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Honeybees and Crop Pollination: a look at how Colony Collapse Disorder is detrimental to farmers and
Honeybees and Crop Pollination: a look at how Colony Collapse Disorder is detrimental to farmers and crop yield
By Sarah Harman
Statement
The recent phenomenon, Colony Collapse Disorder, can be attributed to many factors. Evidence suggests that pesticides may be a factor but probably not the ultimate cause.
Abstract
The paper touches on elements of pollination and how honeybees are vital to farmers and crop yield. The paper also explains how Colony Collapse Disorder is affecting bees and David Hackenberg, the beekeeper unofficially credited with discovering Colony Collapse Disorder in the U.S.
Introduction
The Colony Collapse Disorder is a recent phenomenon sweeping the U.S. and many other countries. Colony Collapse Disorder is the term used for the massive disappearances of honeybees. The honeybee is quickly disappearing from hives across the globe and no one quite understands why. This means that farmers are in danger of losing their primary crop pollinators. The Colony Collapse Disorder could drastically affect crop yield and thus the agricultural economy.
Pollination Basics
In order to understand how the Colony Collapse Disorder came to the forefront of public concern, one must first be refreshed on some basic biology. A plant’s basic goal in life is to produce its seed. In order to do that, the plant must pollinate its flowers. Flowers are the reproductive center of a plant. A biotic plant has two different kinds of flowers: boy flowers and girl flowers. The boy part of the flower is called the stamen and contains the pollen (sperm) on several pads outlining the center of the flower. In the center of the flower, the pistil (location of the ovule) collects pollen on its sticky top. Once pollen is transferred from the stamen to the pistil, the plant’s flower is fertilized and the flower will develop into a fruit.
Plants that need to be pollinated by the flowers of another plant require external forces to pollinate them. This is where pollinators come into play. Sometimes flowers can be pollinated simply by the wind or by animals brushing past the plants. In most cases though, plants are pollinated by the various insects that visit them looking for nectar. Insects can move from flower to flower, collecting nectar very easily and frequently during the day. As the insect moves to and from each plant, it brushes against the pollen and inadvertently transfers the pollen to another flower as it is feeding.
Pollination and Crops
Now that the reader understands a little about pollination, he or she can see why pollination is so important to commercial farmers. Pollination is necessary for their crops to produce the fruits and vegetables that they do. The reader can see why the various pollinators are very important to farmers too. While wind and animals can pollinate their crops, farmers know that insects will pollinate more of their crops, faster and more efficiently than the wind or animals could. Most insects are solitary—meaning that they spend their lives alone unless mating—and may only need to feed on a few plants a day. Instead, farmers rely heavily on social insects to pollinate their crops. Insects that stick together throughout life and forage together would be very beneficial to a farmer with a field full of crops, especially if these social insects lived near the crops. It is precisely because of this fact that farmers use honeybees.
Honeybees and Crops
Honeybees are very unique creatures. A group of honeybees live in a hive together. There is a queen in every hive who is in charge of reproducing bees for the hive and ordering the worker bees about. Worker bees are sterile female bees responsible for foraging, creating honey, and building the comb that the honey will be stored in. When these worker bees are foraging, they are attracted to flowers by their color and/or fragrance. Once a worker bee has found a new area to forage, it will return to the hive and communicate to the others where they can find food by way of the “bee dance”—a very unique communication strategy.
The social nature of the honeybee makes it a very useful insect for a farmer to have around when the growing season comes around. Bees usually choose the closest flowers to forage for nectar in; therefore, one might logically assume that if a hive of honeybees was placed next to a farmer’s field of crops, they would forage almost solely on that field. Since each honeybee is collecting nectar for an entire hive of bees, the honeybee can also be expected to visit a large number of plants per outing. The number of plants visited multiplied by the sheer number of foraging bees officially makes honeybees the most useful insects to a farmer wishing to maximize his or her crop yield.
