Honey Bee Turnover

If you didn’t know, honeybees are dying rapidly, and it is more serious than you might think. The decline of the honeybee is fairly complicated, as we cannot simply target one cause for the honeybee’s decreasing numbers. The combination of factors includes parasitic mites, Colony Collapse Disorder, harmful pesticides, poor nutrition, and habitat loss, all of which have contributed to the loss of droves of honeybees. This issue much more important than what the attention it is getting implies, as honeybees are an essential part to the agricultural society, and the human race in general. Not only are bees responsible for making honey, but also for pollinating a large portion of crops grown around the world. If we did allow honeybees to disappear,

Whatever the proximate cause, it increasingly appears that the bees are succumbing to a long-ignored underlying condition — inbreeding. Decades of agricultural and breeding practices meant to maximize pollinating efficiency have limited honeybees' genetic diversity at a time when they need it the most. Addressing CCD may therefore require more than a simple fix. "We need to have a diverse set of genetic raw material so we can find bees resistant to disease," says Steve Sheppard, an entomologist at Washington State University. "Genetic diversity is an important part of the solution."The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today's honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. "We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an

The honey bee is vital to an estimated $117 billion annual production of crops through pollination within the United States more than a half of the food that humans consume has a correlation with the bee either directly or indirectly. The USDA reports the following food products would be immediately damaged if no bees were available to pollinate:

Furthermore bees specifically are particularly efficient with it being estimated that they are the sole pollinators for 50% of the approximate 80% of flowering plants which rely on insects for pollination (Bradbear, 2009). Their efficiency is further illustrated by the fact that a single colony containing 25,000 forager bees is able to pollinate 250 million flowers per day (Bradbear, 2009). As a result of this it can be seen that bees are hugely important as pollinators with many species of flower being completely dependent on them. Furthermore, the importance of bees extends beyond ecological diversity; certain types of bees are hugely important economically. In addition to pollinating a large variety of fruit and vegetables, bees produce Honey; together this results in them having an estimated value of service of £200m a year in the UK (National Audit Office (NAO), 2009). Overall it can be seen that bees are of significant importance that any decrease in population should be treated with concern, as a result of this a large quantity of research has been conducted into identifying possible

Since the late 1990s, beekeepers around the world have observed the mysterious and sudden disappearance of bees, and report unusually high rates of decline in honeybee colonies. Bees do more than just make honey! Bee transfer pollen and seeds from one flower to another, fertilizing the plant so it can grow and produce food. Cross-pollination helps at least 30 percent of the world's crops and 90% affects our food. The sweet fruits humans eat such as, strawberries, mangoes, grapes, apples, and bananas would not be the same taste wise as they are now. We simply couldn’t live in the same world if it weren’t for the bees.

This paper reviews the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the disappearance of large swathes of the bee population in the US and elsewhere. It reviews the potential causes of CCD, including pathogens, pesticides, and other environmental factors that could contribute to bee deaths. Although many have linked the widespread use of pesticides to the phenomenon, there is no 'smoking gun' that is clearly implicated in causing CCD. The phenomenon can likely be attributed to a wide variety of factors, rather than a singular cause.

The colony collapse disorder has been threatening the United States for many years. Reports show excessive numbers of honeybees dying off. According to the Bee Informed Partnership and USDA’s annual survey, during the winter of 2013-2014, the mortality of managed honeybee colonies was 23.2. The previous winter’s report showed a loss of 30.5 percent of the colonies and thus, the winter 2013-2014 results might show some improvement. However, beekeepers persist that the still declining honeybee colonies are becoming too low for colony collapse disorder to be considered a solved issue. Approximately two-thirds of the beekeepers reported losses greater than the acceptable 18.9 percent mortality rate, thus deeming the losses greater than what is economically sustainable. The issue

From around the year 2006, many bee farmers in the U.S.A and some parts of Europe started reporting sharp declines in their bee stocks. The reason for this declining numbers was not known and therefore scientists named it colony collapse disorder (CCD). Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a not a very old phenomena and it became popular when large number of bee colonies started disappearing. The disappearing was mysterious since no dead bees were found in or around the beehives after a colony’s number was reported to have gone down or vanished. This prompted a lot of study and investigations to uncover the mystery and to establish possible remedies. Among the many reasons for the causes of the CCD

Bees are vital to farmers and ranchers because they’re necessary to keep their crops reproducing.

