of bees not pollinating our world.

There was a study done by Harvard University where they tested out one of their hypothesis for the death of bees. They studied 18 colonies of bees and gave 12 of the colonies a pesticide that is considered to be non lethal. The 6 colonies that were left untreated stayed the same, but of the 12 colonies that were treated with pesticides 6 of them were killed entirely. This could be an answer to how the bees are dying around the world, but there is still the question to why only 6 of the colonies died when treated the other 6 did not. Could this be due to chance or a third variable? The scientists are still trying to figure this out now.

There could be a solution to stopping the decline of bees death could be making a sanctuary for them. These bees would not be used to gather honey from but simply to pollinate our land. We could monitor them to make sure there are no deaths occurring and if there are we can quarantine the hive that had the dead bee so whatever killed it will not kills others. These bees would also not be around any pesticides incase that is the mechanism hat is killing them. It would be tricky since we still cannot pinpoint a reason for the deaths, but we have to try and save the bees somehow.

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/the-surprisingly-simple-reason-millions-of-bees-are-dying/

https://csglobe.com/harvard-study-proves-why-the-bees-are-all-disappearing/

http://nativeplants.msu.edu/pollination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-world-without-honeybees-2013-6

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