Farmers also use honeybees because they manageable. Since honeybees live in a social unit, they tend to stick together when foraging and come back to the same place when they are done. It is for this reason that honeybees are easily transported. This can be good for a farmer if he or she has either multiple crops or a very large crop. The bees are given a few days to forage in a particular area of the crops and then they are moved to either another side of the crop or to other crops completely.
Since honeybees are such a vital component to producing crops, farmers often keep hives of honeybees themselves. However, it is more likely the case that farmers will hire professional beekeepers to bring their own hives to pollinate the crops. Professional beekeepers not only keep bees to sell the honey, but also to help out farmers who need their crops pollinated. These professional beekeepers can be seen traveling from farm to farm in many different areas, allowing farmers to use their truckloads of bees to pollinate their crops. Sometimes a beekeeper’s entire lively hood is dependent on using his or her hives of honeybees to pollinate crops for commercial farmers.
By now, the reader can see why the honeybee is such an extraordinary insect to a farmer. Honeybees, because of their social behavior, prove an excellent means of maximizing crops yields for farmers. Honeybees are used in virtually every crop producing country in the world. In the U.S., honeybees are the chief pollinators for 95 types of fruits and vegetables. In 2000 alone, honeybees contributed $14.6 billion of extra crop yield for farmers. So, it’s not necessarily that other factors do not contribute to the pollination of crops, but honeybees are such efficient pollinators that farmers would be considered very simple-minded if they did not use honeybees to pollinate their crops.
Colony Collapse Disorder
Now that the reader sees how vital honeybees are to crop producing around the world, he or she might now understand the gravity of the situation with the Colony Collapse Disorder. For decades, farmers have looked for ways to improve crop yields. Today there are many utilities available to farms for this kind of job. Among these, there are honeybees, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified crops, and pesticides to fit every occasion. It now seems apparent that all of this synthetic twisting of nature is having repercussions. What the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) entails is that the honeybees are rapidly disappearing from hives around the world. This is a very recent, very alarming phenomenon that has every beekeeper and crop producer scrambling for a remedy to this dire situation. David Hackenberg, a professional beekeeper in Pennsylvania, was one of the first people to notice the CCD occurring in the U.S. Around 2007 he lost 2,000 of his 3,000 hives of honeybees that he used to pollinate crops in Florida (BBC News). Hackenberg is very concerned about his bees, because he is seeing a general fall in the health of the honeybees. Since Hackenberg discovered this loss of bees, the U.S. has discovered that it has lost a third of its total honeybee population (60 Minutes).
No one seems to be able to pin down what exactly is happening to the disappearing bees. Usually when bees die, their bodies can be found littering the ground below a hive. In CCD, this is not the case. When Hackenberg first noticed a large number of his bees to be missing, he searched every nook and cranny of the hives and surrounding areas and yet found not one single bee corpse. He said that it was like looking at a “ghost town” (60 Minutes). So, not only are these bees leaving their hives and never coming back, but also entire hives of bees are not even showing up dead; they’re just coming up missing. This particular aspect of CCD is problematic for those instigating the causes of the CCD, because there are not many bees to analyze and discover their cause(s) of death.
Unhealthy Honeybees
What scientists are seeing is that honeybees in general are not in good health. Honeybees these days are being attacked from a myriad of foreign invaders. Viruses, antibiotics, mites, poor diet and various pesticides are weakening the immune systems of the honeybees, making them susceptible to a rapid and unpredictable mortality rate. A weak immune system creates many problems for the honeybees and may be related to why the bees are “disappearing” rather than showing up dead.
The fact of the matter is, what is causing CCD is most likely not completely lethal. Honeybees are being infected by something or something(s) that destroy the bee slowly and indirectly. What may be affecting the bees could be affecting their navigation system. Normally, honeybees have an excellent navigation system that uses the sun and landmarks to orient the bee of its location in relation to the hive. Perhaps the reason why the bees don’t die at the hive is because whatever is affecting them, affects their navigation system. Essentially, if bees become disoriented while foraging, they may never make it back to their hives. The cause(s) of the CCD might also distort their communication methods and thus create miscommunications with other foraging members of the hive. There are countless factors involved in CCD, which is why scientists, farmers, and beekeepers around the world are very unsettled by this growing problem.
