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You are here: home   Writers on the Range   We can help bees by cleaning up our act
 
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Writers on the Range

We can help bees by cleaning up our act

Writers on the Range - September 04, 2009 by Jodi Peterson
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Over the last four years, millions of the West's workers have vanished. No, they're not immigrants deported back to Mexico. Rather, they're honeybees, and no one's sure where they've gone. Scientists have been baffled by the large-scale disappearances, but now there's finally some good news: Recent research has identified at least three of the major contributors to what's known as "colony collapse disorder." Honeybees pollinate nearly one-third of the food we eat, from almonds to avocados, cherries to celery, and their work adds about $15 billion to the annual value of U.S. agriculture, according to a congressional study. But in Western states from California to Montana, thousands of hives have gone quiet. They contain larvae and honey but very few adult bees, and that decline bodes ill for our food supply. In China, hive collapse has forced some farmers to start pollinating fruit trees -- by hand -- with

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