One of the most underrated and impactful events of this year has had so little airtime, many people still remain unaware: bees have become officially endangered. More specifically, seven species of Hawaiian bees have become the first bee populations to be officially declared endangered (Science Alert, 2016).
While only Hawaiian species are currently officially labeled as in danger of extinction, this is a marker of a much larger issue facing the human race: 70% of the species of crops we eat are reliant on bee pollination, not to mention an immense proportion of uncultivated species of plants (BBC, 2016). Damage to a species that is integral to helping us meet the most basic of our biological needs will profoundly hurt the human race—and this problem isn't isolated in Hawaii, it's facing all of us.
This past August, residents of Dorchester County, SC woke the Sunday morning of the twenty-eighth to find that the Naled spraying earlier that morning, intended to eradicate Zika-carrying mosquitos, had ended the lives of over three million local honeybees. While the county administrator has assured the public they followed the manufacturer and state recommendations on the pesticide’s use so as to minimize the harm toward the bee population, regarding altered timing of the spray, the massive loss is undeniable (CNN, 2016).
Further jeopardizing the honeybees, the county failed to give the necessary notice to many local beekeepers of the impending aerial spray, which led to their being caught unawares, and the spray occurring at a particularly bad time for the honeybees who typically do their work during the very same early morning time frame.
What does this mean for South Carolina?
Hopefully, the Dorchester honeybee populations will be able to recover with time; the singular, isolated incident will likely not be apocalyptic for all bees. However, the fact remains that these populations have taken a heavy blow in a world where honeybees are both vital and fragile, vulnerable to human activity when we don’t often take the time to consider their necessity to our food production and biodiversity as a whole. In addition, beekeepers are dependent on their hives for income and livelihood, so in this case when some people lost as many as 46 hives in one blow, their subsistence is devastated; a small but important faction of the Dorchester population is now struggling and without recourse.
South Carolina may not yet be facing the certified crisis of Hawaii, but further incidents such as this may lead us there. This aerial spraying is not the only event of its nature, and it represents a larger and more troublesome lack of importance placed on the lives of bees despite how vital they remain for humanity to function as we do, and to prevent an alteration of nature that will not be fixable. In many theories and books and movies regarding the end of the world, the bees' disappearing is the first sign the apocalypse is growing near, and this is not without reason: the bees dying does not bode well for the success and livelihood of humans.
The bees are crucial to our way of life, and together these two recent events piece together a larger problem that will continue to grow until we as a society make bees, their habitats, and their ability to survive a priority.
#savethebees
