In August 2020, Italian media reported that 4 million bees died in an area of about six kilometers between , Brescia and Cremona in northern Lombardy, according to local beekeepers. Even with their experience, they have never seen such a large-scale bee death!
"If bees disappear from the earth, humans will only survive for another 4 years. Without bees, no pollination, no plants, no animals, there would be no humans."
Instein never said this,
, is it familiar? But flower growers want to tell you that Einstein never said this, but there seems to be some truth. This article uses this as an argument to see if humans would really be extinct without bees?
If there were no bees, what would human life be like?
In our impression, the hardworking bees provide us with honey, but in fact the honey made by bees is just a by-product of their contribution to nature! Because bees are very important to dioecious flowering plants! Because the flowers need to pollinate at the same time that they gather pollen when they gather nectar, if there is no pollination, then the consequences are predictable, only flowers will not bear fruit!
And most of the fruits and vegetables we eat are flowering plants. Even if they are leafy greens, they need to bear seeds before the next round of planting, otherwise the stored seeds will be used up and the vegetables will be extinct According to statistics from agricultural experts, more than 85% of the world’s crops require insect pollination. This insect vector includes bats and insects (including bees).
Which of the staple foods of mankind need to be pollinated?
People take food as their heaven,No matter how advanced civilization on the earth needs food to support its development, staple food crops are especially important. Vegetables can be overcome for a while, but staple food cannot be overcome. According to statistics, the global staple food crops rice, wheat and barley, Corn, etc., their pollination methods are as follows:
Among them, grains are mainly pollinated by wind, such as rice and wheat. The flowers are very small, not suitable for insect pollination, and the density is high. Blowing can pollinate between rice, while corn is more interesting. Its flower is at the top and corn is in the middle. It can be pollinated by dividing and dropping.
Sweet potatoes and potatoes do not need to be pollinated, because they are tubers, and they are propagated through seedlings. Pollination is only needed when crossing. The main pollination is beans, such as broad beans.
From this point of view, bees do not seem to have a major impact on human staple food crops, because most of them do not rely on insect vectors, so the disappearance of bees will have little impact on humans? Obviously not, at least we can't eat fruits so happily, because most fruits are pollinated by insects, bees disappear, production decreases, and prices skyrocket. Can you bear it? And it is far from that, because the bees still affect an ecology!
For example, in the above data, 85% of crops require insect-borne pollination, and the number of pollination of plants other than crops is even higher. During the process of flowering and fruiting, there will be a large number of insects parasitizing and multiplying. In the back, a large number of birds and animals make a living on this, forming a long ecological chain.
If bees disappear, although there are insects and bats for pollination, but in fact bees pollinate the majority of them, their disappearance will create a gap in this ecology, which in turn will affect the impact of such plants on the earth Flowering and bearing fruit and seeds spread and multiply. After this batch of plant diseases and insect pests die, there will be no replacement. A large-scale reduction is inevitable.
How serious is the environmental problem,Will bees really go extinct?
Bees are critical to the ecology, but bees have died on a large scale worldwide. For example, millions of bees died in Italy in August 2020, and such cases are not rare. For example, in August 2019, Brazil had The death of hundreds of millions of bees is even more shocking!
Colony Collapse Syndrome ( Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD )
From 1971 to 2006, the wild bee colony in the United States has been rare and reduced significantly. Since 2006, bee colonies in some states in the United States, Europe and Australia have suddenly disappeared, and there are no dead bodies, and the scale is far beyond the speed of natural elimination. In addition, according to statistics, the mortality rate of bee colonies in the United States after 2006 exceeds 30%, while the bee mortality rate in my country was only 9% during the same period.
In September 2018, a paper published on PNAS showed that glyphosate may be a key factor among them. This pesticide can cause confusion in the gut microbiota of bees, and then affect it The health of bees and their effectiveness as an insect vector.
Since the introduction of glyphosate in the 1970s, the current global usage is close to 10 million tons. The mechanism of glyphosate weeding is to destroy important enzymes needed in the metabolism of shikimic acid in plants and microorganisms However, animals do not have this metabolic pathway, so glyphosate has always been considered harmless to animals.
But in fact, when the bees are sprayed with glyphosate, the number of beneficial bacteria in the intestines of the bees is drastically reduced, which reduces the health of the bees and is very easy to die in the fierce competition for survival in nature ,Insecticides that have always been considered harmless indirectly kill bees.
Andres Arce, an evolutionary ecologist at Imperial College London, believes, “This study is to observe the trend of complex interactions between animals and their microbiomes, and to understand that these interactions are essential for regulating the use and quantification of pesticides. Reducing the impact on nature is essential."
Pharmaceutical giant Bayer believes that there is no direct evidence that the death of bees is related to glyphosate. Of course, as a direct beneficiary pharmaceutical company, admitting that it is related is like killing a hen that lays a golden egg!
The glyphosate herbicide Roundup , which came out in 1974, is Monsanto’s flagship product. This is a highly effective and broad-spectrum herbicide and the world’s most popular pesticide. Its most powerful feature is that it can eliminate almost all green plants, but it has no substantial side effects on animals, water quality and soil, and is easily degraded, so it is widely used.
2015 World Health Organization 's International Institute of Cancer (IARC) released a research report that the pesticide glyphosate may cause cancer. The report stated that “sufficient evidence” indicates that glyphosate is a carcinogen in laboratory animals; and “limited evidence” indicates that glyphosate may cause cancer in humans.”
Monsanto has been Suffering multiple lawsuits, in September 2018, a jury in the California court found that school gardener Dewayne Johnson was awarded $78 million in compensation for glyphosate causing his cancer. Strong91strong March 2019, A jury in the Federal Court of San Francisco, California ruled that Monsanto should pay Edwin Hardman US$80 million (later reduced to more than US$25 million). Since then, the United States has sued Monsanto for glyphosate in 11,000 cases.
On June 24, 2020, German pharmaceutical giant Bayer announced that it would pay Strong91strong US$10.9 billion to solve the weeding of its subsidiary Monsanto (in 2018, Bayer bought Monsanto for US$66 billion). Lawsuit initiated by the agent Roundup (Roundup) . Among them, US$8.8 billion to US$9.6 billion are used to settle existing lawsuits, and US$1.25 billion is used to pay for possible future lawsuits.
On September 4, 2019, the German Cabinet approved the "Insect Protection Action Plan" proposed by Environment Minister Svenja Schulze on the 4th, and decided to ban the use of herbicide grass from December 31, 2023 Glyphosate. Of course this is a good start, but what about the future?
Is there only glyphosate?
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the residues of two common nicotine pesticides (used to prevent and control pests and diseases of vegetables, fruits and food crops) can also cause damage to bees. The sugar supply in the bees will be affected. In a sub-healthy state, it is more likely to die in the harsh environment of the wild.
There are as many as 1500 types of pesticides used in modern agriculture, 300 of which are the most commonly used. Scientists can’t identify them one by one. New pesticides are put into use every year, so this is definitely a bottomless pit of ecological hazards!
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