Three Long Intros

            Most people believe that honeybees are just bugs that fly flower to flower, stinging whomever happens to walk into their path to the nearest flower. Bees actually place one of the most vital roles in modern day society. They account for 80% of all the pollination done in agriculture. If you are still not convinced, picture sitting at the dinner table and one third of all the food on the table disappeared. Bees do their part in the agricultural process by spreading pollen between flowers as they are blooming in the spring. Pollen is the male reproductive cell that all flower plants produce. As they fly from flower to flower, the pollen sticks to the bees and then steals a ride to whichever flower the honeybee goes to next. The pollen, which is one of the most nutritious substances in nature, is then used as a fuel source for the hive. However, since 2006 the beekeepers have noticed a sharp decline in their bee populations. This is a major problem because the estimated $40 billion agriculture business depends on these bees so that they can start growing crops again. Their sudden die off is causing a major buzz in the science community because they cannot determine a concrete cause for this issue. There are many different factors that can cause this die off, and there is now extensive effort to solve this problem because of their importance.

            I now see bees everywhere I look. No I’m not going crazy. One day, after struggling for almost an hour, my mom gave me the sudden idea to do my research article on honeybees. She got her ideas from a friend who is a supporter of local beekeepers. Most people would immediately ignore this topic, but I remember how interesting an article called “New studies find that bees actually want to eat the pesticides that hurt them.”  This article described how honeybees were attracted to flowers that had a pesticide whose main component was nicotine. This sparked my interest and caused me to research the topic more. I found that bee populations have been declining as much as 70% in Iowa over winter. This is an important topic because bee populations everywhere around the world are declining at a sharp rate. These bees are used by farmers across the countries to pollinate the food that we eat, or the food that we use to feed our livestock. Due to the complexity of bees, they have a delicate balance that can be upset by the littlest imbalance. When they experience an environmental stress such as pesticides they may begin to start behaving abnormally and then eventually die off. The death of large numbers of bees would be detrimental because then our food could not be grown as efficiently as needed. Not only are they needed to feed the growing seven billion people population in the world, but they also produce local honey that many people eat to increase their resistances to local allergies since their honey contains the pollen from all type of local plants.

            A world without honeybees would be one whose plate and fields would be significantly more dull than the one we have today. Even today our fields are beginning to have less wild flowers and other wild plants. The honeybees are responsible for the colorful plates that we have today. The managed populations of bees in America account for 80% of pollination in agriculture including, but defiantly not limited to, apples, avocados, blueberries, melons, and the clover that cows feed on. Since 2006 six, we have begun to see what this type of world may look like. In the winter of that year alone, over a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million beehives, which is tens of billions of bees, were lost to one disease called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Colony Collapse Disorder is describe as the sudden disappearance of worker bees from the hive, even though there are babies, a queen, and ample honey supplies for them to feed on. This phenomena has biologist baffled because of its quick impact and mysterious nature. This disease highlights the larger issue, that the bee populations can be so negatively affected by just one factor. A combination of many different factors including colony collapse disorder, global warming, monoculture, and pesticides have cause the national bee populations to decline by 30% over the last 5 years. The rate at which this is happening is increasing every year, last year being a 42% increase from the year before. The major problem of declining bee populations should alarm everyone because everyone has a stake in this issue.