Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new house Stuff
Speaker 1: Works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three
Speaker 1: stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments
Speaker 1: we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will
Speaker 1: be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,
Speaker 1: and everywhere else that fine podcasts are found. Welcome to
Speaker 1: brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. When you bring up
Speaker 1: bees in social conversations, do your friends inevitably start talking
Speaker 1: about killer bees and oh how scary they are? Do
Speaker 1: they make jokes about that awful Wickerman remake with Nicholas
Speaker 1: Cage being all like, not the bees? Next time? Tell
Speaker 1: them this. What we should really be worried about is
Speaker 1: where the hell all our bees are going? Since two
Speaker 1: thousand six, honey bees have been disappearing too quickly to
Speaker 1: guarantee their long term survival. That's right, honey bees may
Speaker 1: go extinct. Just in two thousand fifteens winter, twenty of
Speaker 1: the honeybee population disappeared. Let me tell you why you
Speaker 1: should care. The United States alone relies on the domesticated
Speaker 1: European honeybee to pollinate one third of its food supply.
Speaker 1: We're talking apples, peaches, almonds, lettuce, broccoli, cranberries, squash, melons,
Speaker 1: and blueberries. Here, people, that's fifteen billion dollars in crops
Speaker 1: every year. Not only are bees crucial to our nutrition,
Speaker 1: they're important to our agricultural economy. Our farm system relies
Speaker 1: on honey bees as part of its huge engineered production process.
Speaker 1: Unlike tractors or combines, honey bees are living creatures that
Speaker 1: are susceptible to biological vulnerabilities like parasites, viruses, and climate conditions.
Speaker 1: If this army of bees we've manufactured gets sick and
Speaker 1: dies off, what are we going to do? This record
Speaker 1: number of bee disappearances is referred to as colony collapse disorder.
Speaker 1: According to the U s d A. The losses were
Speaker 1: first reported by beekeepers in two thousand and six, with
Speaker 1: thirty ton of their hives being hit. It's also called
Speaker 1: disappearing disease because we're not finding bee corpses poof, They're
Speaker 1: just gone. Worker bees specifically are disappearing, leaving behind the
Speaker 1: queen and a few male drones. They're still honey in
Speaker 1: the hive, but without the worker bees, the colony eventually dies.
Speaker 1: Bees have disappeared like this in the past, but never
Speaker 1: this widespread. There's no evidence of predators eating these bees,
Speaker 1: and be diseases with creepy names like chalk brewed and
Speaker 1: foul brewed don't seem to be the culprit either. The
Speaker 1: bees come from different suppliers, and their keepers use different
Speaker 1: methods to both feed them and control pests like mites
Speaker 1: in their hives. However, moths and other bees are known
Speaker 1: to avoid affected empty hives for days. Aside mine that
Speaker 1: the bees may have died from disease or chemical contamination.
Speaker 1: The total effects of colony collapse disorder are staggering. We've
Speaker 1: gone from five million bee colonies in the nineteen forties
Speaker 1: to only two point five million today. Let me do
Speaker 1: the math for you. That's half our bees gone and vanished.
Speaker 1: With our modern agricultural needs, hives have to pollinate more
Speaker 1: than ever before. If losses continue at their current rate,
Speaker 1: it will threaten the economic viability of the entire bee
Speaker 1: pollination industry. The cost of honey, bees and honey will rise,
Speaker 1: increasing the cost of the foods they pollinate. We won't starve,
Speaker 1: but we'll probably get scurvy or some other kind of
Speaker 1: vitamin deficiency disorder. The scariest part is that we can't
Speaker 1: nail down a cause for all these disappearing bees. There
Speaker 1: are dozens of potential answers. Maybe the process of transporting
Speaker 1: bees long distances stressing them out, weakening their immune system,
Speaker 1: and exposing them to pathogens that are affect their ability
Speaker 1: to navigate. Veroa and tracheal mites are known to feed
Speaker 1: on bees by sucking out their vital fluids, and it's
Speaker 1: possible they're exposing them to an unknown virus. Or what
Speaker 1: if there isn't enough genetic diversity among honey bees, making
Speaker 1: them susceptible to a widespread disease we don't know about yet.
Speaker 1: Researchers are looking at everything from pesticides to particularly cold
Speaker 1: winters and a scarcity of clean water as contributors. It
Speaker 1: could also be a combination of causes. For instance, what
Speaker 1: if something makes colonies more susceptible the fungicides or pathogens.
Speaker 1: Scientists even investigated the possibility that the electromagnetic energy in
Speaker 1: cordless phones was causing colony collapse disorder, though this has
Speaker 1: since been widely discounted. On May nine, a new theory
Speaker 1: was proposed in the bulletin of Insectology Researchers from the
Speaker 1: Harvard School of Public Health found evidence that a class
Speaker 1: of insecticide called neo nicotinoids were significantly harming bee colonies
Speaker 1: during cold winters, possibly by impairing their neurological functions. The
Speaker 1: levels of pathogens and parasite levels were the same across
Speaker 1: the studies research and control groups, suggesting that the insecticides
Speaker 1: are not making the bees more susceptible to disease or mites.
Speaker 1: These neo nicotinoids are used to increase the stability of
Speaker 1: crops like corn. The European Union banned the most widely
Speaker 1: used of these in but they're still in use in America.
Speaker 1: Further research is required to pinpoint what exactly these insecticides
Speaker 1: are doing two bees check out the brain stuff channel
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.