Source: ESPN h/t FiveThirtyEightScience
The Fight To Save The Mighty Honeybee
February 28, 2015 8:00pm by Barry Ritholtz
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Neat mite shakers. Odd to see ESPN producing a nature doc.
Just part of the recent trend that started with the Comedy Channel producing some of the best nightly news on TV (you can trace that back to SNL Weekly Update). So why not have sports channels getting into the serious news? Some of the most important recent discussions on domestic violence and rape have actually been occurring in the sports media because of the high-profile investigations of major league players and high visibility college athletes.
From my looking at the research on honeybee decline over the past couple of decades (as part of some of my work), it appears that there are four fundamental causes:
1. The invention of very large,industrial mono-cultural farms that greatly reduce plant bio-diversity over large areas;
2. The invention of GMO crops that allow for the use of glyphosphate (Roundup) to kill weeds in the mono-culture farms. This virtually wipes out any residual plant bio-diversity in multi-county areas.
3. The extensive use of certain types of pesticides in the mono-culture agriculture that damages the remaining honeybees and other pollinators.
4. The expansion of suburbia over the past half-century which has replaced many bio-diverse areas with large swaths of low-diversity lawns.
The reason that honeybees are so important economically is that the reliance on mono-culture of things like almonds in California has wiped out the bio-diverse ecosystems that would have housed and fed hundreds of native pollinators that used to do the job that these farmers now rely on the honeybees for. This issue has expanded to Europe as their agriculture has gotten more “efficient”. Recent studies have shown that European bees are now healthier in the cities with extensive flower gardens than in the rural areas where the old bio-diverse hedgerows have been eliminated to allow for large mechanized monoculture agriculture.
NYC alone has over 230 species of bees (most are native) that are vital for pollination.
http://www.fromthesquare.org/?p=5337
http://inhabitat.com/nyc/new-bee-species-discovered-in-the-brooklyn-botanic-garden/
Here is a pictorial guide to some of the common bee species from the NYS area: http://greatpollinatorproject.org/sites/all/downloads/pdfs/Pictorial_Guide_to_Common_NYC_Bees.pdf