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Agriculture's dependence on pollinators, including both wild and domesticated bees, has increased fourfold since the 1960s. A recent study of these pollinators found that they provide up to $577 billion a year of crops, half of which comes from wild pollinators. These ratios underline the severity of their collapsing numbers. More than a third are facing extinction.
Gemma Cranston, head of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership team that participated in the study, warned that "less than half the companies sampled know which of the raw materials they source depend on pollinators", adding that there needs to be more research to get the full picture.
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Plight of the bees hits unaware businesses
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Plight of the Bees Hits Unaware Businesses
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Ryan's Law:
Make three correct guesses consecutively
and you will establish yourself as an expert.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:00PM (1 child)
Beekeepers certainly are trying to keep their hives healthy, and it is possible to fission a new hive, but you can't just buy new queens if the queens don't exist. Apparently, there are methods available to artificially stimulate queen production, but it's definitely real work.
One other aspect of all this: Farmers growing bee-pollenating plants sometimes contract with beekeepers to bring their bees to that particular field. The beekeepers have been having to be very vigilant about avoiding pesticides thought to be related to colony collapse, including sometimes testing the crops themselves to make sure that the contract won't kill their bees. The cost of that vigilance of course gets passed on to the farmers, which in turn gets somewhat reflected in crop prices, which in turn gets somewhat reflected at the grocery store.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday April 18 2018, @03:19AM
Hives normally overproduce queens, so that's not the real problem. The problem is keeping the workers alive. This probably means keeping them away from persistent insecticides. These may or may not directly kill off the bees, but they weaken them and make the hives subject to infection by mites.
So what you need to do is raise your new hives in an area free of pesticides...which usually translates as "broad spectrum insecticides". This is becoming increasingly difficult, as bees do not willingly contain themselves to a small area, and pesticides are increasingly becoming persistent, and even spreading in the water supplies. You might also look into the causes of amphibian declines...multiple pesticides each at a sub-critical dose can have strongly potentiated effects.
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