Findings and Conclusion
While no one factor has been singled out as the ultimate cause of CCD, there has been a rapid rise in another aspect of farming that contributes some of the symptoms the bees are exhibiting. Pesticides are used consistently alongside the use of honeybees to maximize a farmer’s crop yield. While scientists insist that pesticides are harmless to honeybees, one might wonder how this is so when pesticides are designed to kill the honeybee’s relatives (60 Minutes Pt. 2). According to a journal produced by the Entomological Society of America in 2001, the “sublethal effects, which reduce longevity and adversely affect foraging, memory and navigational abilities,” of pesticide usage has been long overlooked by scientists in the past (Drummond and Stubbs 37). So it is possible that these so-called “sublethal” characteristics of pesticides have been overlooked long enough to be a factor leading up to CCD.
More evidence that suggests pesticides may be a factor in CCD exists in a little town in Highland County Virginia. A local beekeeper there says that the honeybees of this county remain virtually untouched by the effects of CCD. Bill Harman, a local beekeeper there said, “the bees here have mites and viruses and all that, but I haven’t had any bees go missing that I couldn’t find.” Highland County is one of the few rural communities that has no commercial farming. That means that Highland County’s honeybees are not exposed to large (or even small) amounts of pesticides and, though they are exposed to other factors like mites and viruses, the honeybee population remains constant.
Though proven factors leading to the Colony Collapse Disorder have not been clearly identified, the reader must still understand how dire this situation is. The beginning of this paper has already proven how vital bees are to pollination and agriculture. The faster the honeybees decline in number, the less crop yields any farmer will have. Consequently, the CCD will cause an economic downturn for all involved in in agriculture—which includes everyone who goes to the supermarket looking for fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle. Scientists all over the world are scrambling desperately to keep this from happening so farmers and beekeepers can continue to do their work and so the reader can continue to buy fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price.
By Sarah Harman
Statement
The recent phenomenon, Colony Collapse Disorder, can be attributed to many factors. Evidence suggests that pesticides may be a factor but probably not the ultimate cause.
Abstract
The paper touches on elements of pollination and how honeybees are vital to farmers and crop yield. The paper also explains how Colony Collapse Disorder is affecting bees and David Hackenberg, the beekeeper unofficially credited with discovering Colony Collapse Disorder in the U.S.
Introduction
The Colony Collapse Disorder is a recent phenomenon sweeping the U.S. and many other countries. Colony Collapse Disorder is the term used for the massive disappearances of honeybees. The honeybee is quickly disappearing from hives across the globe and no one quite understands why. This means that farmers are in danger of losing their primary crop pollinators. The Colony Collapse Disorder could drastically affect crop yield and thus the agricultural economy.
Pollination Basics
In order to understand how the Colony Collapse Disorder came to the forefront of public concern, one must first be refreshed on some basic biology. A plant’s basic goal in life is to produce its seed. In order to do that, the plant must pollinate its flowers. Flowers are the reproductive center of a plant. A biotic plant has two different kinds of flowers: boy flowers and girl flowers. The boy part of the flower is called the stamen and contains the pollen (sperm) on several pads outlining the center of the flower. In the center of the flower, the pistil (location of the ovule) collects pollen on its sticky top. Once pollen is transferred from the stamen to the pistil, the plant’s flower is fertilized and the flower will develop into a fruit.
Plants that need to be pollinated by the flowers of another plant require external forces to pollinate them. This is where pollinators come into play. Sometimes flowers can be pollinated simply by the wind or by animals brushing past the plants. In most cases though, plants are pollinated by the various insects that visit them looking for nectar. Insects can move from flower to flower, collecting nectar very easily and frequently during the day. As the insect moves to and from each plant, it brushes against the pollen and inadvertently transfers the pollen to another flower as it is feeding.
