© Loree Griffin Burns
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, scientists Marcelo Aizen and Lawrence Harder called for clear thinking about honey bee population declines:
”It’s true that some crops like raspberries, cashews, cranberries and mangoes cannot reproduce without pollinators. But crops like sugar cane and potatoes, grown for their stems or tubers, can be propagated without pollination. And the crops that provide our staple carbohydrates — wheat, rice and corn — are either wind-pollinated or self-pollinated. These don’t need bees at all.”
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t worry about honey bee decline, of course, just that we should worry about the right things, like what is causing them. You can read the entire article here.
In related news, THE HIVE DETECTIVES, my look at honey bee population decline through the eyes of four scientists scrambling to understand it, releases in five weeks. Five weeks! When you’ve been working on a project for three years, five weeks seems like a snap of the fingers.