Saturday, June 25, 2011

Silence of the Bees

Call this the week of the documentaries. This morning I watched Nature: Silence of the Bees from Netflix. This one had to come on disc, not available through instant. But I think it was well worth getting sent to me. Anyone that grows their own food should be interested in this. Actually anyone that eats food should be interested in this. Colony Collapse Disorder has been in the news for a few years now. I never really investigated it any further until I started growing some of our own food and wanting to make sure we had flowers available to encourage pollination. The honey bee pollinates 1/3 of all the food you eat. Millions of honey bees have just disappeared over the last few years. Scientists are unsure if a bunch of factors are to blame (pesticides, fugus, virus, bacteria) or one virus in particular that was found in each hive that had CCD which is IAPV(hope I've got this right). Something I also learned from this documentary is that many farmers across the United States pay commercial bee keepers to bring their bees to the farm each year and do the pollinating. One farmer who is the biggest farmer of blueberries in the US pays 900,000 dollars a year to bring in the bees to pollinate. I had no idea! Another interesting piece of news to me was that every bee tested had multiple problems, meaning even if the IAPV was banished from the bee population you would still have all these other factors to fix. No honey bees would mean very little fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plus the fruits, vegetables and nuts that did actually come to fruition would be very expensive. I would highly recommend watching this documentary. The only thing I didn't agree with was their take on honey bees being around for millions of years. There is one section of the video that speaks about the amazing architecture and anatomy of the honey bee, it just amazes me that these guys can't acknowledge that a Creator created these insects and what they do. Evolution could not come up with all of this through just chances of circumstance.

1 comment:

Staci@LifeAtCobbleHillFarm said...

I have not seen this, but it sounds fascinating. Bees truly are amazing creatures. I am hoping to have a hive someday soon!!