Disappearing Bees

Beginning last spring bee keepers in the US began noticing an alarming thing with honey bee colonies. They began to disappear in huge numbers. The problem continues into this year. They have a name for the phenomenon, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), but have no idea as to why it is happening. The reason that this is such a big deal is that bees are a big part of the agriculture business. Without them we can not grow certain foods.

The remarkable part is that no one knows why. I don’t know if the disappearing bees are a result of human activity, that’s not the point. The situation nicely illustrates two significant items. One is that relatively small changes to an ecosystem can cause major upheaval. Secondly is that we really don’t know much about anything. Our ability to make cell phones and MP3 players becomes largely irrelevant in the face of our lack of understanding about something as simple as bees.

Every time I hear someone criticize the idea of global warming I think about the bees. It turns out bees are pretty important. Who knew? They are dying by the millions. Why? Who knows. It seems like the kind of thing we might want to pay a little more attention to because if a bunch of bees are causing this scale of a problem I’m thinking messing up ocean currents may be kind of a big deal. If ever there was a time for “better safe than sorry” thinking I would say that would be it.

Honeybees Vanish – NY TImes, February 2007

As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks – Fortune, August 27, 2007

Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons NY Times, April 24, 2007

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