HOW WILL THE WORLD CHANGE IF BEEES DISAPPEAR (6 photos)
Nature magazine reported that Europe lost 1/3 of its honey bee population last winter. The threat of their complete disappearance is becoming real. What would our world be like without a master pollinator? Einstein said that after the bee, a person will die.
SCARY NUMBERS
A person can live without oxygen for three minutes, without water for three days, and without bees for four years. At least that’s what Einstein thought. The scientist’s quote appeared in 1941 in the Canadian Bee Journal. It follows from it that the death of bees for humanity will be no better than a global catastrophe – a volcanic eruption, a meteorite fall or an explosion of the Large Hadron Collider. The result is still the same.
Meanwhile, the mass death of bees continues. The scientific journal Nature reported that in the southern countries over the past winter, the population decreased by 5%, in central Europe by 10-15%, and in the North by 20%. In Russia, too, not everything is smooth. The number of hives is especially strongly reduced in the Chelyabinsk and Ulyanovsk regions. In the country as a whole, bee mortality is 20%. Experts say that the current number of bees is no longer enough to pollinate all plants. Last year, the UN declared that bee mortality is becoming a global problem.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
The story of the death of honey insects is not new: the process was launched in the middle of the 20th century, but reached its peak in the last twenty years. There is no single reason, but the main culprit has been found – this is a person. Agriculture almost everywhere switched to chemistry – nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides. The latter do not kill insects, but, according to scientists, lower their immunity, and viruses do not sleep. Professor Peter Neumann talks about the plague of bees – varroatosis, a disease carried by a microscopic mite: “it is dangerous because it sucks all the life juices out of the bee. This is the most common bee disease, it is difficult to get rid of these mites, and the treatment and nursing of weakened insects takes a lot of time and rarely leads to the desired results. And the worker bee is not supposed to get sick. The beekeepers do not particularly care about the health of the hive members and continue their business as usual: they transport colonies of bees over long distances. In the US, beehives are transported from Florida to California for pollination of crops. Such long trips put bee families under tremendous stress. And this leads to “colony collapse syndrome.”
It was described by American beekeepers in 2006. During the “sickness” insects leave their colonies, never to return there again. Bees do not live alone and soon die away from the hives. The reason for the strange behavior is chemicals and cellular radio signals, which, according to scientists at the University of Koblenz-Landau, drive winged workers crazy.
WHAT IF…?
Yet, what happens if the bees die out, or if their population is reduced to a critical level? Will Einstein’s prediction “no bees – no pollination – no food – no man” come true?
It must be said that there are other natural pollinators in the world – flies, butterflies, birds, bats, wind. In addition, not all plants are pollinated by bees. In the old days, the flora of North America and Ireland did just fine without them. It was people who brought the bees there.
But since the great geographical discoveries, considerable changes have taken place in the world. The population has grown, and so has the need for food. Today, the loss of bees, to which we owe 1/3 of the entire crop, cannot pass without consequences. Humanity will lose not only honey.
The Times and Business Insider publish the following chain, referring to the opinion of experts: the greater the mortality among insects, the faster beekeeping will become unprofitable. People will begin to abandon their craft, and the frightening statistics will only get worse. Since a large part of the crop depends on bees, humanity will have to “tighten their belts” – the food stalls will be empty, the prices of the remaining products will skyrocket. Hunger will come to visit His Majesty. And do not rely on other components of our daily diet. Since some of the plants will disappear, the livestock will also lose food, which means goodbye milk, cheese, yogurt and, ultimately, beef. In general, whatever one may say, a world without bees will not be able to afford the current population of people.
Against the background of the previous one, the idea that a person will have problems with clothes simply fades. Among other things, bees pollinate cotton. In general, you will have to say goodbye to the “100%, 50%, 5% cotton” tags and switch to polyester or skins.
Vanga predicted that onions, garlic, peppers and BEES would soon disappear from the earth … This will happen before a global catastrophe! As for the products loved by many – while everything seems to be there, the gardeners are silent, then everything is ok. but the BEES disappear – this is a fact.
