This may sound silly to you, but there is a Honey Bee crisis right now. Honey Bees are disappearing and dying at alarming rates. Seeing as how Honey Bees are responsible for pollination for 1/3 of the entire world's food supply, this is a very serious problem for the planet.
In my Geology class I'm taking this summer, we were discussing Geologic Time - Eons, Eras, Periods, Epochs. We are currently in the Holocene Epoch. An Epoch is the smallest level of Geologic Time. Our current Epoch began with the retreat of the last ice age. A student in class asked the teacher what would cause us to enter a new Geologic Epoch. She responded by saying a "mass extinction." A mass extinction is a sharp decrease in a species over a short period of time. When asked what would count as a mass extinction, she said, "ALL the birds or ALL the humans or...the honey bees."
She said that because the honey bees play such an important role in the pollination and indirectly the production of 1/3 of the planet's food supply, if they continue to disappear at the rate they are, we will have a mass extinction within our lifetime. This would permanently and devastatingly change the entire planet.
We have already seen the affect of the honey bee crisis in food prices - we've all noticed the increases over the past year. Ice cream companies like Haagen-Dazs are starting to step up and contribute to the research of the Honey Bee disappearances because they know how important the honey bees are to the production of their ice cream. Click here to go to the Haagen-Dazs Help the Honey Bees website for more general information about the honey bees crisis and also for information about how the honey bees affect the ice cream production.
Just to give you an idea, while honey is not the most important thing that will be lost if the Honey Bees disappear, it gives a picture of how many of them have disappeared - before 2006, when the Honey Bee crisis was first identified, many commercial beekeepers were able to produce more than 6,000 pounds of honey per year. Currently, they are producing 1,000 pounds of honey per year - a drastic change in only 2 years.
One of the main problems that I have right now is that this issue has yet to be addressed by either political party or by Congress or the President. I think it is an important issue that could affect and IS affecting not only the United States, but the entire world.
I will be posting more information on the Honey Bees in the next few days...
In my Geology class I'm taking this summer, we were discussing Geologic Time - Eons, Eras, Periods, Epochs. We are currently in the Holocene Epoch. An Epoch is the smallest level of Geologic Time. Our current Epoch began with the retreat of the last ice age. A student in class asked the teacher what would cause us to enter a new Geologic Epoch. She responded by saying a "mass extinction." A mass extinction is a sharp decrease in a species over a short period of time. When asked what would count as a mass extinction, she said, "ALL the birds or ALL the humans or...the honey bees."
She said that because the honey bees play such an important role in the pollination and indirectly the production of 1/3 of the planet's food supply, if they continue to disappear at the rate they are, we will have a mass extinction within our lifetime. This would permanently and devastatingly change the entire planet.
We have already seen the affect of the honey bee crisis in food prices - we've all noticed the increases over the past year. Ice cream companies like Haagen-Dazs are starting to step up and contribute to the research of the Honey Bee disappearances because they know how important the honey bees are to the production of their ice cream. Click here to go to the Haagen-Dazs Help the Honey Bees website for more general information about the honey bees crisis and also for information about how the honey bees affect the ice cream production.
Just to give you an idea, while honey is not the most important thing that will be lost if the Honey Bees disappear, it gives a picture of how many of them have disappeared - before 2006, when the Honey Bee crisis was first identified, many commercial beekeepers were able to produce more than 6,000 pounds of honey per year. Currently, they are producing 1,000 pounds of honey per year - a drastic change in only 2 years.
One of the main problems that I have right now is that this issue has yet to be addressed by either political party or by Congress or the President. I think it is an important issue that could affect and IS affecting not only the United States, but the entire world.
I will be posting more information on the Honey Bees in the next few days...
1 comment:
i was just reading about this the other day! the honey bees, and bats too (there's some disease killing them off that's spreading down from new england)
scary stuff...i'll be glad to see what you post for ways to help!!
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