Pollination and Crops
Now that the reader understands a little about pollination, he or she can see why pollination is so important to commercial farmers. Pollination is necessary for their crops to produce the fruits and vegetables that they do. The reader can see why the various pollinators are very important to farmers too. While wind and animals can pollinate their crops, farmers know that insects will pollinate more of their crops, faster and more efficiently than the wind or animals could. Most insects are solitary—meaning that they spend their lives alone unless mating—and may only need to feed on a few plants a day. Instead, farmers rely heavily on social insects to pollinate their crops. Insects that stick together throughout life and forage together would be very beneficial to a farmer with a field full of crops, especially if these social insects lived near the crops. It is precisely because of this fact that farmers use honeybees.
Honeybees and Crops
Honeybees are very unique creatures. A group of honeybees live in a hive together. There is a queen in every hive who is in charge of reproducing bees for the hive and ordering the worker bees about. Worker bees are sterile female bees responsible for foraging, creating honey, and building the comb that the honey will be stored in. When these worker bees are foraging, they are attracted to flowers by their color and/or fragrance. Once a worker bee has found a new area to forage, it will return to the hive and communicate to the others where they can find food by way of the “bee dance”—a very unique communication strategy.
The social nature of the honeybee makes it a very useful insect for a farmer to have around when the growing season comes around. Bees usually choose the closest flowers to forage for nectar in; therefore, one might logically assume that if a hive of honeybees was placed next to a farmer’s field of crops, they would forage almost solely on that field. Since each honeybee is collecting nectar for an entire hive of bees, the honeybee can also be expected to visit a large number of plants per outing. The number of plants visited multiplied by the sheer number of foraging bees officially makes honeybees the most useful insects to a farmer wishing to maximize his or her crop yield.
Farmers also use honeybees because they manageable. Since honeybees live in a social unit, they tend to stick together when foraging and come back to the same place when they are done. It is for this reason that honeybees are easily transported. This can be good for a farmer if he or she has either multiple crops or a very large crop. The bees are given a few days to forage in a particular area of the crops and then they are moved to either another side of the crop or to other crops completely.
Since honeybees are such a vital component to producing crops, farmers often keep hives of honeybees themselves. However, it is more likely the case that farmers will hire professional beekeepers to bring their own hives to pollinate the crops. Professional beekeepers not only keep bees to sell the honey, but also to help out farmers who need their crops pollinated. These professional beekeepers can be seen traveling from farm to farm in many different areas, allowing farmers to use their truckloads of bees to pollinate their crops. Sometimes a beekeeper’s entire lively hood is dependent on using his or her hives of honeybees to pollinate crops for commercial farmers.
By now, the reader can see why the honeybee is such an extraordinary insect to a farmer. Honeybees, because of their social behavior, prove an excellent means of maximizing crops yields for farmers. Honeybees are used in virtually every crop producing country in the world. In the U.S., honeybees are the chief pollinators for 95 types of fruits and vegetables. In 2000 alone, honeybees contributed $14.6 billion of extra crop yield for farmers. So, it’s not necessarily that other factors do not contribute to the pollination of crops, but honeybees are such efficient pollinators that farmers would be considered very simple-minded if they did not use honeybees to pollinate their crops.
Colony Collapse Disorder
Now that the reader sees how vital honeybees are to crop producing around the world, he or she might now understand the gravity of the situation with the Colony Collapse Disorder. For decades, farmers have looked for ways to improve crop yields. Today there are many utilities available to farms for this kind of job. Among these, there are honeybees, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified crops, and pesticides to fit every occasion. It now seems apparent that all of this synthetic twisting of nature is having repercussions. What the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) entails is that the honeybees are rapidly disappearing from hives around the world. This is a very recent, very alarming phenomenon that has every beekeeper and crop producer scrambling for a remedy to this dire situation. David Hackenberg, a professional beekeeper in Pennsylvania, was one of the first people to notice the CCD occurring in the U.S. Around 2007 he lost 2,000 of his 3,000 hives of honeybees that he used to pollinate crops in Florida (BBC News). Hackenberg is very concerned about his bees, because he is seeing a general fall in the health of the honeybees. Since Hackenberg discovered this loss of bees, the U.S. has discovered that it has lost a third of its total honeybee population (60 Minutes).
