The Melting Honeybees

By Mickey Friedman
June 10, 2015

I’ve never been able to juggle. One ball’s going up, another is headed down, and another is suspended for a moment in space. Too confusing and the balls invariably fall from the sky and bonk me in the head.

And now this morning thinking about what to write about my mind is doing pretty much the same thing – boggling, as one idea is joined by another. I blame Twitter. I follow all these different news organizations and social and political groups, not to mention all the sportswriters and comedians who I can’t blame for today’s dilemma. All these people have things to say and stories they want me to read and things they think I should be thinking about. It’s like a nonstop Associated Press wire.

You probably don’t even know what that is, unless you’ve worked for a newspaper or seen an old movie about newspapers. But once upon a time there were teletype machines clacking in every newsroom with the latest stories from around the world, written by AP or United Press International reporters. Occasionally a big boat would sink or an airplane crashed or a king was killed and then the wire-room attendant would have to cut the story and rush like a maniac to give it to the highest ranking editor in the room. And if was big, really big, someone would yell “Stop the presses!” Maybe Cary Grant or Clark Gable.

In many ways Twitter is just a glorified digital AP wire, with tweety feeds coming from anyone who thinks he or she has something to say.

Anyway, today’s tweetstorm started for me with NASA and the melting Antarctic. The extraordinary Larsen B Ice Shelf which you can see amazing photos of, grand and imposing. Well, it could be done. Gone. Not in a century. Not in fifty years but …

According to Ala Khazendar of NASA: “Although it’s fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it’s bad news for our planet. This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone … likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs before the end of the decade.”

That’s the Antarctic in the deep south. Turns out the ice near Chile is also in trouble. The website Quartz told me, “In the last five years, the peninsula has been melting at a rapid clip, sending 300 trillion liters of melted glacier into the ocean—what you’d get if you filled the Empire State Building with water and dumped it into the sea 350,000 times.”

Stuff like this you really want to absorb.

Which I would have if it wasn’t for the honeybees. Lately I’ve been baking and when you bake you begin to realize how sugar is ever-present and everywhere. White sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar. If you want to use less sugar you turn to honey and maple syrup. Buy honey and your brain might just remind you about honeybees. Which is very problematic. Because as a tweet from the Huffington Post about a Reuters report schooled me:

“Honey bees, critical agents in the pollination of key U.S. crops, disappeared at a staggering rate over the last year, according to a new government report that comes as regulators, environmentalists and agribusinesses try to reverse the losses.

“Losses of managed honey bee colonies hit 42.1 percent from April 2014 through April 2015, up from 34.2 percent for 2013-2014.”

Colony collapse disorder. So I’m thinking honeybees and before I know it Twitter transitioned me from the Huffington Post to the UK Guardian, and I’m reading about the latest honeybee response from Washington: “The White House has announced an ambitious plan to ‘promote the health of honeybees and other pollinators’ in the United States in a bid to help reverse a worrying trend that has seen the honeybee population fall by half over the last seven decades.

“It includes making millions of acres of federal land more bee-friendly, an explicit ambition to increase the population of the monarch butterfly, and the provision of millions of dollars to be spent on research.”

Zippety-doo-dah … Yes indeedy … Except that … “the plan announced on Tuesday falls short in one capacity that has environmental groups up in arms. It does not ban the use of any form of toxic pesticides, despite a large body of scientific research showing many of them – specifically neonicotinoids, or ‘neonics’ – to be closely linked to widespread bee life loss.”

Maybe the White House is confused about the science or maybe there’s no real evidence. Except that: “Last year, research emerged from Harvard University showing that when colonies of honeybees were exposed to neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticide around the world, half of them died.”

So when is bee-friendly not really bee-friendly.

Bye-bye Larsen. Bye-bye bees. Which is why I’m writing a column about the melting honeybees.

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For more information:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/13/bees-disappearing_n_7273862.html

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/13/honeybee-deaths-colonies-beekeepers

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/19/white-house-plan-honeybees-pollinators-pesticides?utm_

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/12/3657633/study-sea-level-rise-accelerating/

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-study-shows-antarctica-s-larsen-b-ice-shelf-nearing-its-final-act