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Implications of decline in bees worldwide
Essay on bee population declining
Implications of decline in bees worldwide
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This paper discusses the disappearance of cees and the drastic impact they have upon an ecosystem, a sphere, and the Earth as a whole. The first section of this report details the basic purpose of bees in the environment and organisms that exist within it. The next section of the paper talks about the devastating effects the decline in bee populations is having on CO2 levels, ecosystems, environments, economy, and humans. Three important causes, whether they occur instantaneously or over time, and whether or not they are man-made are also discussed. Towards the end of the essay, there is a diagram detailing the various impacts of the event, bee disappearance, on the hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. How each sphere interacts with the other because of this event is also described. The final section of this paper consists of a Quad chart describing a NASA funded project known as Honey Bee Net; the project is designed to pinpoint …show more content…
However, bees are some of the most hardworking organisms that exist on the Earth. They are vital for the continued survival of the human race as well as the Earth that is known today. There are thousands of various species dedicated to pollinating the food supply that continues to feed humans as well as all animals. (Tucker, 2014). However, in recent years, the populations of bees and other pollinators has been on a continued decline. Some of the causes for such a decline are pesticides and insecticides, diseases, and harmful agricultural practices (Causes, n.d.). This decline has various impacts on the environment, ecosystem, economy, humans, and Earth’s spheres. For example, a decline in bee population leads to the elimination of various plants species, which leads to the reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere, causing devastating impacts (Dafardar, 2014). It is vital for the survival of the planet and humans to save the
It is not unusual for bees to die or colonies to be lost, but the nature and extent reported in the year 2006 was alarming. Statistics gathered in the United States alone show that 50-90% of the bees have been lost so far, due to this scientific phenomenon (Cox-Foster et al., 2007, p. 284). Honeybees play a very major role in the pollination of plants and therefore these huge losses have become a serious concern. There are many reasons that have been floated and acclaimed to be behind CCD and they include pesticides, parasites, electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, climatic changes, and urban sprawl, among many others.... ...
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
To most, the honeybee can be an annoying insect that has a powerful sting. Yet, the honeybee is so much more than just another insect. The honeybee is arguably the most vital component in the development of our food crops. With roughly 90 percent of our food crops dependent on the pollination of our honeybees, our food system, agricultural development, and diet rest on the work and well being of these buzzing insects. Unfortunately, since 2006 there has been a major decline in the population of honeybees, and has gotten progressively worse because of colony collapse disorder. The first reported increase of CCD was documented in November 2006 in Florida. By February 2007, several states began reporting major losses associated with CCD, ranging from 30% to 90%. A little over a half decade later in 2012 the attention paid towards CCD has grown substantially with more research being done as CCD continues to get worse. The main culprit for CCD, as research has suggested, is the use of pesticides on our food crops. With major corporations such as Bayer making millions and millions of dollars in profit each year in the distribution of pesticides, it is no wonder that nothing is being done to stop this practice despite evidence linking the use of pesticides and the drastic deterioration of the health of honeybees. With the continuation of the use of deadly pesticides and the vital role bees play in the pollination and development of our food crops, both the environment and our economy will be effected directly and face the potential for catastrophic results.
In Myla Goldberg’s fiction novel, The Bee Season, young Eliza Naumann is a fifth-grader at McKinley Elementary School. In the novel, Goldberg incorporates several key concepts Martin Buber presents in his text, I and Thou. The story is set around Eliza as she competes in the school, district, and national spelling bees. Throughout the story, struggles as her family begins to separate and deteriorate. Buber in his text argues that there are two separate realms of I-You and I-It (Buber 82, 83). The I-It world is where Eliza experiences reality of the circumstances her family is experiencing. On the other hand, in the I-You world Eliza becomes in total commune and relation with God, or shefa as Eliza describes (Goldberg 190). Buber suggests every human has desire to be in I-You realm (Buber 79). However, this realm can become an I-It by individuals seeking the I-You— making it objectified and using it for a specific purpose (68). In Goldberg’s novel, Eliza begins seeking I-You, shefa, to remove herself from chaos and to help solve her problems of her broken family (Goldberg 172). Once she has obtained shefa, Eliza wants to be removed from the I-It world and “desires to have God continually in space and time” (Buber 161). Buber would suggest Eliza’s I-You relationship is lacking depth and that she is actually going further away from the I-You realm and into the I-It realm, as she objectifies her I-You. Goldberg helps the reader to have a better understanding of Buber’s key concepts, by allowing the reader to experience alongside Eliza as she encounters the I-You and I-It realms.
