That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. The honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modem system of industrial agriculture. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee, “says Jim Cane, of the U.S. And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system that was emerging. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new-in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.Ĭ If that ‘Fruitless Fall, has not-yet-occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. These practices killed many native bees outright-they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest-and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides.
pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. Pollination in modem agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.ī But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. A Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder(CCD)，that is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops.
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