Green Options

Summers have been more silent in recent years because the bee population has been falling at an alarming rate – in Britain it fell by a third between last year and this, and right across Europe the decline is similar and disturbing

A UK Professor Hopes His Genetically Modified Worker Bees Can Help Stop The Colony Collapse Disorder That Is Grossly Effecting the UK Economy

Last week 140,000 protesters from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) marched on Whitehall demanding $8-million in emergency funding from the Department for Environment to tackle alarming rates of bee decline. The decline has cost the UK economy about $54-million in the past year alone.

But British scientist Francis Ratnieks — and the UK’s only professor of apiculture –  is pioneering research that he hopes will assuage the hardship beekeepers have been experiencing with colony collapse disorder.

The honey bees are dying off around the world, and yet still many people have never heard of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This week the Italian government banned several pesticides that are thought to be linked to the honey bee decline. More research (funding) is required to find out exactly what is causing the disappearance.

During Honey Week on our sister site, Meridith Melnick wrote:

“One-third of the food we consume comes from pollinators. Bees are responsible for pollinating almonds, apples, soft fruit, and berries among other crops. Without them, we will lose more than honey (a tragedy in its own right!), we will lose a large portion of the biodiversity we now enjoy on our plates.”

30-90 percent of bee colonies have been dying over the past two years.   Europeans are banning the pesticide clothianidin to protect their bee populations from “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD), yet the FDA, which approved the pesticide in 2003, refuses to release public documents of studies conducted by clothianidin’s maker Bayer CropScience on the chemical’s impact on bees and the environment.  Last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit [...]

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We’ve got some sweet posts for the week ahead. This week is Honey Week at Eat. Drink. Better. in tribute to bees and all they do for us, including that delicious honey. To kick it off, I want to share a cool bee fact and a recipe.

Did you know?

1. California’s almond orchards are the location of the largest pollination event annually. Nearly one million hives (about 50 percent) of the US honey bees are brought to the almond orchards each spring.
2. The apple crop in just New York requires about 30,000 hives.
3. 50,000 hives each year are needed for Maine’s blueberry crop.
4. According to the USDA, one-third of our diets rely on insect-pollinated plants. 80 percent of this pollination is done by bees.

Recipe for Honey Curried Cauliflower follows the jump.

Häagen-Dazs has given $250,000 to researchers studying colony collapse disorder, the mysterious condition causing large numbers of bees to simply disappear. The grant isn’t sheer altruism, though: Häagen-Dazs says 40 percent of its flavors depend on the bee’s specialty, pollination.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Abrahami.