Our bees are dying at the highest rates ever recorded: 42 percent of the United States bee colonies collapsed in 2015 (NRDC, 2015). 50 to 80 percent of the world's food supply is directly affected by honeybee pollination (Pennsylvania Apiculture Inc., 2011). Reduced crop pollination will make food more expensive and can even make some crops harder to grow successfully (Worland, 2015).
The worldwide eradication of honey bees may not be too far away. The reasons the honey bees are dying are linked to a number of things. The most common causes are linked to industrial agriculture, parasites/pathogens, and climate change, according to the article entitled “The Bees in Decline” on GreenPeace’s website, SOS-bees.org. However, bee-killing pesticides pose the highest risk to the pollinators (the Bees). Honey bees are not the only form of pollinators.
Did you know that so all bees in the world are close to extinction? It is estimated that a million beehives disappear or are destroyed each year. Some people may say that humans shouldn’t help bees because they will eventually go extinct, but if they go extinct we’ll have lost a natural helper of agriculture. Bees help with agriculture naturally, so we need to focus more on measures to protect bees so that they do not become extinct.
CCD threatens the integrity of over 100 different US crops including, but not limited to: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, citrus fruit, peaches, berries, melons, as well as animal-feed crops like clover(14). While nature has it's own ways of sustaining itself and bees are not our only pollinators, losing them to Colony Collapse Disorder would cause our agricultural empire to crash. Bees are responsible $15 billion of revenue in the US annually (15). The endangerment of honeybees poses such a threat that in 2015 the Obama administration set aside for $50 million for the research of CCD in an attempt to preserve our agricultural integrity. A study by the Department of Environmental Studies,EMory University, Atlanta, GA, suggests that the current decline in these pollinators could already by causing negative impacts on the surrounding
The lives of humans and honeybees have been intertwined for millennia. For at least 8,000 years, humans have sought honey for applications in disciplines ranging from medicine to the culinary arts. But while humans love honey, honeybees provide a much more valuable service: pollination. As the world’s most prolific pollinator, honeybees are essential to the reproduction of many plant species, which in turn benefits other animals and plants. In fact, humans heavily rely on honeybees to pollinate our own food source, a service that is worth billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, the honeybee population is in a severe and prolonged decline, often in the form of colony collapse disorder, in which entire colonies are seemingly abandoned by adult bees overnight. Honeybees are an indispensable component of modern agriculture, and a failure to discern and address the many causes of honeybee population decline – both manmade and natural – could have disastrous consequences for the environment and human society.
The disappearance of honey bees is baffling scientists everywhere. Although most people see bees as useless annoying insects, they play an important role in the eco-system. Without bees, agricultural business would cease to exist, so it is vital that bees are saved. Currently, about one-third of the honey bees on the United states have disappeared. It seems that within a few days of having a good, healthy colony of bees, most of the adult population disappears. They can't even find any bodies near the hive. Scientists nicknamed this as CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Bees have been disappearing all over the globe. Countries such as Portugal, Poland, Central America, and South America have all reported cases of the phenomenon. When bees get sick, they sacrifice themselves and leave the colony to die to lessen possibility of spreading the disease or affliction to the rest of the hive. What is unique about CCD though, is the sheer number of bees leaving the hive.
