is any animal species that fertilizes plants.
relies on natural pollination of native species. However, a sharp decline of espeically
"There has been a sixty-year decline in pollinators. The honeybees and native bees may live in far more harmony than cats and dogs, but the modern world has not been in harmony with them. The last 60 years have been rough on all pollinators. In the 1940s there were over five million managed colonies of honeybees in the United States. Today there are just over two million, and their numbers are declining, both in North America and worldwide."
"The entire world now faces a decline of native pollinators. Over 100 species of birds and more than 80 mammals that pollinate are considered threatened or extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), a network that includes scientists, experts, government agencies and
non-governmental organizations from around the world. Each country has its own tale to tell. In southern India, nearly all of the native bees died in the 1990s when they became infected with an imported virus. In Iraq, smoke from the burning oil wells during the Gulf War decimated most of the country's bee colonies."
90 per cent loss in US
Also, "90% of the feral (wild) bee population in the United States has died out. Recent studies in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have shown that
bee diversity is down 80 percent in the sites researched, and that "bee species are declining or have become extinct in Britain." The studies also revealed that the numbers of
wildflowers that depend on pollination have dropped by 70 percent. Which came first, the decline in wildflowers or the decline in pollinators, has yet to be determined. If bees continue to die off so would the crops they support and with that would ensue major economic disruption and possibly
famine. In the US, bee keepers are experiencing unprecedented die offs of bees some losing as much as 80% of their colonies. Commercial beekeepers in 22 states have reported deaths of tens of thousands of honeybee colonies. So far the cause remains unexplained and somewhat mysterious. It is being called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and is causing agricultural honeybees nationwide to abandon their hives and disappear and raising worries about crops that need bees for pollination. It's a kind of mass suicide in the bee world. "There have been cases where there have been these die-offs of bees before, but we have never seen it to this level," said Maryann Frazier, a Pennsylvania State University entomologist. "One operation after another is collapsing."
"Bees have done quite well for millions of years, in the last 60 years that began to change. In recent years, beekeepers have been losing 25 percent of their hives each winter. Thirty years ago, the rate was 5 percent to 10 percent, said Keith Tignor, the state apiarist for Virginia."
Thomas Gerber on Colony Collapse Disorder among bees.
similar dieoffs
Similar
dieoffs have been observed among
amphibians, especially
frogs, worldwide. Some species of
birds, not just those succumbing to
avian influenza, have died in strange incidents in
US and
Australia.
"This is the precedent of a disease working its way across an entire species on the scale of all mammals, all birds or all fish," said Joseph Mendelson, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta and an organizer of Amphibian Ark. "Humans would be absolutely stupid if they didn't pay attention to that."
Affected birds, amphibians, fish, bees, share climate and man as common factors. Some trees have initiated chromosomal changes in response to the climate - becoming more like trees in the south.
See climate change.
