| |
Excerpt from the television program: Real Time With Bill Maher
The joke may have fallen flat, but this time no one
could blame Bill Maher. Sure, it happened on the
May 4, 2007 installment
of his show Real Time With Bill Maher, but CNN
personality and senior medical correspondent Sanjay
Gupta was the one delivering the punch line, and it
seems he was the only one in the room who believed the
issue of Earth's mysteriously vanishing honeybees was a
joke. And while some may argue that he stayed on
message, promoting his May 19 documentary called
Danger: Poison Food, he nevertheless fumbled for
answers when Maher asked him about what could be killing
a major component of the nation's food supply.
"Gosh, I
don't know," Gupta answered, searching for context. "The
-- you know, with regards to bees in particular, I'm not
sure what's killing the bees. I'm not sure what's
killing the birds or the bees." <Cue the laugh
track.>
In
Gupta's defense, a few weeks or months ago, the
increasing disappearance of the honeybees, known now by
the technical term
Colony Collapse Disorder,
had that feel of an urban legend, a phenomenon so
esoteric and strange that it sounded like something out
of science fiction. Except it's not: It's a frightening
trend that, according to those hard at work at solving
the problem at universities and organizations worldwide,
could lead to everything from a radically transformed
diet to an overall wipeout of the world's food supply.
"It is
real," argued Dewey M. Caron, professor of entomology at
the University of Delaware and one of several
authorities investigating the issue with the
Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension
Consortium's Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group (MAAREC).
"We surveyed a few states and figured out that half to
three-fourths of a million bee colonies have died. This
is no urban legend. It is serious."
What is so
serious is not only that the bees themselves are dying
off without a smoking gun present, but that most people
have no idea of the role they play in the food supply at
large. Commercial beehives pollinate over a third of
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.
Without this annual pollination, you could conceivably
kiss those crops goodbye, to say nothing of the honey
bees produce or the flowers they also fertilize.
But as the
world has grown, so has its hunger and crowds, which has
paved the way for the death of wild pollinators as well
as the importation of honeybees from different climates
in order to have massive crop pollination.
In the case
of California's aforementioned almonds, the largest
managed pollination event in the world, the growing
season occurs in February, well before local hives have
suitably increased their populations to handle the
pollination load. As a result, the region is
increasingly dependent on the importation of hives from
warmer climates.
The same
goes for apple crops in New York, Washington and
Michigan, as well as blueberries in Maine. Almonds alone
require more than one-third of all the managed honeybees
in the United States, so it's entirely possible that the
honeybees may have already been stretched to the
breaking point, as far as environmental and chemical
stressors are concerned. In fact, it's safe to say that
the nation's honeybees, already a tireless lot, are
totally exhausted from work.
"The
honeybee is so important for pollination of hundreds of
agricultural crops, because humans have made it so,"
Caron explained. "We destroyed the natural pollinators,
plowed up the area they needed to live and continued to
replace their habitats with strip malls and housing
developments. So, farmers have come to rely on honeybees
because of mushrooming human populations and our own
destructive habits to the natural ecology."
And not just
here, either: The disappearance is under way across the
world. Regions of Iran are experiencing the same
phenomenon, as are countries like Poland, Greece, Italy,
Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and more every
day, including Latin American and Asia. The breadth of
the problem suggests that a major environmental balance
could be to blame -- what else is new? -- yet no
authority will sign off on the possibility and the
specific causes still remain unknown.
"Other
countries are also experiencing serious declines of
honeybee colonies," said Maryann Frazier, senior
extension associate at MAAREC and the department of
entomology at Penn State University. "But we are not
certain that the cause behind the losses here in the
United States are the same as those causing [losses] in
other parts of the world."
Throw in the
fact that this type of thing has been recorded as a
regular occurrence since the 19th century, and you have
an apiary mystery of mammoth proportions.
"Bee
colonies die all the time," Caron added. "They die over
winter, lose queens, are destroyed by pests or diseases.
But this is different, as the bees are simply gone and
do not develop normally."
"We have had
honeybee die-offs in the past which may or may not be
related to the current situation," said Frazer. "However,
they seem to be getting more severe. If the problem of
honeybee health isn't addressed quickly, there could be
serious repercussions."
<< Return to Top of Page
<< Return
to Bee Crisis Page
|
|
