Of Bees and Flowers and Feeding Ourselves

photo by Nicolas Guérin

Bees play a critical roll in pollinating crops, not to mention every other flowering plant in the world. They are vanishing. But a new study shows even if the number of bees recover, if the diversity of bees declines, crops are in trouble.

Crops are often pollinated by many different bees. If some of those bees are absent the process, the resultant fruit can have far fewer seeds. Lowered bee diversity means lowered crops. Hardly something the world can afford right now.

This is just one warning chime of the impact of decreasing bio-diversity. Life is indeed an intricate web. When the strands are broken, the consequences will continue on and be far greater than might be initially evident. With species extinction happening at somewhere betwen 100 to 1,000 times the natural rate, that's a lot of strands snapping.