Protecting One of Our Most Valuable Food Sources: Bees

By Tracy Taylor Grondine

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about bees. Yes, bees. Those pesky little critters that wreak havoc on your picnic and bring out folks’ worst childhood fears of getting stung. Yet, this bane of your leisurely existence can actually take credit for your, well, real-life existence. That’s right, without bees and other pollinators, there would be 80 percent fewer crop plants in the world. In layman’s terms, that’s a lot less food.

June 24-30, is National Pollinator Week. It’s a time to celebrate the marvelous bee and its pollinating friends, as well as raise public awareness about protecting pollinators and their habitat.

Aside from being exceptionally smart, bees play a critical role in pollination and are the major type of pollinators in ecosystems that contain flowering plants. Importantly, they are extremely critical to agriculture.

According to the Pollinator Partnership (http://www.pollinator.org/), pollinators are indispensable for an estimated one-out-of-three mouthfuls of foods, spices and condiments we eat, as well as beverages we drink. Further, they play a significant role in making fibers, medicine and more than half of the world’s diet of fats and oils. And not only are they vital to our survival and the existence of nearly all ecosystems on earth, they have a big price tag attached to their work. Pollinated products account for $20 billion annually in the U.S. alone.

If you think about it, some of our most beloved foods have been pollinated. Apples, avocados, blueberries, canola, cucumbers and tomatoes, just to name a few. Without bees and other pollinators, not only would our favorite foods not survive, but humans and entire ecosystems would be in danger of extinction.

For this reason, legislators are pushing to insert pollination habitat protection legislation in the next farm bill. The Farm Bureau-supported Pollinator Protection Act encourages planting of pollinator-favorable habitat on conservation land, while still allowing producers to receive compensation. Because let’s face it, bees are disappearing at alarming rates.

There is much speculation as to why entire honey bee colonies are completely disappearing without a trace. Some of the theories include: chemical residue or contamination in the wax; pathogens or parasites in the bees; stress to the bees; lack of genetic and lineage diversity in bees; even alien abduction. Enter the Twilight Zone.

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But on a more serious note, according to entomologist May Berenbaum in a recent Smithsonian magazine article, the disappearance of bees is more than a crisis. “It’s a crisis on top of a crisis,” says Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at University of Illinois. “[It had previously been projected] that commercial bee-keeping [might] cease to exist in the United States by 2035 – and that was before the colony collapse disorder. And we can’t count on wild pollinators because we’ve so altered the landscape that many are no longer viable.”

As for theories to explain the bee disappearance, Berenbaum adds, “I like the theory that visitors from another planet have decided they were going to abduct the smartest organisms on [earth], and they’ve picked the honeybees.”

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