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In May, dandelions were thriving in the Grand Marais Rec Park. “We have a ‘no mow’ policy this month,” Dave Tersteeg said.
It’s all part of a plan to encourage bees and other pollinators to thrive, added the Rec Park Director.
National Pollinators Month in June seeks to encourage people to plant nectar-producing plants to attract bees, birds, bats, and other natural pollinators, and while these little creatures might seem annoying at times, they are critical to our survival.
Leading the charge of pollinators in the U.S. is the honeybee.
It’s a lot to buzz about; however, commercial beekeepers are reporting that they are losing 30 to 40 percent of their colonies each year, and a study finds the life span of honeybees has fallen by 50 percent over the last five decades, reports New Scientist.
In the 1970s, a western honey bee’s median lifespan was 34.3 days. Today
commercial beekeepers find their bees live an average of 17.7 days, according to research conducted by Anthony Nearman and Dennis vanEngelsdorp from the University of Maryland.
One theory is that fewer bees with a shorter life span means less time to collect nectar and pollen for the
colony, which means less honey for the colony to make it through the winter.
While honeybees are negatively affected by pathogens, parasites, pesticides, and other pollutants,
genetic interference might be the most significant cause of shorter lifespans.
Researchers speculate that as breeders have sought to make bees more disease resistant, they may have invariantly shortened the potential life span of the bees.
Dr. Nearman told New Scientist, “For the most part, honeybees are livestock, so
beekeepers and breeders often selectively breed from colonies with desirable traits like disease resistance. In this case, it may be possible that selecting for the outcome of disease residence was an inadvertent selection for reduced lifespan among individual bees. Shorter-lived bees would reduce the probability of spreading diseases, so colonies with shorter-lived bees would appear healthier.”
Dr. Nearman reports that if genetic factors influencing lifespans can be isolated,
finding longer-lived bees could be the key to building back honeybees’ lifespans and improving honeybee colonies’ health.
So, how important are honeybees? It turns out that 87 of the leading 115
food crops depend on pollinators, and pollinators contribute more than $217 billion to the global economy and between $235 billion and $577 billion to the US. economy. Out of that, honeybees account for more than $15 billion in the U.S. because of the work they do to pollinate fruits, nuts, and vegetables used in our diets.
To learn more about pollinators, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a website called Honey. Check it out; it’s a sweet site.
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