The Plight of the Humble Bee
Excerpt:
The world’s bees are in decline, driving up the price of pollination so high it has spurred a black market of bee rustlers dealing in stolen hives. The almond growers of California’s central valley, who need 1.8 million hives each year, have seen the price to rent them grow over the past decade from $50 to as much as $200—valuable enough for thieves to spirit thousands away each season in the dead of night, to be rebranded and pawned off to different growers. Last year, police uncovered one cache of contraband bees worth close to $1 million.
Farmers, beekeepers and biologists have a name for the problem: the “beepocalypse.” It started mysteriously in 2006, when hives began failing en masse across North America, and next spread to Europe. Healthy-seeming bees would simply fly away and never come back, leaving behind combs full of honey and a dying, untended queen. Scientists at the time dubbed the phenomenon “colony collapse disorder” and launched a massive research effort, yet no clear cause of the malady has ever emerged. Stranger still, honeybees continue dying even though colony collapse disorder peaked quickly and has been on the wane. Those classic empty-hive symptoms now appear in less than 5% of failed hives, yet beekeepers continue losing between 30% and 40% of their stock every season.
People badly need bees. Biologists chalk up every third bite of food in the human diet to bee pollination, and in terms of the most popular and nutritious food crops the ratio is even higher; bees visit more than 75% of them.