Quote from austinp:
When people think about honeybees, they naturally assume conversation is limited to honey. Actually, honey is just a secondary byproduct of bee production.
Anything that flowers must be pollinated by something in order to produce seeds in the form of fruits, vegetables or grains. A small percentage of flowers are pollinated by wind. Some plants have evolved to host specific insects for the task.
It's estimated that roughly 1/3 of all food product fruits and vegetables are pollinated by honeybees. Bee production is a big part of that. Hives are trucked into and out of farms, orchards and vineyards specifically for pollination. The honey produced is merely a byproduct of the beekeeper's income from providing bees for pollination.
If for whatever reason the honeybee population would collapse, U.S. food production would likewise drop 25% at the very least. We can plant all the fruits and vegetables land will support: but the flowers will fall off unpollinated with no produce formed.
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For example, home gardeners are usually awash in squash by mid-summer. If you leave two zucchini squash on your dashboard with the car locked, someone is liable to break in and leave four more alongside those just to be rid of them.
Last year was the first time I recall planting a usual amount of squash and cucumbers with a very meager yield. We watched flowers blossom as usual, but nil squash or cukes followed. I actually bought some of each vegetable from local stands in the heart of production season, and there wasn't much offered available to public at that.
Experts are stumped as to what has caused a sudden collapse in bee colonies. The solution may be simple or impossible, any degree within that scale. Meanwhile, it does loom as the most potentially serious problem to hit our economy... crude oil shortage is a very distant second when it comes to ALL fruits, grains and meat production intricately tied together.
