Bee Collapse

It’s kind of surreal. Beekeepers all over the world are reporting that their bees are dying. They are calling it Colony Collapse Disorder. There is no accepted explanation for this phenomenon, but apart from a few back-page stories in the paper there has not been much discussion of this.

A bee pollinating, from pdphoto.org

An article in the Independent today has two interesting aspects to it. First it presents work related to electromagnetic disturbance of bee navigation. This is relevant to mobile phones because it’s been shown that bees won’t return to a hive if there’s a cell phone nearby. In colony collapse disorder the bees seem to die alone, far from home, so anything that has appeared recently that would confuse their navigation seems relevant.

The second interesting thing is that Bees provide huge amounts of our pollination services in commercial agriculture. According to Wikipedia “the largest managed pollination event in the world is in Californian almond orchards, where nearly half (about one million hives) of the US honey bees are trucked to the almond orchards each spring. New York’s apple crop requires about 30,000 hives; Maine’s blueberry crop uses about 50,000 hives each year.”

The Independant article reminds us that Einstein said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

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› environment     2007-04-17 10:50   ...1