Dr. Weeks’ Comment: I was a beekeeper before I was a doctor and the health of the bees is a critically important issue. Dr. Marc Sircus writes a great article on this calling bees “biological geiger counters” and like the proverbial canary in the mine shaft, these winged wonders are warning us of an ecology dangerously out of balance.
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Bees – Biological Geiger Counters |
| The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter of 2010, while a new study shows honeybees’ pollen and hives laden with pesticides. Scientists are concerned because of the vital role bees play in our food supply. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini. One-third of those surveyed had trouble finding enough hives to pollinate California’s blossoming nut trees, which grows the bulk of the world’s almonds. |
| It is thought that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in US, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts.
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| On their travels, bees transfer pollen from plant to plant, flower to flower, fertilizing the blossoms and allowing them to set fruit. This ancient partnership of pollinator and plant is essential to life as we know it. One-third of the food we eat comes from crops that need animal pollinators, a role often filled by bees but sometimes by butterflies, beetles, birds, or bats. |
| The disappearing bees are a catastrophe and will have a direct impact on our collective stomachs. In the last few years beekeepers have been getting the shock of their lives seeing hundreds of millions of their bees literally disappearing. Beekeepers go out to open their hives and find them empty. Bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply not returning to their homes, they vanish without a trace. Researchers say the bees are dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold. Researchers have labeled this affliction “colony collapse disorder.” |
| Farmers across North America have been blitzing their fields with millions of tons of herbicides and pesticides for decades. And since the mid to late 1990’s massive numbers of genetically engineered crops have been planted. Greg Ciola
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| Special Note: This is the lead essay on my Agriculture Natural World News site so please visit to read the rest of this article as well as many more. |
| Mark Sircus Ac., OMD Director International Medical Veritas Association http://publications.imva.info |