Decline in bumble bee species have been studied extensively in the past 60 years in regards to the European species. Only recently has data on the American species been gathered, which has been collected since the 90´s. According to D. Goulson, G.C Lye and B. Darvill the decline in bee populations is primarily driven by; habitat loss, the decline in floral diversity and abundance, monoculture agriculture, pesticides, inbreeding, commercial trafficking, pathogens and environmental and demographic stochastic. What’s clear is that the drivers, which threaten the pollinating services to wildflowers and crops, are widespread. The solution is simple but requires a reform in the way society is structured; all the large scaled monoculture crops must leave space for habitat/floral (which words seems better?) biodiversity, which is needed to support viable bee populations in the long term. The information gathered in this journal has been greatly beneficial to my research, not only has it thoroughly explained some of the drivers behind bee decline and possible solutions in great detail with citations referring to other viable sources, it has given me a new perspective on the importance of bees to the human race. Bees need flowers to survive, it is a mutually dependent relationship, and if one of the two partners is going extinct it will drive the other to extinction as well. This is called an ”extinction vortex”. Understanding the importance of bees to the survival humans might ...
Pollinators are very important to the environment because many plant species rely on reproduction to be carried out by pollination1. Bees are dependent on plants for pollen and nectar and in return, are the most common pollinator of plant species and around 90 percent of plants require pollination by an animal7. Bees are used in farming, both for pollinating crops and for producing honey, and the estimated value of bees to the United Kingdom is £400 million per year9. Plants are the primary producers in many food webs and, as so many are dependent on pollination in order to reproduce, a decline in pollinators would have a detrimental effect to whole ecosystems. Therefore, the declining numbers of pollinators, particularly bees, are a cause of concern because of the environmental knock-on effects. High declines in adult bee numbers in some colonies have been reported and this decline is known as colony collapse disorder6. These declines are higher than normal and can go unnoticed by bee keepers because the bees do not generally die in the nest so the decrease is not immediately obvious. The problem addressed in this paper will be the decline of bees and the effects this decline has on the environment. The solutions proposed for this problem are increasing research, managing farming and spreading awareness. It is important to conserve the bee populations before the problem of decreasing pollinator numbers becomes too great to fix.
Bees play a huge part in the environment and contribute to our everyday lives, but their work is not taken into account. A lot of people just see them as insects that live to sting us and spread pollen, in reality we need them more than we think. Bees have to work ten times harder to make what we love to use on our faces, love to eat, and use to help heal wounds― also known as honey. Another thing that we should be concerned about is when they are pollinating, the pesticides that are sprayed on flowers have a serious effect on on the bees. In other words, they get “drunk” off the chemicals and it doesn’t kill them right away.
The first reports of a massive number of bees dying off were reported in the 1990’s, but the disappearances did not gain much attention until the late 2000’s. Scientists were baffled as a large number of seemingly healthy bees abandoned their hives and never returned. The issue of the disappearing bees became so severe that one third of all the honeybee colonies in the United States were lost, and scientists still could not pinpoint an exact cause for the deaths of so many bees, however they were able to come up with a few possible theories. Deeming the decrease in bees, the Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD for short, researchers believed that the mass disappearance could have been caused by a number of interwoven factors, one of which is global warming. Changing climates and weather patterns due to global warming causes certain species of flowers to bloom either earlier or later than usual, which means that bees are not always provided with the pollen and nectar they desire when they emerge from hibernation, and in addition to this, global warming has been known to cause harsh winters and extremely hot summers which adds stress to the honey bee’s life (Bee Facts).
Over the past decade bee populations have been dropping drastically. A 40% loss of honeybees happened in the U.S. and U.K. lose 45% of its commercial honeybee since 2010. This is a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear in a short time. These data are definitely not meaningless since bees are a crucial part of the reproductive cycle of many foods. The impact bees have on the agriculture and the environment is far more crucial than we may think. Crops rely on bees to assist their reproduction and bring them life. Bees are renowned in facilitating pollination for most plant life, including over 100 different vegetable and fruit crops. Without bees, there would be a huge decrease in pollination, which later result in reduce in plant growth and food supplies. On the other hand, without the pollination progressed with the assistance from bees, the types of flowers According to Dr. Albert Einstein, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination…no more men”. That’s why bees’ extinction affects people more than we ever think, and could even forebode the doom day of human race.