Why is the bee population declining?

How many times  have you been outside having a picnic with your family or with your partner and uninvited guests show up?They are often dressed in yellow and they are so cranky that if you do anything to annoy they will literally "sting" you. I am talking about bees. 

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How many times did you think about killing them? 

Interestingly, researchers have found that when we have these type of homicidal thoughts our brains emit a special type of gamma waves that can at first bewilder some insects (like bees) and if exposed for prolonged periods of time it could even kill them.  Obviously I am joking, I just wanted to make you feel cool for a second, to my knowledge the only place where your thoughts can kill someone is in your imagination. 

By the way, since I mentioned them, our brains do produce gamma waves but they seem to be related to perception and consciousness and are highly active when we are involved in "virtuous" thoughts such as spirituality and love, definitely they are the opposite of a deadly weapon. 

So rest assured that your thoughts are not responsible the decline of bees population, however we are still not off the hook, real studies show that we may actually be responsible. How? Because of pesticides.

But let's go in order, first I want to explain why should you care about bees.

One out of every 3 bites of food you take is the result of the work of bees. They are, in fact, the buzzing backbone of our crop industry. They are the pollinators that allow us to harvest crops like fruits, nuts, coffee etc. and also they maintain wild plant species, therefore they are also the keepers of our plants biodiversity. 

It is a well known fact that today we have fewer bees and they are less widespread. There may be several causes to this decline, but there is strong evidence that points the finger at a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. 

Neonicotinoid-pesticides have been used since the 1980s to treat plants from the seeds. Once the seeds germinates, the pesticides spread throughout the plant, including their nectar and pollen. That means that it gets in what bees eat. 

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How do pesticides affect bees?

Once bees consume pesticide-laden pollen, they start having issues such as impaired motor-function, they lose olfactory memory and they can't collect pollen effectively and bring it back to the colony. 

As you can imagine, many studies have been conducted to investigate this further. Unfortunately, they only added more confusion because they showed contradicting results. At the end it was found that the reason for this was that different bees populations are affected differently by the Neonicotinoid-pesticides. Each study used a different population of bees, and that may explain why they all saw different results. Another consideration that has to be done was that in all these studies they were investigating a chronic exposure of bees to these pesticides. Pesticide companies were pointing out that bees in real life are not exposed to such high levels of pesticides, and moreover, they would not like the taste of pesticide-containing pollen (because it's bitter) therefore in their opinion the bees would simply avoid the pesticide-treated plants. A study showed that they were wrong.

They exposed bees to plants treated and un-treated with pesticides and it was surprising to see that bees actually preferred pollen from plants treated with pesticides. Why? Well as the word itself says neonicotinoids contains nicotine, thus it is very likely that bees became addicted to pesticide-laden pollen. So not only in real life bees do not avoid pesticide-treated plants, but very likely they may be seeking them, exacerbating the exposure to pesticides. 

Currently in the EU is banned the use of pesticide-treated seeds, while in North America there are no restrictions. This is not just an issue for bees, these pesticides are also on the food that arrive on our tables and often simply washing the food is not sufficient to eliminate the pesticides. 

I hope you read the full post and that you did not stop at the first paragraph. It would be hilarious if you now were going around the parks staring at bees with murderous intentions. Maybe your threatening face will scare them to death. 

Source:

https://www.nature.com/news/bee-studies-stir-up-pesticide-debate-1.17366

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