Hungry Bees = Hungry People
Starvation Effect
Have you ever been hungry?
So hungry that you can’t think right. You find yourself settling for the quickest solution without concern for the effects and normally it’s some sort of nutrient deficient junk. That junk will give you enough energy to stabilize your hormones and do a minimal amount of work but that option is really only available to you since you are a person.
Now imagine if you were a bee.
Do you know of bee grocery stores? I don’t and I do know that bees normally do quite a bit of work in a day that would require a constant supply of quality nutrients. Not to mention they don’t have bee doctors to provide medicine for any illness they might suffer due to the lack of those quality nutrients.
Why does this matter?
Well it’s pretty simple actually bees have been reported to pollinate up to 1/3 of our produce. A Cornell University study estimates that bees are responsible for pollinating $14 billion in seeds and crops of the US alone. Sounds like we would be pretty hungry without our industrious little friends.
Whats the problem?
Bees are not getting enough healthy food. To be more specific they are not getting enough of a dietary diversity. Remember that 
ridiculous food pyramid you were shown as a kid, of course now you know that being healthy requires a little more than that simple construct. Our bees need just as many viable resources for a healthy immune system in order to effectively do what they do best, pollinate.
How can we do anything?
There isn’t one simple answer but there are a few ideas going around that would at least get us moving in the right direction. One suggested idea from our founder Walter Schumacher is a bee co-op, where individual land owners would be able to have their own bee colony. The idea is that the bees would then be provided a greater biodiversity in their diet along with some separation between the populations to reduce the number of casualties from an outbreak.
Let’s recap real quick, bees help pollinate a lot of our food. Bees are dropping dead from sickness all around the world and one suspected cause is lack of nutritional biodiversity. So if bees are starving then eventually the cost of our produce will increase meaning it will become more expensive to acquire certain types of food. Sounds like pretty simple math to me bee starvation = human starvation.
If you could spend a little extra money today to save a ton of money tomorrow would you not do that? Lets look at the bigger picture. A simple donation today could help our organization fund projects to effectively create a network of stabilized bee populations that would allow for healthy affordable produce for generations to come. I am not asking you to sacrifice or abstain from any of your common pleasures only to invest into the future of our planet. The Central Texas Bee Rescue is grateful for your consideration.
Cited references:
http://www.mnn.com/local-reports/pennsylvania/local-blog/the-importance-of-honeybees
