Are Big Macs Killing Bees?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-Big-Macs-Killing-Bees-by-David-Simon-Agriculture_Agriculture_Bees_Corn-140414-510.html

Are Big Macs Killing Bees?
By David Simon
General News 4/14/2014 at 18:12:15




There's a beautiful beach called "Crystal Cove" near my home, so close that my partner Tania and I, who consider it our personal sanctuary, walk on the shore several times a week. (This stretch of coastline is one of the best things about Orange County, California, a place so conservative and corporate-friendly that voters here rejected a GMO labeling initiative by a two-to-one margin.) In the past year, however, we've seen something strange on the beach along with the starfish, anemones and shorebirds: dying bees. Sometimes there are none. Other times they're present by the dozens, wriggling in circles in the wet sand at the water's edge like drunken, disoriented little aviators. Eventually, they get tired and simply expire. You can pick them up, barely alive, and move them inland to a safe place, but it makes no difference. They're fatally lost, they can't find their hive, and they'll be dead in a few hours.





"Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) refers to the mysterious disappearance of millions of US honeybees over the past half-century -- and at an alarmingly accelerated rate since 2006. I don't know for certain whether dying bees at the shore are casualties of CCD, and the academics I asked didn't know either. But it sure seems likely, especially since CCD is such a generalized concept that almost anything might fit the category. Which brings me to the main point of this article: the evidence shows that CCD is yet another unfortunate, costly result of Americans' extraordinarily high consumption of meat and dairy. "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) refers to the mysterious disappearance of millions of US honeybees over the past half-century -- and at an alarmingly accelerated rate since 2006. I don't know for certain whether dying bees at the shore are casualties of CCD, and the academics I asked didn't know either. But it sure seems likely, especially since CCD is such a generalized concept that almost anything might fit the category. Which brings me to the main point of this article: the evidence shows that CCD is yet another unfortunate, costly result of Americans' extraordinarily high consumption of meat and dairy.





In my book Meatonomics , I show that our nation's obsession with animal foods -- leading us to consume more meat per capita than any other country on the planet -- costs us more than $400 billion yearly in hidden, or externalized, costs. The expenses related to these bee die-offs are also significant, which is why the agriculture industry and the US Department of Agriculture take CCD seriously and are devoting resources to addressing it. One-third of the food we eat depends on honeybee pollination -- giving those pollination services an estimated value of $215 billion worldwide. In 2008, there were just 2.4 million honeybee colonies in the United States, down from 5.9 million in 1945. These massive colony losses have already raised honey costs and beehive rental costs, hurt some beekeepers' incomes, put others out of business, and threatened to disrupt the production of crops worth $15 billion.