Early last year, beekeepers and various news organizations noted with astonishment how the honeybees in the United States are vanishing. Last year, beekeepers on the East Coast have lost up to 70 percent of their honeybees, while their counterparts on the West Coast lost 60 percent. This was noted in the New York Times and other publications and there hasn’t been any answers as of yet.
This is probably old news for some people, but it was new news to me. I venture off into broad esoteric subjects from time to time to hear what people on the fringe are saying and doing. I encountered the subject of the incredible vanished honeybees on one of these ventures and thought to myself, “What the heck? This can’t be true.”
Like many other topics, I did some digging off the net to corroborate the story. Being familiar with some journalistic techniques I learned in college (I was a Journalism minor), I set out to find at least three independent sources to confirm the initial report I heard.
I didn’t have to look very far. Low and behold, this story has been quietly cascading across the world for over a year. From Canada to China, from Taiwan to England honeybees around the world are vanishing, and the scientists, despite mapping out the genetic code of honeybees two years ago, are utterly dumbfounded.
It would be one thing if beekeepers found their bees laying prostrate dead in and around the bee colony, but that is oddly not the case. In most cases, the bees are simply– gone.
Millions of bees around the world has vanished without so much of a good-bye and the only traces they’ve left behind are their dead or dying offspring. Diana Cox-Foster, who works with the CCD Working Group, told the UK’s Independent newspaper that researchers into this phenomenon were “extremely alarmed” and that this crisis “has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry.”
Moreover, she added, the symptoms of the bee’s demise and disappearance “does not seem to match anything in the literature”.
One Florida beekeeper, Dave Hackenberg, said, “They weren’t dead, they were just gone.”
In Britain, John Chapple, who chair the London Beekeepers’ Association, lost all 14 of his bee colonies and he said, “I could attribute some losses to a failing queen bee or wax moths, but there were a few I could find no reason for.” And elsewhere he was quoted as saying, “The mortality rate is the highest in living memory and no one seems to know what’s behind it.”
Well, “mortality rate” is a bit of an assumption actually. Beekeepers have walked the effective range of their honeybees and, in the cases where the bees have disappeared from their colonies, they haven’t found a single bee. No bodies. Nothing.
As one part-time beekeeper said, it was “like somebody had moved out of their house”.
Scientists have started calling this phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Some of them have hypothesized that the strange disappearance has to do with an HIV-like virus afflicting them. In fact, “[t]races of every disease that has affected bees over the last 100 years are now being found in the stomachs of the infected insects.” Although this fact is interesting to note, that neither explains the sudden inexplicable disappearance of bees from their colonies nor that fact that, in most cases, no bodies are found.
Even as peculiar and as alarming as this is, many people are not aware of the implications of such a massive die-off of bees. As of now, the only people noticing it are the beekeepers, farmers and various aficionados of the bizarre and inexplicable. But people will take note of it soon. They would have to.
Why? Because a full one-third of all our food is either directly or indirectly related to honeybee pollination.
And with 60 to 70 percent of our bees vanishing out of thin air, we might see a dramatic decline in our food production. In addition to producing honey, the pollination done by honeybees is vital to the process of reproduction in plants. Various crops like almonds, fruits, and other crops depend heavily on the pollination done by bees.
But don’t take the severity of the situation just from me, Albert Einstein said:
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
Needless to say, what is at stake is much more than just honey.
Because of the massive disappearance of honeybees, some farmers are becoming desperate.
Crop farmers have tried to pollinate their crops without bees, and in some cases they’ve gotten very creative. They’ve tried blowers and even mortar shells. Scientists have tried using other bees, like the blue-orchard bees which seem more resilient in colder temperatures than the honeybee, for the purpose of pollination, but they agree that none comes close to the effectiveness of honeybees.
With the recent rice shortage, the new fungal infection, Ug99, that, according to the UN can affect one-fourth the world’s wheat crops, and the droughts and flooding across the world affecting food production, this bizarre disappearance of bees makes the future seem even more ominous. Indeed, the enormity of what we’re facing sounds almost Biblical in scale.
Could this be the first rumblings of the famines foretold in our Christian prophecies?
… it might just be.
Consider one thing more.
The disappearance of bees began in late 2006, took on steam in early 2007 and became a worldwide phenomenon by the end of that same year. If the bees finish their disappearing act by the end of this year, and if Einstein was correct in his four-year assessment, then we will be in deep trouble by 2012…
Since Judeo-Christian tradition has always linked honeybees and the honey they produce with the presence of God’s grace, is it a coincidence that mindless, motiveless violence like the Virginia Tech Massacre in April 2007 is increasing as the honeybees vanish?
Is God’s grace withdrawing from the Mankind?