Why the bee crisis isn’t as bad as you think (but still matters)

Australia Bee crisis could cost billions in lost agricultural production

There’s a note of evangelical glee in some of the predictions of bee extinction. Vanishing bees are a sign of the end times. The bees are dying and we have no idea why! And because we don’t know the cause, people are free to fill in their least favorite aspect of modernity: GMOs. Chemicals. Unrelenting connectivity (cellphones, electromagnetic frequency transmission). Climate change. Even wind turbines.

All the rhetoric about the extinction of honeybees is just hype — none of the serious scientists working on this thinks honeybees are vanishing. But the hype isn’t necessarily a bad thing: It’s gotten people interested in the pollinator problem — and it really is a problem, even if it’s not an existential problem. Beekeepers around the country have lost their livelihood.

At this point, scientists suspect a combination of four major factors: parasites, disease, pesticides, and dwindling habitat. One putative cause is a newly popular class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, which go inside plants. The European Union has placed a two-year moratorium on the use of neonicotinoids. But without neonics, some farmers are spraying other insecticides that are more likely to kill not just crop-munching insects but also innocent bystanders.

We could simply insist on less of all insecticides, but then we’d lose more food to insects, and farmers might plow up more land to meet demand — that would reduce the habitat and wild plants that are vital for sustaining insects when food crops aren’t blooming. So choosing the best policy really depends on what the primary problem is.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Why the bee crisis isn’t as bad as you think (but still matters)

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