Bees, honey, pollenation and their demise

Biodiversity begins with a bee is about why bee populations are crashing with some ideas about what people can do about it. One of the suggestions is to stop mowing your lawn to give the insects a chance.

from BiodiversityBee via conservationbytes
produced by: Scotish National Heritage

Insecticides and the mass death of bees

Researchers have identified an Australian virus as a possible factor in the death of bees. Bees are essential in fruit growing industries to pollenate almonds, apples blue berries and lemons. They are worth $US14 billion to US agriculture.

The honey which is produced by the bees in the American plantations is so heavily contaminated with pesticides that it is treated as a waste product and is not consumable.

Could it be that the death of the bees has something to do with collecting all those toxic substances? Might the toxins make them susceptible to illness, such as viruses? Would the bees be better able to resist illness if they didn't have to carry around so much poison instead of pure pollen and concentrate it in the honeycomb in their hives?

GM corn linked to bee deaths

A recent study has suggested that the mass deaths of bees in North America and Europe may be linked to genetically modified crops. Bees fed on a diet of GM maize pollen die in large numbers if they are infested by parasites. Healthy bees appear to be not affected.
Bees play a crucial role in agriculture pollenating plants from strawberries, apples and cucumbers to almonds. Without them, the work of bees has to be done by human hand. In the USA, farmers already have to pay bee keepers to bring hives to their crop. Almond growers pay $150 per hive.
The health effect on bees does not occur until the bees are weakened from another source. Similar studies on the effect on unhealthy humans have not been carried out.
"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."
Albert Einstein.