Disappearance of the Bees
by Codie
Bees are a miraculous living design of form and function. They are truly amazing insects. They have compound eyes that are made up of nearly 7,000 facets! Each of these facets contains their own lens and sensory cells. A bees head has a mouth specialized in lapping up nectar and excreting wax. The thorax of a bee gives all its muscle strength that powers its legs and wings. The wings are very interestingly made. Sequences of Velcro-like hooks, which cause the wings to beat in tandem with each other, connect the front wing and the back wing. A honeybee’s hind leg has the most important job of all. They are specially shaped and covered with tiny hairs that help the bee to collect pollen and then store it in their ball-like “pollen baskets” that are attached to its legs. The abdomen of a bee holds the digestive and reproductive organs as well as its stinger that it can only use once in its lifetime.
Source of the information for the above is here. You can also learn more about the anatomy of a bee at this site.
Not only is a bee an amazingly designed animal but also, it has a job that our environment depends on greatly. Bees pollinate one third of the food that we eat, that is 15 billion dollars of food. Recently, we have been discovering that bees in the USA and some parts of Europe have started to disappear. This phenomenon has been given the name of Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD]. 35 of our US states have witnessed bees disappearing already. Sources state that 600,000 bee colonies have collapsed in a matter of 6 months!
What exactly is the importance of bees though? And why does it matter so much if we don’t have them anymore? Well, without bees we won’t have the plants they pollinate to eat which means that we will have to survive off of wind pollinated plants such as rice. In one area of China the bee population was completely destroyed by a pesticide used on plants. Now farmers have to pollinate the trees and plants themselves. One pear tree farm uses a method of collecting and preparing the pollen for the trees. Then when the pollen is ready they distribute it throughout the trees all by hand! This is possibly what could happen to us if we don’t take action now!
Several hypotheses have been developed as to what exactly is causing CCD. Pesticides, viruses, or malnutrition are some of the more popular causes.
Source for the information above came from “The Silence of the Bees”. Nature. PBS. Station call numbers not found, Atlanta. 28 Oct 2007.
Some claim that the radiation given off by cell phones is a key cause as well, but this is not as widely supported as the other hypotheses. [source] Several case studies have proven reactions from pesticides similar to the symptoms of the bees with CCD, however one mysterious thing I discovered while researching was that bees are disappearing in areas where there are no pesticides at all. Scientists have concluded that there is not a single problem that is causing CCD but many. [source] Scientists are not sure what is going on with the bee colonies right now, but it certainly is not something that we can procrastinate with. Without the bee population life on this earth could not be possible. No bees equals not enough food to support the numbers of people on this planet.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:12 am
Wow, I never thought our bee population could lower. They play such a key role in society providing us with our much loved honey. Distributing pollen by hand does not sound like a fun deed for those unlucky farmers, but, It is the price they pay for senselessly spreading pesticides. I do have one question though, how do the hind legs of bees help collect pollen?
November 21st, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Personally, bees are quite annoying when the come around me because i’m afraid they’ll sting me. But after this I never realized how much they really matter. That’s amazing that 1/3 of our food is pollunated by them! Here is a website of some peoples theories of why bees are dissapearing:
http://www.celsias.com/2007/02/27/bees-dying-by-the-millions/
great post!
November 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Well Cooper. There are special hairs on a bees hind legs. When these hairs are rubbed together [flying] they create a charge that attracts the pollen to it so when a bee lands on a flower the pollen literally jumps onto the bees legs. Its really interesting!
November 21st, 2007 at 1:52 pm
That’s terrible that the bee population is lowering! If there’s alot of people starving now imagine what would happen if all the bees dissapeared! People in China would have to change their whole diet since they eat alot of rice.Cooper, the bees’ hind legs have little hairs on them that catch the pollen on them when the bees fly by.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I never knew how much we depended on bees. I always saw them as a pest that lived in my backyard and stung you when you got to friendly with it. I agree with Cooper, pollinating manually does not sound like fun. I thought of bees like ants, there are so many of them that they never could decline in population. I guess I was wrong. I knew back in the 70s there was a problem with pesticides draining into creeks and rivers. In one article I saw it showed a frog that had three legs an one eye due to a farm draining runoff from their farm, which contained pesticides and mutated the genes in a frog embryo. Hopefully there won’t be any mutated bees due to pesticides.
November 21st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Maryclaire, hypotheses. Repeat hypotheses.
November 21st, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Its crazy that the radiation given off by our cell phones could be a key cause to this! Cell phones are something people use every day! I found this website about bee’s disappearences…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070223-bees.html
November 21st, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I watched the Silence of the Bees special that Miss Baker told us about on PBS. It was truly shocking to me because I hadn’t heard about it. It’s truly alarming that one third of the food we eat will be gone if they go. On the special, they showed the area of China where the population had gone. The people had to work so hard just to hand pollinate. Personally, I don’t think that we could do all that in the US. Look on the bright side though, it would create a lot of jobs;which would stimulate the economy.
I’m having ADD here, but we need to get down the concept of a theory. A theory is a BROAD explanation with A LOT of supporting evidence. The ideas that scientists have on what is causing CCD are just hypothesis. It takes years for the scientific community to accept a theory. I am not picking on anyone, but Miss Baker is working so hard to explain to us what a theory is and she shouldn’t have to. It’s not that hard of a concept!
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Wow, i never really worried about a bug’s population until now…. because i really dont wanna be eating rice for the rest of my life. It seems that alot of animals and plants critical to our survival are dropping dangerously low in population. I fear that in the near future, all of these animal and plant populations will collapse and our society as we know it today will be over. Like how they estimated the fishing industry would collapse in 50 years, how long do they think it will be before the bee population collapses Codie?
November 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Cody, If there is a charge that attracts the pollen on their hind legs, then shouldn’t it wear off before they reach another flower to pollinate it?
November 25th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
That sounds kind of like that new movie, Bee Movie. The bees worked together to get all of the humans to stop taking their honey. Then the bees had no need to ever make any honey ever again, because there was so much honey that the humans gave back to the bees, then there was no pollenation going on, all of the flowers died! thank goodness for bees, if they disapear, all of the beautiful flowers will disapear with them.
November 25th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I knew that bees pollinated plants, plants that we eat, but I never put two and two together. It’s amazing that such a small, and seemingly insiginificant, organism can have such an impact on our lives. It also is incredible to me that an insect could become extinct. I always thought that insects were, well, disposable since there are so many of them. I now see this is a horrible disposition. Here is a website that has a list of ideas on how WE (adolescents) can help. http://www.thedailygreen.com/going-green/2836
November 25th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
woah, this is freaky. whenever i got stung by a bee i hated them cause i figured they have no purpose but to just make honey. and since i’m not that big of a fan of honey i didnt really care that much about bees. but now since alot of other populations run off bees we could fix this promblem. like richie said in the future alot of other animal popluations can go out and we’re to blaim. i’m starting to get what miss bakers trying to get into our heads. our generation can totally change the world by doing something so simple.
November 26th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
wow the fact that alot of our food comes through the helpof bees, i never thought that bees played an important role in our lives. Like Kristen said i always thought that they just stung people and made honey. But this blog post really changed my perspective on bees. Thanks Codie! i do have a question though, how do the chinese farmers spread the pollen by hand??