In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the bee is responsible for 80 per cent of that pollination, according to the US Department of Agriculture(USDA).
While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, nothing that large-scale bee die-offs thave happend before, this one seems particularty baffing and alarming. Us beekeepers in the past fes months have lost one-quater of thier colonies-or about five times the normal winter losses-becuase of what scientists chave dubbed "colony collapse disorder". The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 staes, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada adn parts of Europe.
A congresional study said bees add about $15 billion a year in value to the US food supply.
The top suspects are a parasite, an unknow virus, some kind of bacteria, epsticiddes, or a one-tow combination of the top four, with one weakening the bee and the second killing it.
Sientists finished mapping the bee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complment of genes that take poisosns out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of gens to fight tosins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum. What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins", Berenbaum said.
There were reports of something like this in the US in sprts in 2004 and Germany had something similar in 2004.