Bee Gone!

Reported July, 2007

GREENBELT, M.D. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Don’t be afraid of the buzz of a bee. If it wasn’t for bees, many fruits and vegetables we enjoy wouldn’t exist. They are vital for pollination of plants, but lately, they’ve been disappearing by the billions, possibly putting food supplies at risk.

“We need them for the food that we eat, for the color and variety that’s on our plate,” says Dewey Caron, Ph.D., an entomologist from University of Delaware. But this year, bees are dying by the billions, a problem threatening to wipe out crops dependent on bees for pollination. Fewer bees could cost us all at the grocery store.

Jay Evans, Ph.D., a geneticist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says, “What was striking is the suddenness with which the bees disappeared.” Entomologists call the mass disappearance, colony collapse disorder, or CCD. The cause is most likely toxins that make bees more susceptible to or cause disease.

“We’ve seen collapses of colonies in the past, thought they were related to stress, related to nutrition, this seemed to be very widespread,” Caron says. Bees pollinate 80 percent of fruits and vegetables by transferring pollen from one flowering plant to another. This starts fertilization that helps the plant grow seeds that turn into the food we eat.

“It’s really this pollination service that we cannot live without if we want the very inexpensive food, the abundance and the variety of foods that we’re accustomed to,” Caron says.

Bee keepers are now taking steps to control CCD so higher produce prices won’t be all the buzz

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

American Beekeeping Federation
Jesup, GA 31598-1038
(912) 427-4233
info@abfnet.org

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