By Lily Fraser

Honey bees seem like an awful insect because of their stingers, but they’re actually extremely important for the environment and human life.

The honeybee is now officially on the endangered species list, which means human life is at risk.

Human society is extremely complex and fragile, and holding up the lifestyle is the honeybee. One-third of the meals eaten by humans are made possible by bees. Honeybees are so important that if they died out, several thousands of plants would fall out of human consumption.

Bees have a huge economic impact. The dollar value from bees is close to $265 billion every year from the crops they pollinate. The food we take advantage of would stop existing, causing a huge decrease in productivity. According to writer Christina Sarich, from the Natural Society, “while we don’t need bees to pollinate every single crop, here’s just a brief list of some of the foods we would lose if all of our bees continue to perish,” listing 92 different fruits, vegetables, and plants such as apples, mangos, peaches, avocados, lima beans, coffee beans, cactus, cashews, cotton, cherries, watermelon, broccoli, beets, brussel sprouts, cocoa, vanilla, and 72 others.  

It sounds unsettling, but honey bees are truly starting to disappear. Millions of hives have died in the last few years. Beekeepers around the world have seen an annual loss of 30-90% of hives. In the U.S., bees are steadily declining from 5 million hives in 1998, to 2.5 million in 2015. Since 2006, a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder has affected honey bees in many countries and scientists don’t exactly know what’s causing it. All they know is that it’s pretty serious.

Over the past few decades, bees have been visited by dangerous parasites such as Acarapis woodi, a microscopic mite that infects the tracheae (the breathing tube) of bees. They lay their eggs and feed from the fluids of their victims which causes them to become weak and spending their whole life inside of bees.

Another parasite goes by the name of Varroa destructor, a perfect name for this mite. They can only reproduce in honeybee hives and lay eggs on the bee larva before the bee is about to pupate and before the hive bees cover the cell with a wax covering. The eggs hatch and the baby mites and their mother feed on the developing bee in the safety of the covered cell. The bees don’t die, they just become weakened (still has enough energy to chew through the covering and release itself from the cell). As the bee unveils itself, the mother mite and her new offspring escape from the cell and are free to spread across the hive, restarting the process over again in a cycle of 10 days. Their numbers grow increasingly fast after a few months which can lead to a total collapse of a bee hive. Even worse, these mites can also transmit viruses that harm the bees even more and can lead to birth defects such as useless wings.

In Hawaii, beekeeping is huge to the community. Since the state has many sweet fruits and vegetables, they depend on the bees’ pollination almost more than other states. But, Varroa destructor mites have been found on bees in Hawaii. Back in 2007, the mite was first discovered on the bees, and now it was spread quickly throughout the Hawaiian bees.

There are threats such as viruses and fungi that can harm honey bees, but even these threats are not enough to explain why the horrendous amount of bees are dying at an alarming rate.  

Over the years, new insecticides have been introduced that are deadly to bees. Neonicotinoids, a chemical similar to nicotine, was approved in the early 1990s as an alternative to chemicals like or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane, or DDT for short, a synthetic organic compound used as an insecticide. Neonicotinoids attack the insects by harming their nervous systems. To this day, they are the most widely used type of  insecticide in the world. In 2013, neonicotinoids were used in the U.S. on about 95% of corn and canola crops, as well as the vast majority of fruit and vegetable crops such as apples, cherries, peaches, oranges, berries, leafy greens, tomatoes, potatoes, cereal grains, rice, nuts, grapes, and many more. Bees get in contact with the toxin while collecting pollen or via contaminated water, bringing material into the hive where the poison can spread and slowly kill the whole colony.

The toxins harm the bees in a variety of ways. In high enough doses, it quickly leads to convulsions, paralysis, and death. Even in small doses, it can still be fatal. It may lead to bees forgetting how to navigate the world, so bees fly into the wild, get lost, and die alone, separated from their hives. If it happens often enough, a hive can lose its ability to sustain itself.

There are even more factors contributing to the demise of bees, like too much genetic uniformity, crop monocultures, poor nutrition due to overcrowding, stress because of human activities, and other pesticides. Each of these factors on its own is a major problem for bees, but together, they probably account for colony collapse disorder. With parasites upping their game in the recent decades, the honeybee is now fighting for survival. It would be a catastrophe if they lost the fight.

Beekeepers around the south-eastern U.S. fear a new threat to their livelihood; a fine mist beaded with neurotoxins, sprayed from the sky by officials with mosquitos that carry the Zika virus. South Carolina beekeepers found millions of dead honey bees carpeting their fields, killed by the insecticide. An estimated 2.5 million bees were killed. At Clemson University,  Dr. Mike Weyman said that though South Carolina has strict rules about protecting pollinators, county officials were using the neurotoxin called Naled.

Humanity is deeply interconnected with the earth and the other lifeforms on it, even if humans think they can have a strong and independent life without bees, but the human race is at risk. Humans around the world have to take better care of their surroundings, if not to preserve the beauty of nature, then at least to ensure their own survival.