Beepocalypse: How You Can Meet the Bees’ Needs
About 10 years ago, bees all over the US started dying off in droves and no one could figure out why. The blight kept spreading and the mystery deepened, getting lots of media attention and an apocalyptic-sounding name: Colony Collapse Disorder. Farmers, understandably, panicked. Without bees to pollinate their crops, production would be decimated—from blueberries to oranges to carrots, almost everything in the produce aisle would disappear. Now, symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder aren’t as common as they used to be but bees are still dying off at an alarming rate.
Beekeepers and researchers are working around the clock to find out why and farms are finding ways to cope. Incredibly, robotic pollination drones already exist, and Monsanto recently began using them. While this is technically a solution to the problem, to me it seems myopic. The widespread death of pollinators isn’t an isolated issue, it’s symptomatic of a larger one—rather than working around the problem, we should be listening to the alarm bell and looking at ecosystems on a larger scale to find out what’s wrong. We should also be paying attention to other kinds of bees besides the charismatic honeybee, which has been getting the …read more
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