The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees: A Scientific Mystery
It's a Mystery On a warm day in October 2006 Dave Hackenberg went to check on his workers Hackenberg is a beekeeper and his workers are millions of honeybees As he walked among a group of nearly four hundred beehives he expected to see the air full of bees It wasn't Curious Hackenberg lifted the cover of one hive and peeked inside Three weeks earlier when he drove this group of beehives to Florida from Pennsylvania each hive was home to about thirty thousand bees Now he found only the bee colony's egg laying queen and her brood developing young inside the hive Thousands of worker bees were missing
Worried Hackenberg checked dozens more hives He discovered they were nearly empty too But there weren't any dead bees to be found inside the hives or on the ground around the hives In his fifty years as a beekeeper Hackenberg had never seen anything quite like this What had happened to all the bees
If Honeybees Are in Trouble We're in Trouble Having insects such as honeybees vanish may not seem like a big deal but it is Without honeybees you could be limited to eating oats rice and corn These foods come from plants that use wind to move their pollen male reproductive cells to their ovules female reproductive cells The process of transferring pollen is called pollination It has to happen for a plant to produce seeds parts that contain an embryo or baby plant That's how the plant produces more of its own kind of plant The wind pollinates some plants But birds bats and insects especially bees pollinate many more Honeybees in particular are needed in order to grow apples raspberries watermelon almonds and cucumbers to name just a few These are some of the foods you can enjoy thanks to
Honeybees depend on plants just as plants depend on bees Many plants produce nectar a sweet liquid to attract bees and other pollinators Bees gather this liquid as food The nectar's scent attracts bees to a plant Many flowers are also colored to signal that they contain nectar The flowers are shaped to make sure that visiting honeybees will spread pollen in return for the food To reach nectar a worker bee usually has to burrow into a flower The bee brushes past the flower's male parts where it collects pollen and the female parts containing the plant's ovules The bee picks up pollen this way and also drops off a little pollen often from another flower To form a seed the ovules and the pollen must be from the same kind of plant Fortunately honeybees tend to visit only one kind of plant during a nectar collecting flight And each flower produces just a few drops of nectar a day So during each flight a bee visits as many as four hundred flowers That's a lot of pollination
