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"Honeybee populations in more than 20 states have mysteriously crashed. May Berenbaum, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies "colony collapse disorder" and its consequences.
There was a major decline in bee populations 20 years ago. Why is this more troubling?
In the '80s the cause was clear: the accidental introduction of a parasitic mite that saps honeybees of vitality. This time, the bees are simply disappearing. There are no dead bodies. It's as if they're not coming home. Among the hypotheses is that their navigation system is perturbed. Honeybees have an incredibly sophisticated system for finding floral nectar and pollen sources, providing directions to their nest mates to promising nectar and pollen sources, recruiting them to these sources, and having everybody come home safely. And that's not what appears to be happening.
What could be causing this?
Name something and it's been suspected. A British paper [suggested] that cellphone transmission is interfering with bee navigation. There's absolutely no evidence for it. People have also suggested jet contrails, wireless Internet, changes in the earth's magnetic field. More plausibly, high-fructose corn syrup, used to supplement honeybee diets, is not nutritionally very complete and has been shown to influence behavior. Some new pesticides that are known to affect behavior are in wider use, and those may be a factor. People are also suggesting a sort of multiple stress disorder.
Is this really a crisis?
It's a crisis on top of a crisis. [It had previously been projected that] commercial beekeeping [might] cease to exist in the United States by 2035—and that was before colony collapse disorder. And we can't count on wild pollinators because we've so altered the landscape that many are no longer viable.
It's not just about running out of honey?
Honey is trivial compared with the importance of pollination. The two-billion-dollar almond industry in California depends entirely on honeybees. Blueberries, melons, squashes—all kinds of crops rely heavily on honeybees. Over three-quarters of flowering plants—the foundations for most terrestrial food chains—depend on [honeybees and other animal] pollinators. Yet we know pathetically little about most of them.
Why can't we just pollinate these flowers ourselves?
First of all, we're talking about thousands of acres. Secondly, flowers are very complicated. They're designed to keep out inappropriate visitors. They don't want any visitor to be able to take pollen away, so it's not a simple problem of dusting an orchard with pollen and hoping it gets to tiny stigmatic surface of the flower where it needs to go in order to fertilize the female cells."
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/june/interview.php
Mais aqui: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder