▶ Sung Ho Woo, Whitney High School 10th Grade
Many people are well informed that bees help pollinate various sectors of the environment and are vastly important to the overall ecosystem.
However, most people do not credit the bees for all the work they do, involving a major aspect of human life: food.
Everyday people digest whole,raw, and organic food substances that require sugar, or a type of honey extract to add in flavor that our taste buds have grown quite accustomed to.
Recently, there has been a bee crisis called the Colony Collapse Disorder in which entire colonies of bee shave suddenly died in a relatively short amount of time. Beekeepers were so baffled that they contacted local science departments to find out what was causing this disaster. Scientists were shocked after they thoroughly investigated the issue. In short, the bees were sick and debilitated. The main problem was that no one knew why. What was the reason for this illness pervading the entire bee colonies in question? Experts believe that it is due to a multitude of reasons, mainly involving stress commercial bees were forcefully moved from state to state to pollinate without any delays or breaks. In a sense, they were undergoing too much labor due to unnatural human intervention.
Another theory that is correlated with this involves the frequent use of pesticides. Because there is more food from pollination, it means more pesticides. There is a long debate involving whether pesticides are necessary or not, and it can go on forever, but the disturbing fact here is that bees are actually becoming affected by the chemical involvement of pesticides that are used on a grander scale. If this continues, then we may have to localize the bee population so that they are not as frequently exposed to industrial and commercial pesticides. In addition, we may have to determine realistic measures that allow the logistics of honey production to continue, in a humane and moral manner. In the end, scientists are still baffled by this phenomenon, but they believe that bees will never truly become extinct. Even still, it is a dilemma for our food chain because it is through this outbreak that humans have realized how reliant they actually are to bees.