Honey, who shrunk the bee population???

It's been happening for awhile, America is losing her pollinators either to...nobody knows what exactly--they get disoriented and find themselves unable to navigate back to their hive-homes, or to multiple viral pathology. May Berenbaum, professor and head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana – Champaign has this to say, "Really, what distinguishes this particular phenomenon from previous massive bee die-offs is the absence of bodies. That is probably the key to figuring out what’s going on. So in my opinion, the best guess as to what’s causing this is some form of stress that disrupts the honeybees' capacity to orient and navigate".

Bees are such utterly fascinating creatures, I must say. Their social consciousness is so deep-rooted that it is evolutionarily beautiful when you take a step back and admire them for what they are: true team-players.

"A bee’s stinger is made of two shafts, lined with barbs like fishhooks. When a bee stings, it can’t pull the barbed stinger back out. It leaves behind not only the stinger, but also part of its digestive tract, plus muscles and nerves. This massive abdominal rupture is what kills the bee.

But there’s an advantage for the bees in this. Even after you swat the bee away, a cluster of nerve cells coordinates the muscles of the stinger left behind. The barbed shafts rub back and forth, digging deeper into your skin. Muscular valves pump toxins from an attached venom sac, and deliver it to the wound – for several minutes after the bee is gone. You might’ve heard people say you should flick off the stinger, or scrape it, rather than pinch it off. But since the stinger continues to work after the bee is gone, it’s only essential that you remove it quickly.

And although an individual bee dies when it stings, this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Since bees that defend the hive don’t reproduce, the only way they can insure their genes are passed on is by protecting the hive and their reproductive relatives inside".


Berenbaum emphasized that more study is needed to get to the bottom of the mystery of disappearing bees in 2006 and 2007. I agree with her (and I know this to be true as I see it everyday, especially living in a place like Kansas that leads with the motto, "Kansas-Eat Beef"). "About a third of the American diet can be traced back to honeybee pollination. And that includes seemingly unlikely components of the diet such as beef and cheese… Collectively, the pollination services of honeybees alone, just honeybees, amount to 14 billion dollars a year, according to one estimate. I don’t think people realize just how utterly dependent we are on bees", says Berenbaum.

I second that.