The mysterious case of the missing bees - or Colony Collapse Disorder:
Five years ago beekeepers noticed a dramatic decline in the bee population. Almost overnight a colony of bees would just disappear, gone - poof! It had beekeepers mystified and soon it was all the buzz in the bee community.
Since that time this has become to be know as CCD or Colony Collapse Disorder. There doesn't appear to be just one single cause of this but rather its a combination contributory causes.
"According to Ross Conrad, author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), the industrialization of agriculture is the largest single cause of the decline. “We’re destroying our life-support system,” Conrad says. “We have to learn how to work with nature in a partnership instead of trying to dominate it in order to conform it to our own desires and wills.” Conrad links bee disappearance to a combination of factors associated with industrialization: the use of pesticides, antibiotics, long-distance travel, poor diet, genetically engineered crops, large monoculture farms, the changing climate, inbreeding and stress."
We can all help in big and small ways to help the bees out. Here are a few tips that will help to assure that bees will have the healthy environment they need to keep thriving.
I will watch it. Thanks for the heads up. I like that note about what to plant to make bees happy. In the Spring, we'll give it a shot. I like bees. But then I like most any creature.
ReplyDeleteI'm tending my downstairs neighbor's patio garden this week while they are out of town. The bees and hummingbirds flourish. After I watched Vanishing of the Bees I realized how important even his small garden is to our world as a whole.
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