In my last post, I discussed the depressing prospect of the dying bee population and how that would impact us as a whole. For this post, I will discuss what exactly is happening to cause the bees to die off in such vast numbers.
Yesterday, one of our founders at Bee Champions, Steven Daniels, forwarded another article to me about the bee losses in America, this time by the New York Times. The article goes into more depth about what is exactly killing off the bees, and discusses this with the men from Penn State University who are studying the sudden loss. They ended up reaching two conclusions: pesticides and varroa mites.
There was also another overarching disease that was spreading: Colony Collapse Disorder. Without a firm cause or consistent symptoms, they simply used this term to describe the collective sicknesses that the bees were dying from.
I will not rehash the findings in this post, as you can read them in the article itself. There is also a ten-minute video roughly halfway down the article that was absolutely fantastic, and I highly recommend that you take the time to watch it.
Click here to go to the article by the New York Times.
As illustrated in the video and in my previous post, you can do your part in preserving the bees! You can begin your backyard beekeeping experience by buying beekeeping equipment here and starting a new colony, or you can participate in the "Just Bee-Cause" Hive Sponsorship Program to contribute to sustainable bee research and population growth.
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