Before I knew we had a serious situation on our hands, I was secretly happy there were no more bees.
As a child, I had fallen victim to their barbed stingers—and they to my bare foot—more times than I can remember. Charging toward a sprinkler or a plastic pool, I was oblivious to the bees pollinating the white clover flower, Trifolium repens, on my grandma’s backyard lawn. My shoeless foot would land right-smack!-on one of their bee abdomens, resulting in a painful sting and a trip upstairs, so grandma could pull out the stinger and dab the wound with baking soda. She never told me their fate was much worse than mine.
Now there are just a few bees on my backyard lawn, but it is not because I killed them all as a child. Across the country, bees have been mysteriously vanishing, leaving their hives in search of pollen and nectar and not returning. Apiarists noted the disappearances last summer; and since then, more than a quarter of America’s commercial beehives have been lost.
Like any good scientific investigation, theories for the honeybee disappearance abound, ranging from the rational to absurd. Pathogens, pesticides, immune suppression, global warming, cell phones, genetically modified crops, and bee rapture (unscientific, yes, but a theory nonetheless) are some of the ideas that have been presented. Whatever the cause, one thing is for sure: we need bees, and not just for honey.
“Close to one hundred crop species in the United States rely to some degree on pollination services provided by this one species—collectively, these crops make up approximately one-third of the U.S. diet,” said May Berenbaum, Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois, in a statement before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture.
Some of nature’s most delicious and nutritious foods rely on bees for pollination. Apples, almonds, squash, asparagus, strawberries, melons, avocados, peaches, and cherries are a small sampling of the crops that need bees to transport pollen from the male stamen to the female pistol. In return for helping with the process, bees get nutrient-rich pollen and nectar.
