The ABCs of Bees

I’m not sure how many of you remember this but there was talk of honey bees disappearing from various parts of the country. This was loud enough for me to generally notice how many honey bees were buzzing around my yard, when I was thinking about it this summer. A question I had was, what exactly would the impact bee if they “disappeared”.

So, One third of our food begins with bee activity. Almonds, blueberries, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, melons, onions, squash, cucumbers, etc. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) could cost us $15 billion in direct crop loss and $75 billion of indirect loss. Wow!

Bees of collapsed colonies have been studied and found to be full of disease causing microbes. Speculation on how the bees came down with this is great, but may never be known. One thing to remember is that history has shown similar activity every 10 years or so, this bout is seemingly larger than the past ones. I suspect that just like us, the bees will develop a resistance to the bad microbes, eventually. That is as long as we don’t “tinker” with them and provide an anti-biotic to “help”.