The USDA is warning that honeybees may disappear in the U.S. if the current trend continues. Bees are dying off so quickly, there’s no guarantee they will be able to survive in the U.S., according to the latest Dep’t of Agriculture (the USDA) report.
According to the USDA, “For the winter of 2013/14, 23.2% of managed honey bee colonies in the U.S. died. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (65.4%) experienced winter colony loss rates greater than the average self-reported acceptable winter mortality rate of 18.9%.” The numbers represent a lower death rate among colonies than the previous year, but even so, the survival rate is not high enough to guarantee the survival of honeybees in the future.
The biggest reason for the decrease in the honeybee population has been linked by scientists to?neonicotinoids, the world’s most widely used pesticide. According to a recent Harvard study,?neonicotinoids ?are to blame for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), where bees abandon their hives during winter months and die. The study appeared online on May 9th of this year in the Bulletin of Insectology, whose publisher is the U.S. Department of Agriculture.??We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,? said one of the study’s authors,?Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology at Harvard’s School of Public Health (?HSPH).
Maria Spivak, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Entomology recently gave a TEDTalk about what threatens honeybee survival the most, and what you can do about it. You would be surprised just how easy it is to effect change. Watch Spivak give solutions:
H/T The Guardian
