Colony Collapse Disorder
There is a worldwide problem today, and it’s the rate at which honey bees disappear. It’s gotten to a point where beekeepers say that we only have around ten years before it’s too late, and a cure for the malady will not be useful anymore. The association of beekeepers from Great Britain said that by 2018, honeybees might disappear completely from this country.
It’s called CCD and it means Colony Collapse Disorder, or the mystery behind the disappearance of bees. With CCD, the bee hive remains only with young adults and the queen bee, plus their food, but the workers that normally pollinate will disappear. This is something that takes place all over the world.
Just in the US alone, beekeepers reported a 35% decrease in bee hives, after the last winter. The year before that, they lost another 30%. Similar losses of bee hives took place in countries like China, India, Brazil, Canada and European countries.
In most cases international organizations and agencies don’t do anything to stop this problem, which seems to be getting worse. After a hearing held by the House of Representatives last year, $5 million was allocated for research of the honeybees. Unfortunately, that sum dropped to half next year. Only $4 million was spent last year for research on the disappearance of honeybees, by universities from the United States.
The problem is that politicians don’t pay enough attention to the colony collapse disorder, and too much to the warming effect that our planet might endure because of the CO2 emissions. The colony collapse disorder is a more immediate threat, with the potential to threaten our food supply, diet and health. If the plants would no longer be pollinated, the effects on the agriculture would be devastating at an international level. These effects could appear in the next ten years or so.
Actually, the livestock feed, the vegetables and the fruits are there for us because of the pollination done by the honey bees. Around one third of all the food produced in America and over three quarters of all the fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, cotton, are pollinated by bees.
Since the government isn’t investing the proper sums into the research of the colony collapse disorder, the rate at which the bees disappear each year increases and soon we might find ourselves in a world where bees no longer pollinate the plants.
One example of what the future might bring can be seen in a county from China, where the overuse of pesticides and the increased harvesting of honey made all the pollinators leave the area. Now, people from the area need to manually pollinate the apple and pear trees, since bees no longer do their job. In this area, thousands of people climbed the trees each spring for the last twenty years or so, using pollination sticks and spreading the pollen on the blossoms of the trees. Such a future would be horrible for our agriculture and human bees could not replace the missing honey bees.
Not only would this be difficult to do, but it would be expensive as well. Instead of using the free services of the honey bees, we would need to hire people. Estimates put this cost anywhere between fourteen and ninety two billion only in the US, without taking into consideration the rest of the world.