The fuzzy yellow and black bugs that are bees often stir up emotions of fear and disgust. They are famous for their stingers and ferocious group mentality. But these insects do far more than just inflict pain upon an unlucky few. They feed us every day. The fact of the matter is 90% of the plants that feed the world only exist thanks to honey bees. Ironically, the way we produce mass quantities of these foods is killing off the very bugs that make them possible.
For the past decade, bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Studies show that bee keepers have been increasingly losing more than double the acceptable amount of bees since 2006. This devastating loss has been occurring for a number of reasons. The biggest contributor to the disappearance of the bees, pesticide exposure and climate change, are because of our agricultural industry.
The loss of so many of our precious bees can largely be tied back to our agriculture system. It is widely known that the main cause for climate change is the excessive production of greenhouse gasses. The agriculture system alone contributes to 30% of the worlds greenhouse gases. In addition to this, many modern agriculture systems utilize deadly cocktails of pesticides to their keep crops looking pristine for our consumption.
The pesticides used to protect plants from harmful insects are having traumatic effects on the bees. The most well known pesticide threat to honey bees are a type called neonicotinoids. These pesticides, while non-harmful to humans, are extremely harmful to bees. European countries have even banned this category of pesticide to help preserve their bee populations. However, the US still widely uses this pesticide. Studies show that this pesticides interferes with bee’s ability to gather food and also has the ability to kill them. The bees that aren’t killed by this type of pesticide might as well be dead. Bees affected by the pesticide often forget how to pollinate plants altogether. There is little benefit to pesticides if they kill of the very bugs that allow the plant to exist in the first place.
The most glaring issue to the widespread bee loss is climate change. Thanks to the agriculture industry, much of the bee’s homeland has been destroyed to make room for crops. Since 1970, bees have lost over 200 miles of their native habitat in the U.S. alone and are continuing to lose more and more of their homeland to this day. In addition to losing their lands, bees are losing the plants that inhabit them. Because of the global increase in temperature, many plants have been starting to shift northward to follow their preferred climates. Studies from the University of Ottawa show that bees are not following this shift, but rather are migrating in the complete opposite direction. This limits the bee’s diet options and causes them to be poorly nourished, ultimately resulting in more bee deaths. In addition to losing their food, the dramatic weather changes stresses the bees, making them more susceptible to mites, pesticides and viruses.
The loss of bees will result in the loss of many of people’s favorite crops. To name a few, the extinction of bees would bring about the end of apples, strawberries, coffee, cotton, grapes and cocoa.
Multiple weak efforts have been made to combat the dramatic honey bee loss. The disappearance of US bees has become so significant that, since 2007, the US has been forced to import many of its honey bees from Australia just to get by. In addition to this, just last year the White House addressed this pressing issue by passing The National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and other Pollinators. This act set out to reduce honey bee colony loss within the next ten years, increase monarch butterfly populations, and restore pollinator’s habitats. Unfortunately these efforts have yet to bear any results. Data collected from 2015 revealed the decline of the honey bee is still overwhelmingly high. The poisons and greenhouse gases the agricultural industry produces is devastating to the environment and might very well cause us to lose many of the foods we love forever. The real solution to saving the honey bees is to fix out agricultural system. We need to create a more efficient, less toxic way of producing food. There are already many potential solutions in circulation: eating less meat, organic farming, GMO’s to reduce pesticides and many others. For the honey bee as well as many of our favorite foods to stand a chance, we need to implement not just one of these options, but all of them. We have been pumping poison into our atmosphere and ravaging the earth’s resources for decades. To make a real dent in fixing all those wrongs we need start enforcing extreme changes.