Silence of the Bees

This past Sunday, PBS aired a fascinating, but at the same time, alarming episode of Nature called, "Silence of the Bees". For mysterious reasons, honeybees are disappearing around the world (researchers suspect a virus to be a likely culprit). In a part of China, for example, they vanished years ago, due to the overuse of pesticides. Now, pear farmers in China pollinate every pear tree blossom by hand. It is an excruciatingly tedious process, and nowhere near as efficient as the bees' work. The program estimated that if honeybees became extinct in the United States, it would cost 90 million dollars a year for humans to pollinate crops and flowers. And even with technology, nothing can pollinate better than a bee. This is yet another example of the goods and services that Mother Nature provides, scott free, that are actually worth millions and millions of dollars. If honeybees disappear, everything that depends on them will be drastically affected, from the crops we consume to livestock that depend on crops. And don't forget the honey.

Honeybees are fascinating creatures. Here are just a few fun facts about the bees and their honey:

• Honey is antibacterial and will never spoil...when King Tut's tomb was uncovered, the honey within it was still good!
  
• Honey is 25% sweeter than table sugar
• Honey speeds the healing of open wounds and combats infections
• Once the bees have regurgiated honey into the honeycomb, they evaporate the water in it by fanning their wings over the cells
• Honeybees stroke their wings over 11,000 times a minute when they fly
  
• To communicate to the hive where a good feeding site is, a bee will do a "dance", showing the bees directions to the site through the "dance moves"
• 80% of the pollination of fruits, vegetables, and seed crops in the United States is due to honey bees
• Worker bees (the ones that do all the pollinating) are all female
• Honeybees have five eyes
• An average beehive can hold up to 50,000 honeybees