The Bees Are Dying...Why Should I Care?

Okay, so the bees are dying, but why should you care? There are two reasons why people should care if the bees die. The first reason is concrete and immediate - Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) will affect food production and thus create higher prices on many common food items like honey, apples, almonds, cherries, and peaches. The second reason is a bit more complex - the bees dying may very well be a symptom of a much deeper and more disturbing reality. Our biosphere may be seriously ill.

I am going to discuss the first reason in this blog entry and save the second reason for later consideration. Modern agriculture is dependent on bees to pollinate fruit and other crops. The massive groves of apple and almond trees require growers to import millions of bees into the orchards at the exact right time. They hire bee keepers from around the country to bring their bees in by the truckload. These bees are released into the groves, fly from flowering bud to flowering bud in search of nectar, and as they do they carry pollen from one tree to the next. This fertilizes the buds and ensures a healthy crop. When the bees have done their job they return back to the portable hives and the bee keepers pack them up and return home.

For this critical service the growers pay the bee keepers a fee. I talked to Mary Ann Frazier about his problem. Frazier is an etymologist at Penn State University and part of the Bee Working Group whose job it is to find the root cause and a cure for CCD.

"Just two years ago growers were paying bee keepers between $35 and $45 per colony for the pollination service," she said. "Now they are paying $65 to $75 per colony.

Fewer colonies means greater demand and that translates to higher prices. So who do you think the growers pass that increased fee onto?

"The growers are not going to absorb those costs," explained Frazier. "They are going to pass those extra costs onto the consumer. That means higher food prices and possibly even shortages."

So, expect to see dramatic price increases very soon in honey, apples, almonds, all types of berries, watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and many other food items.

But that’s only part of the problem. The real crisis is even more dire. Soon there may not be enough bees to go around and when that happens we will not be looking at high prices we will be looking at empty grocery store shelves. If the bees continue to die at the rate they are now, we may go to the grocery store and find there are simply no apples or almonds or many other items to be found.