No one seems to be able to pin down what exactly is happening to the disappearing bees. Usually when bees die, their bodies can be found littering the ground below a hive. In CCD, this is not the case. When Hackenberg first noticed a large number of his bees to be missing, he searched every nook and cranny of the hives and surrounding areas and yet found not one single bee corpse. He said that it was like looking at a “ghost town” (60 Minutes). So, not only are these bees leaving their hives and never coming back, but also entire hives of bees are not even showing up dead; they’re just coming up missing. This particular aspect of CCD is problematic for those instigating the causes of the CCD, because there are not many bees to analyze and discover their cause(s) of death.
Unhealthy Honeybees
What scientists are seeing is that honeybees in general are not in good health. Honeybees these days are being attacked from a myriad of foreign invaders. Viruses, antibiotics, mites, poor diet and various pesticides are weakening the immune systems of the honeybees, making them susceptible to a rapid and unpredictable mortality rate. A weak immune system creates many problems for the honeybees and may be related to why the bees are “disappearing” rather than showing up dead.
The fact of the matter is, what is causing CCD is most likely not completely lethal. Honeybees are being infected by something or something(s) that destroy the bee slowly and indirectly. What may be affecting the bees could be affecting their navigation system. Normally, honeybees have an excellent navigation system that uses the sun and landmarks to orient the bee of its location in relation to the hive. Perhaps the reason why the bees don’t die at the hive is because whatever is affecting them, affects their navigation system. Essentially, if bees become disoriented while foraging, they may never make it back to their hives. The cause(s) of the CCD might also distort their communication methods and thus create miscommunications with other foraging members of the hive. There are countless factors involved in CCD, which is why scientists, farmers, and beekeepers around the world are very unsettled by this growing problem.
Findings and Conclusion
While no one factor has been singled out as the ultimate cause of CCD, there has been a rapid rise in another aspect of farming that contributes some of the symptoms the bees are exhibiting. Pesticides are used consistently alongside the use of honeybees to maximize a farmer’s crop yield. While scientists insist that pesticides are harmless to honeybees, one might wonder how this is so when pesticides are designed to kill the honeybee’s relatives (60 Minutes Pt. 2). According to a journal produced by the Entomological Society of America in 2001, the “sublethal effects, which reduce longevity and adversely affect foraging, memory and navigational abilities,” of pesticide usage has been long overlooked by scientists in the past (Drummond and Stubbs 37). So it is possible that these so-called “sublethal” characteristics of pesticides have been overlooked long enough to be a factor leading up to CCD.
More evidence that suggests pesticides may be a factor in CCD exists in a little town in Highland County Virginia. A local beekeeper there says that the honeybees of this county remain virtually untouched by the effects of CCD. Bill Harman, a local beekeeper there said, “the bees here have mites and viruses and all that, but I haven’t had any bees go missing that I couldn’t find.” Highland County is one of the few rural communities that has no commercial farming. That means that Highland County’s honeybees are not exposed to large (or even small) amounts of pesticides and, though they are exposed to other factors like mites and viruses, the honeybee population remains constant.
Though proven factors leading to the Colony Collapse Disorder have not been clearly identified, the reader must still understand how dire this situation is. The beginning of this paper has already proven how vital bees are to pollination and agriculture. The faster the honeybees decline in number, the less crop yields any farmer will have. Consequently, the CCD will cause an economic downturn for all involved in in agriculture—which includes everyone who goes to the supermarket looking for fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle. Scientists all over the world are scrambling desperately to keep this from happening so farmers and beekeepers can continue to do their work and so the reader can continue to buy fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price.
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