FOX News, like many in the media, circulated the narrative far and wide. Citing the National Resources Defense Fund, which passed along the comment as accepted wisdom, āone of every three bites of food Americans consume comes from a plant visited by bees or other pollinators.
All of those suitably proportioned values added up to less than $15 billion using data from 1996 to 1998. According to the USDAās census of agriculture, the market valueof our food supply then was $197 billion, which means bees would account for about 7.4 percent of agricultureās value. To be sure, thatās a substantial amount, but itās hardly one third.
āBetween April 2018 and the same month this year, beekeepers in the U.S. lost about 40.7 percent of their colonies, according to a report by of the Bee Informed Partnership, a program partly run by the University of Maryland and Auburn University.ā
Letās not have a bunch of arguments about how bees are not important. At this point everyone should know that theyāre critical.
Email your representatives and tell them that this is unacceptable.