Honey Bees Life

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Life is filled with the prophecy of the end of the world, natural disasters claim countless lives, weather patterns seem increasingly more erratic, yet when a person hears the cry of global warming the thought, not in my lifetime comes to the forefront of the mind. It is something to be dealt with later, tomorrow, just not right now. Yet, the time is now for the effects of a global scale catastrophe lie right outside the window. The mere absence of what many consider a nuisance of daily life, the honey bee, is an ominous foreboding of the real-time catastrophe the world’s society is in the midst of. Yet this predictor is only a piece of the greater puzzle that is life. In the discussion of how honey bees sustain human life, how the use of neonicotinoids …show more content…

“Without bees, pollination would be difficult and time consuming, it is estimated that one-third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination” (Honeybeecentre, 2013). Yet the bees are disappearing at an alarming rate. “Bee researchers first reported massive die offs back in the 1990s. But the plight of the honeybee didn’t truly buzz into the national consciousness until the spring of 2013, when data revealed the average beekeeper had lost 45% of colonies the previous winter” (Heid, 2015). Why seems to be the main question as to the reason bees are disappearing, and the answer begins 27 years in the past. Matt McGrath an environmental correspondent for BBC News notes the fact that “neonicotinoids were introduced in the early 1990s as a replacement for older, more damaging chemicals”, and this coincides with the beginning of the decline. Understanding that bee decline poses a great threat to the survival of humans, we shift focus onto what neonics are and how they translate into global ecological …show more content…

The Hydrosphere, as defined in Ocean Studies by Joseph Moran, “encompasses water in all three phases…that continually cycles from one reservoir to another within the Earth system”. This cycle is the process in which neonics, a toxin, have begun permeation. Neonics “have high leaching and runoff potential, and are highly toxic to a wide range of invertebrates. Therefore, neonicotinoids represent a significant risk to surface waters and the diverse aquatic and terrestrial fauna that these ecosystems support” (Morrissey, et al., 2014). Being that neonics target invertebrate, then the assertion that one of the world’s primary aquatic invertebrate, zooplankton, being an unintended target of the mass usage of neonics in agriculture, is an acceptable one. So how does this effect the ocean? Zooplankton feeds on phytoplankton which in turn utilizes Co2 that has been absorbed into the water from the atmosphere for food. Phytoplankton then release a chemical known as Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS), which when released into the atmosphere reflects solar energy out of atmosphere effectively cooling it down. According to NOAA “Phytoplankton is the base of several aquatic food webs. In a balanced ecosystem, they provide food for a wide range of sea creatures…”. So, when unbalanced, as we are seeing with the induction of the

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