Brit Amos begins talks about the loss of foods stating that “Commercial beehives pollinate over a third of {North} America’s crops and that web of nourishment encompasses everything from fruits like peaches, apples, cherries, strawberries and more, to nuts like California almonds, 90 percent of which are helped along by the honeybees” (Amos). Honey bees are much more famous for producing honey. However, most people do not know that “the benefits of honey go beyond its great taste” (“Health Benefits of Honey”). For example, “The 3 key health benefits of honey are related to the fact that: 1. Honey is nature's energy booster 2. Honey is a great immunity system builder 3. Honey is a natural remedy for many ailments” (“Health Benefits of Honey”). It is interesting to think that something as small and insignificant as the honey bee can provide us with so many basic needs.

The United Nations reports that approximately 70% of the world’s crops, valued at close to $US200 billion, are dependent on bee

Honey bees are a critical link in agriculture across the world. Recently, they have been under serious pressure from an unsolved problem: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). CCD is defined as “the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen” (Colony Collapse Disorder).

During the past decade the presence of bee diseases, droughts and other variable weather conditions has reduced the supply of bees worldwide. In the United States for example, the past few years have seen bush-fires, droughts, the killer mite (Varroa destructor) and the Colony Collapse Disorder wreck havoc with U.S. honey crops by destroying nearly two-thirds of their colonies. This has lead to a market opportunity for other countries to sell their honey to the U.S., which happens to be the largest consumer (and 3rd largest importer) of honey worldwide.

Recently, studies are showing a dramatic decrease of the bee population. As a result, there have been fewer instances of the great pollination process performed by the bees, therefore affecting the food and produce whose growth process are dependant on the bees. Honey bees originally came from Europe, but the problem of the decreasing population became known after ‘Pollination Week’ declared by the senate and governors on June 22nd. The reasoning behind the lack of bees on agriculture farms, is due to the harmful pesticide spray. “Denied access to neonics, farmers will inevitably revert to spraying their fields- either from the ground or by plane- with older and more dangerous insecticides”(Rodgers Media 6). Furthermore, because there are fewer pollinators, the food they help flourish have become a worry to researchers. “The world would be a desolate place without our pollinating friends, devoid of flowers, flowering plants and many of our favorite foods”(Hannon Gerald 9). Implies the importance of the bees handiwork in the production of the produce that we eat. Although it is costly in order to transport the

Honey bees, feared by the misinformed and admired by the intelligent, are dying. The interest in bees from many environmentalists is not for a sudden cause, as this issue is not new to the world. Honey bees as a population have been in decline for years but have yet to reach the endangered species list anywhere in the United States except for Hawaii. Many people kill bees that buzz around joyfully, simply because they are afraid of being stung by them; however, a vast majority of bees do not sting and the others do not care. This unfortunate commonality is not even one of the top causes of the worldwide epidemic of honey bees. Although bees are jokingly idolized on the internet in pictures and videos as a result of a popular children’s movie, their population decline is in fact quite serious. Honey bees and other pollinators like birds and insects ensure the pollination of flowering plants and crops all around the globe. Not only do honey bees pollinate plants that produce the foods that humans eat, but they also pollinate trees that produce clean oxygen for Earth. Without honey bees, the world as we know it could soon end, due to carbon dioxide pollution and lack of farmable foods. The population of honeybees and other important pollinator-bee species is dwindling due to a dilemma known to scientists as colony collapse disorder (CCD) because of the use of bee-killing pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, the decrease of flower meadows in the world, and the general increase