Where have all the Honey Bees gone?

I was listening to NPR today to a story about declining honey bee populations and the possible implications on the food supply. There may not be enough bees to pollinate the crops this year. About 30% of the food consumed by US consumers requires bees for pollination. This was an interesting story. But it is a story I recall hearing every spring for at least the past several years. Each time it seems that concerned groups of farmers and bee keepers are speaking to some panel in Washington about the problem. Each time the story is pretty much the same. They don't know why. It could be this new pesticide that causes insects to become disoriented - thus bees would not be able to find and return to their hives. This seems plausible since the hives are being abandoned rather than filled with dead bees. So the bees aren't dying in the hives. So what happens if we don't figure out what is happening to the bees and eventually there are not enough? Here is a link a to a National Geographic article. It says it could be due to diseases passed on by mites. It also says there are normal ebbs and flows in the bee population but this one appears more pronounced.

I don't know about you but when I was a kid I was really afraid of bees. My kids are scared to death of them. Funny for something to be so essential, so tiny, so vulnerable to external influences and yet SO SCARY. I for one hope the bees come back. I like my flowers, a good tomato and all the other goodies of the garden that require these little critters to produce. Let's hear it for the Bees! And maybe next year when this story comes out in the news there will be a story about being closer to a solution to the decline.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1005_041005_honeybees.html

This is an interesting article about the honey bee and it talks about the life cycle of the bee.
It also has some interesting pictures of a bee pollinating a flower.

http://www.cirrusimage.com/bees_honey.htm

See I was right. I've been seeing this for years. Below one from '99 and one from '00. In the last century the bee population has declined by more than 50%.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/05/05/pollinators.peril/

See here's a story from 1999 about the decline. There was hope that a solution to kill the mites would help the bee decline. I guess it didn't work. So maybe it is the pesticide.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/09/990930071452.htm

Here are the words to The Bee Song - written in 1938 by Kenneth Blain

http://ingeb.org/songs/owhatagl.html

And if you really want to get carried away......

Muddy Waters has a song called Honey Bee. You can get it from http://www.itunes.com/ or http://www.amazon.com/ . If you aren't familiar with Muddy Waters, well, he's a famous Blues singer. "Sail on Honey Bee".