Why Are Honey Bees Disappearing?

Honey bees are vanishing? But why?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new house Stuff
Works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three
stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments
we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will
be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,
and everywhere else that fine podcasts are found. Welcome to

(00:23):
brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. When you bring up
bees in social conversations, do your friends inevitably start talking
about killer bees and oh how scary they are? Do
they make jokes about that awful Wickerman remake with Nicholas
Cage being all like, not the bees? Next time? Tell

(00:45):
them this. What we should really be worried about is
where the hell all our bees are going? Since two
thousand six, honey bees have been disappearing too quickly to
guarantee their long term survival. That's right, honey bees may
go extinct. Just in two thousand fifteens winter, twenty of
the honeybee population disappeared. Let me tell you why you

(01:08):
should care. The United States alone relies on the domesticated
European honeybee to pollinate one third of its food supply.
We're talking apples, peaches, almonds, lettuce, broccoli, cranberries, squash, melons,
and blueberries. Here, people, that's fifteen billion dollars in crops
every year. Not only are bees crucial to our nutrition,

(01:31):
they're important to our agricultural economy. Our farm system relies
on honey bees as part of its huge engineered production process.
Unlike tractors or combines, honey bees are living creatures that
are susceptible to biological vulnerabilities like parasites, viruses, and climate conditions.

(01:52):
If this army of bees we've manufactured gets sick and
dies off, what are we going to do? This record
number of bee disappearances is referred to as colony collapse disorder.
According to the U s d A. The losses were
first reported by beekeepers in two thousand and six, with
thirty ton of their hives being hit. It's also called

(02:14):
disappearing disease because we're not finding bee corpses poof, They're
just gone. Worker bees specifically are disappearing, leaving behind the
queen and a few male drones. They're still honey in
the hive, but without the worker bees, the colony eventually dies.
Bees have disappeared like this in the past, but never
this widespread. There's no evidence of predators eating these bees,

(02:38):
and be diseases with creepy names like chalk brewed and
foul brewed don't seem to be the culprit either. The
bees come from different suppliers, and their keepers use different
methods to both feed them and control pests like mites
in their hives. However, moths and other bees are known
to avoid affected empty hives for days. Aside mine that

(03:00):
the bees may have died from disease or chemical contamination.
The total effects of colony collapse disorder are staggering. We've
gone from five million bee colonies in the nineteen forties
to only two point five million today. Let me do
the math for you. That's half our bees gone and vanished.
With our modern agricultural needs, hives have to pollinate more

(03:23):
than ever before. If losses continue at their current rate,
it will threaten the economic viability of the entire bee
pollination industry. The cost of honey, bees and honey will rise,
increasing the cost of the foods they pollinate. We won't starve,
but we'll probably get scurvy or some other kind of
vitamin deficiency disorder. The scariest part is that we can't

(03:47):
nail down a cause for all these disappearing bees. There
are dozens of potential answers. Maybe the process of transporting
bees long distances stressing them out, weakening their immune system,
and exposing them to pathogens that are affect their ability
to navigate. Veroa and tracheal mites are known to feed
on bees by sucking out their vital fluids, and it's

(04:08):
possible they're exposing them to an unknown virus. Or what
if there isn't enough genetic diversity among honey bees, making
them susceptible to a widespread disease we don't know about yet.
Researchers are looking at everything from pesticides to particularly cold
winters and a scarcity of clean water as contributors. It

(04:29):
could also be a combination of causes. For instance, what
if something makes colonies more susceptible the fungicides or pathogens.
Scientists even investigated the possibility that the electromagnetic energy in
cordless phones was causing colony collapse disorder, though this has
since been widely discounted. On May nine, a new theory

(04:52):
was proposed in the bulletin of Insectology Researchers from the
Harvard School of Public Health found evidence that a class
of insecticide called neo nicotinoids were significantly harming bee colonies
during cold winters, possibly by impairing their neurological functions. The
levels of pathogens and parasite levels were the same across

(05:14):
the studies research and control groups, suggesting that the insecticides
are not making the bees more susceptible to disease or mites.
These neo nicotinoids are used to increase the stability of
crops like corn. The European Union banned the most widely
used of these in but they're still in use in America.

(05:37):
Further research is required to pinpoint what exactly these insecticides
are doing two bees check out the brain stuff channel
on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.