Lucas Soard- Finals Speech

We have a problem. You probably haven’t heard about it, but if you have, it was probably just in passing, and you've probably forgotten about it.  You may have seen the article headlines, “America’s Bees are dying? Why?” Who cares?

Why care about the bees? Bees are the bug that stung you while you were climbing that tree when you were ten. Bees are the thing you have to be careful of when you are mowing the lawn, bees are the things that produce honey. ‘Aw, well you’re just going to give a speech about honey’. You’re daily life probably won’t change with the absence of honey. But as director Markus Imhoof tries to tell us in his Oscar winning documentary, bees are much “More than Honey”.

The United States, according to the US House Agriculture committee, has a 14.6 Billion dollar bee industry per year, while some estimates go as high as 20 billion. Billion. With a “B”. (Get it. A “bee”? Never mind). Where does all this money come from, how are bees responsible for so much. The answer is pollination. We all know how pollination works. It’s basically plant sex. Except they can’t get it on without help. Some plants do this via the wind, but Bees pollinate any plant that flowers. Other insect do this too, but none are as effective as the bee. They go in search of the plant’s nectar, and pick up the pollen from that plant. When the bee next travels to a plant, the pollen is deposited, fertilizing what will become a seed. Any excess pollen is used as a protein reserve at the hive. Other insects can do this too, but not as effectively as bees. There are thousands of bees in a hive, and these are sent out daily to collect food for the hive. Just by sheer number alone, bees are more valuable to plants than any other animal. I’ll give the example that Imhoof does in “More than Honey”. He shows an almond orchard in California. California is responsible for 80% of the nation’s almonds, and a majority of the world’s. The owner of the orchard claims that his business is entirely dependent on bees, as in, he has no livelihood without them. He gets bees from a businessman, who owns thousands of hives worth in excess of $600,000. One man, and $600,000. Imhoof shows us a man who packs thousands of bee hives onto semi-trucks and ships them across the country.

A study I read said that bees are responsible for 1/3 of the food on our plates. They are valuable not only to the plants that we eat, but also to those that feed the animals we eat.

Hopefully, by now, you realize how important bees are to our lives. But these bees are dying and scores. Why? I don’t know. Really. Imhoof tells us the problem but really fails to tell us what to do. The problem is, there is no problem, there are multiple problems. These multiple theories and reasons for bee death are collectively known as CCD. One study I read over the summer said that a disease called Israeli Acute parasite Disease or IAPV. I sat terrified as I read the scientific study, thinking the bees were cured and I would have to forget about my bibliography. But the bees kept dying. A major cause of death for bees can be our growing cities, who take out the plants that bees need to live, and spewing out pollution that can kill hives. (Imhoof takes us to China, where people have to be hired to do the job the now nearly extinct bees can no longer do.) Varroa mites are a common killer of bees, growing on their bodies as parasties, but this doesn’t explain the absence of bodies with in a hive. An article on snopes.com claimed that GMO cornfields can’t be blamed for over 37 million bee deaths in Canada despite the widespread belief that they were. The Canadian Beekeeper’s Association blames certain pesticides. 

The point is, we don’t really know. All we know is that the bees are dying, and we haven’t stopped it yet. These small insects in their large numbers, despite what you would guess, are truly important to us.

Works cited:

·        Jacobsen, Rowan. Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print

·        Maori, E., and N. Paldi. "IAPV, a bee-affecting virus associated with

Colony Collapse Disorder can be silenced by dsRNA ingestion." Insect Molecular Biology 18: 55-60. Web. 29 June      2014.

·        More Than Honey. Dir. Markus Imhoof. , 2012. Film.

·        San Martin, Gilles. A Varroa mite on a honey bee pupa. Digital image. Michigan Beekeepers Association. N.p., 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 1 July 2014. 

·        vanEngelsdorp, Dennis, and Niko Speybroeck, et al. "Weighing Risk Factors Associated With Bee Colony Collapse Disorder by Classi     fication and Regression Tree Analysis." JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 103: 1517-1523. Web. 29 June 2014.