The life of bees has been cut in half in the last 50 years, a possible explanation for the abrupt fall in the productivity of the colonies, the problems of pollination in forests, mountains and fields, and an ecological crisis that can have serious consequences for the food chain.
The authors of a study published in the journal new scientist they removed pupae from a colony to rear in an incubator and then kept the adults in captivity. Those specimens lived an average of 18 days, as opposed to the 34 that had been recorded in a similar work from the 1970s.
With shorter life spans, bees spend less time collecting pollen and nectar from flowers, resulting in fewer honey reserves to help them survive the following spring. When producers open the hives, they often find losses of up to 40%, much more than in previous decades.
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In 2018, a massive death of hives in the Traslasierra area meant the loss of some 50 million bees: 60% of local production. The harvesters blamed the pool of companies that had surrounded them with lots of wheat, sorghum, corn and soybeans. As bees can travel up to four kilometers in search of food, the fumigated fields have directly affected them. The monoculture that wipes out the native species that feed these insects completed a complex picture.
Two decades ago there were almost 3.5 million registered hives in the country; today they dropped to two million. Between 2010 and 2018, 73% of the producers were lost. “Where there is soybean there is no beekeeping, because it is planted right up to the shoulders,” he explained three years ago to the magazine brando Alexander Martin, member of the Argentine Society of Beekeepers. “Initial fumigation of herbicides is done, which kills the flowers, and then insecticides are used, which kill the bee. If she doesn’t die poisoned, she dies of hunger.”
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It is a global problem. Some scientists describe a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Syndrome: when the workers disappear, the food reserves for the queen and her young begin to drop. Some die, others refuse to eat and the colony enters a torpor that ends in disappearance. The domino effect can be terrible.: bees pollinate 77% of the plants that produce the food resources of the entire planet. All the almonds depend on his work, 90% of the apples and blueberries, 47% of the peaches and 27% of the citrus fruits.
Some of the proposals to avoid the definitive collapse are the reduction of the use of agrochemicals crops, crop rotation and the installation of forest curtains between fields and mountains, but above all the policies that promote forms of production that do not destroy crucial plants and trees for the survival of hundreds of species.
AM FM
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