Hi, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new house Stuff Works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, and everywhere else that fine podcasts are found. Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. When you bring up bees in social conversations, do your friends inevitably start talking
about killer bees and oh how scary they are? Do they make jokes about that awful Wickerman remake with Nicholas Cage being all like, not the bees? Next time? Tell them this. What we should really be worried about is where the hell all our bees are going? Since two thousand six, honey bees have been disappearing too quickly to guarantee their long term survival. That's right, honey bees may go extinct. Just in two thousand fifteens winter, twenty of
the honeybee population disappeared. Let me tell you why you should care. The United States alone relies on the domesticated European honeybee to pollinate one third of its food supply. We're talking apples, peaches, almonds, lettuce, broccoli, cranberries, squash, melons, and blueberries. Here, people, that's fifteen billion dollars in crops every year. Not only are bees crucial to our nutrition,
they're important to our agricultural economy. Our farm system relies on honey bees as part of its huge engineered production process. Unlike tractors or combines, honey bees are living creatures that are susceptible to biological vulnerabilities like parasites, viruses, and climate conditions. If this army of bees we've manufactured gets sick and dies off, what are we going to do? This record number of bee disappearances is referred to as colony collapse disorder.
According to the U s d A. The losses were first reported by beekeepers in two thousand and six, with thirty ton of their hives being hit. It's also called disappearing disease because we're not finding bee corpses poof, They're just gone. Worker bees specifically are disappearing, leaving behind the queen and a few male drones. They're still honey in the hive, but without the worker bees, the colony eventually dies. Bees have disappeared like this in the past, but never
this widespread. There's no evidence of predators eating these bees, and be diseases with creepy names like chalk brewed and foul brewed don't seem to be the culprit either. The bees come from different suppliers, and their keepers use different methods to both feed them and control pests like mites in their hives. However, moths and other bees are known to avoid affected empty hives for days. Aside mine that the bees may have died from disease or chemical contamination.
The total effects of colony collapse disorder are staggering. We've gone from five million bee colonies in the nineteen forties to only two point five million today. Let me do the math for you. That's half our bees gone and vanished. With our modern agricultural needs, hives have to pollinate more than ever before. If losses continue at their current rate, it will threaten the economic viability of the entire bee pollination industry. The cost of honey, bees and honey will rise,
increasing the cost of the foods they pollinate. We won't starve, but we'll probably get scurvy or some other kind of vitamin deficiency disorder. The scariest part is that we can't nail down a cause for all these disappearing bees. There are dozens of potential answers. Maybe the process of transporting bees long distances stressing them out, weakening their immune system, and exposing them to pathogens that are affect their ability
to navigate. Veroa and tracheal mites are known to feed on bees by sucking out their vital fluids, and it's possible they're exposing them to an unknown virus. Or what if there isn't enough genetic diversity among honey bees, making them susceptible to a widespread disease we don't know about yet. Researchers are looking at everything from pesticides to particularly cold winters and a scarcity of clean water as contributors. It
could also be a combination of causes. For instance, what if something makes colonies more susceptible the fungicides or pathogens. Scientists even investigated the possibility that the electromagnetic energy in cordless phones was causing colony collapse disorder, though this has
since been widely discounted. On May nine, a new theory was proposed in the bulletin of Insectology Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found evidence that a class of insecticide called neo nicotinoids were significantly harming bee colonies
during cold winters, possibly by impairing their neurological functions. The levels of pathogens and parasite levels were the same across the studies research and control groups, suggesting that the insecticides are not making the bees more susceptible to disease or mites. These neo nicotinoids are used to increase the stability of crops like corn. The European Union banned the most widely used of these in but they're still in use in America.
Further research is required to pinpoint what exactly these insecticides are doing two bees check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.