Bees in the news
Dear All – here are a couple of links that might be of interest. Bees have been in the news over the last couple of days.
Newsweek has an article about the effect of bees disappearing on agriculture.
Here is the link to it:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/141461
And George Monbiot who writes for The Guardian has a piece on the failure of science to investigate the effects of pesticides on bees:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/14/bees-scientific-research
Please spare a moment if you can to look at them. Bees are in deep trouble, especially in Europe and North America as well as parts of Asia such as China. Whatever the may causes behind the decline of bees, especially the honeybee, we need to wake up and start doing something about it.
There is also a new film out called ‘The Vanishing Bees’, you can watch a trailer and learn more about it here:
More soon – was just watching some honeybees foraging on the flowers of some acacias, will share those pictures shortly.
While I appreciate the human point of view, honey bees are not the only bee pollinators around, there are 12,000 odd other species of bees on the planet. Most of these have been suffering declines for decades, not from disease, but because of human-mediated honey bee invasion and overpopulation of their habitat. While CCD might mean problems for honey bees and humanity, the other bee species of the world will probably view it as a reprieve. We have no idea how many bee species have been pushed to or beyond the edge of extinction in the last few hundred years by our mindless greed.