Bee Armageddon

 I suspect that we have all heard the "Fact" that bees are dying out ....

Which Bees Need Saving

.... and that as the foremost pollinator we will face a collapse of agriculture and starve to death ..... or something like that.

Now to a certain extent its true. We are losing bees, but not the honey bee variety, of which due to commercial and private apiarists (bee-keepers to you and I), there are probably more of these than ever before. However all the other bee types i.e. wild bees are dying out at an alarming rate.

The "Fact" became a bit confused after the Colony Collapse Disorder publicity in the 2000's, which became combined with the warnings about the general wild bee collapse and created the new fact. So all the "save the bees" campaigns, became aimed at the wrong types of bees. To the cost of us all, as hundreds of species of wild insect pollinators face extinction, and need to be saved.

In the UK, two bumblebee species have become extinct, and eight are at risk of extinction. Almost one in of the ten wild bee species face extinction in the next decade ... whether the extinction of the bee's would really end all life on the planet, is something of an open question as other insects are also pollinators.

However, we shouldn't downplay the importance of bees .... for instance, in the U.S. alone, Bees are responsible for pollinating 35% of agricultural production, and almost 90 different commercially grown food crops, and contribute $24 billion to the U.S. agriculture industry, making up a third of the food consumed by Americans.

So we should really do something to save them ... but probably won't.