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  • A single honey bee weighs just a tenth of a gram, but a beehive is worth more than its

  • weight in gold.

  • Crops pollinated by bees are worth $215 billion worldwide, and they provide us with 75% of

  • the fruits, veggies, and nuts we eat. Their pollinating services are worth at least

  • $24 billion to U.S. farmers, but that's probably an underestimate.

  • Bees also pollinate the coffee plant. That might be the most critical job on Earth.

  • One could say that bees are the bee's knees.

  • To say that bees are important would be like saying Beyonce is a pretty good singer. Incidentally,

  • she has a bee-impersonating fly named after her.

  • When people talk about bee death, they're usually talking about the European honey bee.

  • Cue the bee roll please. This one species is basically a domesticated

  • animal, just like cows, sheep, or chickens, taken from the wild, put in a box, and used

  • to harvest honey and pollinate crops.

  • Each winter, it's normal for a small fraction of colonies to die off, but between 1947 and

  • 2005 US beekeepers lost nearly half their bees. By 2006 beekeepers were reporting losses

  • as high as 90% and this honey bee apocalypse was given a name: Colony Collapse Disorder.

  • Talk about a buzz kill-- "Too soon!"

  • A hive that falls victim to CCD is like a ghost town: no adult worker bees, the honey

  • and immature young left behindit's pretty much just a lonely queen wandering around

  • like her friends stranded her at a party.

  • But honey bees' wild, solo-living cousins are in trouble too.

  • It's estimated that over the past 120 years, as many as half of all wild bee species have

  • gone extinct.

  • Bee die-offs have been reported as far back as 1868, but as far as we know they've never

  • happened on this scale before. And we're not entirely sure what's causing it.

  • Pesticides are one of the likely culprits, particularly a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids.

  • Feeding on neonic-tainted food can be deadly to bees, and even at nonlethal doses bees

  • can lose the ability to communicate and forage.

  • In some places, there's just not as many flowers as there used to be. Like humans,

  • bees do best when they eat a balanced diet from many different sources. Thanks to habitat

  • loss, we're giving them a buffet with just a few choices, and it's definitely notall

  • you can eat”.

  • Just because they're small doesn't mean bees can't get sick. When a colony is weakened

  • by pesticides or lack of food, they become more vulnerable to viruses, parasites, and

  • all kinds of other infections.

  • Like these blood-sucking mites, which, judging from their name I'm guessing are pretty

  • bad. These bacteria can turn larvae into liquid. And these parasites lay eggs inside the bees'

  • breathing tubes, suffocating them to death.

  • Turns out some bees are naturally resistant to some of these infections, so scientists

  • are trying to breed entire colonies that can fight off these microscopic horrors.

  • According to a 2015 study in the journal Science, it's likely that instead of one culprit,

  • bee declines are being driven by a perfect storm of troubles: pesticides, habitat loss,

  • and infections.

  • But there are possible solutions, and all of us can do our part.

  • We can plant more flowers in more places, reduce the use of pesticides, keep out invasive

  • species, and take better care of our wild bees.

  • Most of all, we all need to keep an eye on our relationship with nature, in the garden

  • or in the grocery store. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck wrote in 1901,

  • "You will probably more than once have seen her fluttering about the bushes, in a deserted

  • corner of your garden, without realizing that you were carelessly watching the venerable

  • ancestor to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and fruits, and possibly even our

  • civilization."

  • As William Shakespeare once said, to bee or not to bee. To bee.

  • Stay curious.

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