Bees are Vanishing:
Is This Another Wake Up Call?
by Donald Sutherland, PAg

Tech news: Science April 18, 2007, has sounded a very loud alarm bell. Beekeepers in every state in the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Greece, and the UK report opening hundreds of hives only to find queens, eggs, and a few immature workers. The mature worker bees have vanished without a trace. Clearly, no honey production is possible without thousands of worker bees. It is not just the loss of honey that is worth millions, it is the loss of millions of pollinators for hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables. The food production losses are staggering and total in the billions. Beekeepers and researchers are scrambling to find the reason or reasons for such sudden and catastrophic losses. Researchers have dubbed the sudden demise of worker bee populations as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Early reports are that Canadian hives have not, to this date, been seriously affected.

Theories attempting to explain sudden worker bee loss include possibilities such as: chemicals, parasites, transportation of hives, growing genetically modified crops, or some combination. The reason or reasons for sudden and almost total worker bee loss could be simple or could be quite complex. What is your best guess? Consider an idea “outside the box.” Some researchers at Landau University, Germany, are testing the theory that radiation from mobile phones is interfering with the bees’ navigation systems. If this theory is validated by further scientific testing, our food supply will very quickly be in serious jeopardy. Imagine a battle between cell phone users and worker bees. Which will gain the upper hand? Our love affair with the cell phone is torrid and still heating up. Bees are not the only pollinators in sharp decline. Wasps, flies, birds, and bats are also shrinking in numbers. All of these creatures possess complex navigational systems developed over a long evolutionary stretch of time.

While the cause of CCD is still a mystery, what is no mystery is that we understand so little of the natural world. We are the proverbial bull in the china shop. We slaughter sharks and sell only their fins as a delicacy. We scrape the bottom of the oceans and, in consequence, starve fish and whales. We use disappearing glacial water to irrigate crops. We burn rain forests. God created a completely interconnected, complex, and fragile ecosystem and expected us to be diligent careful stewards and share mother earth with the utmost reverence.

We are in such danger of total ecological collapse that we should immediately shut down our pillage of the last remnants of the natural world and truly observe, study, listen, and learn before treading further on mother earth—with even the most gentle of footsteps. We need to cancel our subscriptions for stress pills and, instead, sign up for large doses of humility pills. Arrogance, blindness, one-dimensional thinking, greed, pride, and sheer ignorance are our enemies and are hurtling us toward our own destruction and that of all living things.

Reprinted courtesy of Earthcare Connections, PO Box 2800, Humboldt, SK S0K 2A0. Phone (306) 682-2407, fax (306) 682-5416, email: earthcare@sasktel.net, www.earthcare.sk.ca. Donald Sutherland is a career counsellor, personal coach, and mediator with special training in restorative justice. He is also a professional agrologist and active farmer, email: donaldsutherland@sasktel.net.