Excellent news, the bee colony collapse disorder thing was one of the more concerning developments to have happened in the past decade or two.
It’s pretty clear at this point that it’s the pesticides that did it, or at least significantly contributed, so curtailing usage of the offending pesticides makes sense.
Losing the bees on a global scale would be an absolute disaster. Hopefully the US follows suit, but with US agri being as politically powerful as it is I kinda doubt it.
MSNBC: Why we can stop panicking about the honeybees
UPDATED 07/10/1
The mass death of the honeybee, the pollinator behind at least third of our food, a portent of the apocalypse…
But there comes a point in every public panic when it’s time to stop propping up the mystery and face the humdrum truth. The bees are going to be fine…
There are more than 4,000 species of wild bees in the United States, in addition to the honeybee. However, the “bee rapture,” as it’s been billed, has nothing to do with these bees…
That drives a stake through the heart of any reasonable fear that bees are the dead-canaries of some on-rushing global apocalypse. If they were, then wild bees would be dying, as well. Some are, but most are healthy and scientists aren’t widely concerned…
But dire predictions about a drop in bee population, leading to a food crisis, have been way overblown. Bee keepers simply replace their dead hives — for the price of a movie ticket…
there are just as many commercial bees in America today as there were in 2006…
Point of my post being:
If there really IS a bee die-off problem that affects plant reproduction, it exists in Europe, not in the U.S.
For a period scientists believed we had such a problem here, but it turned out to affect domesticated bees almost exclusively, and even that was not significant enough to affect bee keepers, honey prices or plant reproduction.
