“If 70 percent of all cattle or 30 percent of all chickens were to die annually, states of emergency would be declared everywhere. The death of bees is at least that dramatic and with even more far-reaching consequences.” More Than Honey
There has been much research carried out on the plight of our little fuzzy, busy Bees worldwide and the findings are alarming, to put it mildly; the bee populations of the world are dying, not slowly, but rapidly and when you start to read, even just a little, it is perfectly understandable. Actually it is horrifying!
We, by our fiddling with natural order of things are committing a slow form of suicide by killing off the bees. Over exaggeration you may think or say, but once you have taken a read of More Than Honey, you will perfectly understand the damage, trauma and destruction we are creating.
Although much of the data gathered relates to America and Europe it translates to other food bowl producers such as Australia, New Zealand and Asia and is a telling piece of work by Imhoof & Lieckfeld. They describe the Bee as an intellectual addition to this world; one that has immense capabilities and definitely does far more than produces honey. This information makes fascinating and astonishing reading.
The truth of it is that without Bees we would be a hungry race of people living in a desert region with little or no food. Certainly not the food we have become accustomed to eating on a daily basis.
That we owe our wellbeing to this highly evolved, talented little creature is a humbling though but sadly not one we, as this so enlightened race, bother to spend time considering. Interesting, is it not! The problem being the way we have allowed food to be grown to feed the masses raises many, many issues with genetic modification being only one of the many.
Transportation of masses of bee colonies from one place to another to pollinate mass orchards, crops and the like is another, with many Bee’s dyeing on the way is one that many are not aware of strangely enough, as it is a matter which, unless you are involved, causes the end user little concern.
But, and it is a big but, unless we begin to start taking note of how out demands, and ever increasing demands for foods, is beginning to seriously affect our ability to be able exist on this world we, the human, enlightened, educated peoples will eventually be no longer.
What we, as a modern society are doing to this magnificent little Bee is unforgivable. But there is hope as, although agriculturally, bees are in decline, there appears to be a renaissance happening within the cities, as more and more people within the urban environment begin to keep hives for fresh honey and to help pollinate their small plot of land. While this will help a little, preserving various species of bee, it will not overwhelmingly solve the problem. But what to do is the question of which, at this time, there is no one, specific, quick fix answer.
The answer lies in Corporations facing up to the effect and damage their methods of mass production of foods, the chemical usage and over stressing of bees has created, and a concerted effort made by all peoples to fix that which is most definitely, broken.
Unrealistic you say: But consider the very real, very close alternatives.
In a quote attributed to Einstein he states that ‘humankind cannot survive without bees’ and he also says that ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them’.
The final question there to be asked as posed by Imhoof & Lieckfeld in this work and the documentary of the same name is ‘where do we, as a civilization go to from here, if we will not listen, will not observe and keep on blindly charging down the same pothole ridden pathway, failing to fix up the potholes’?
Makes you wonder, does it not!
