From Fox News:
Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have.
Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.
There is also history of this happening before so there might be some sort of cycle involved:
First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.
The article didn't say it, but my guess it's only a matter of time before the libs blame Bush for the bees dying and relating it to Global Warming.
2 comments:
Ugh... this issue just screams GM crops to me...
This issue has been all over our local news because it is affecting our beloved strawberries. The newscast I watched said they believe the new types of cell phones are affecting the bees' sense of direction in finding their hives and sending directions to their bee friends.
Interesting that there may be some sort of cycle involved, the newscaster made it out like it was the end of the world as we know it, ha ha. They showed crops of white strawberries, tiny strawberries, ones with few seeds... they were definitely going for the scare factor!
-Colleen
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