Factors Contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder

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Picture sitting next to a river in the summer time where it is just the perfect temperature and you are soaking up the great weather and the amazing scenery when a bee buzzes past you and lands on a flower by your feet, as human nature you don’t want to be next to the bee because it could sting you… do you step on it or simply walk away?
What you may not know is that honeybees play a huge roll in America’s agriculture, whether it is pollinating alfalfa hay to feed your horse or pollinating that apple you eat every morning for breakfast. Honeybees pollinate about one-third of crops species in the U.S. (Vanishing Bees, 2008). Bees pollinate a lot more than you would think a few more examples are almonds, avocadoes, cucumbers and peanuts. A bee is categorized as a “pollinator,” a pollinator being something that transfers pollen and seeds from one flower to another, which fertilizes the plant so it can grow and produce food. Bees are not the only pollinators out there, other insects and birds do a decent job but they cannot pick up the slack that is lost without the bees, the agricultural industry has simply grown too big.
The problem is that since about 2006 the honeybee population has decreased drastically. Bees that were healthy to the eye one day were abandoning their hives in masses the next day, without return. Researchers call this occurrence, Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD. There is no set reason for CCD, but a there is a wide range of factors that are all very possible and probable to the cause of dying bees. As a consumer, everyone of us want to have fruit year round but never really take in to account how it is managed throughout the seasons. Commercial beekeepers have to haul colonies of honeybees across the country ye...

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... possible for the bee to sense the earth’s magnetic fields, this sense of the magnetic fields give the bee a way to orient itself. The cell phone radiation is compromising the bee’s ability to sense the magnetic fields and gets the bee so confused it basically gets lost and won’t ever find its way back to the hive.
There are so many different opinions and research that are said to be the cause of CCD, whether it is only one of these factors or all of them together that is causing the problem there are still a problem that needs to be majorly reduced. The loss of bees (CCD) have been known since 2006 and although it is said by some that the problem is getting better all hive keepers and commercial farmers are still struggling with their bee colonies and believe it could get worse. In total bees contribute more than $15 billion to U.S crop production (Holland, 2013).

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