The more we learn about bees, the more we appreciate them
If you could hear the buzzing of all the bees in the world, you would hear less of it now than you would have a few years ago. The reason is simple: There are far fewer bees to do the buzzing.
Bees have been dying off at a shocking rate — the six million bee colonies in the US in 1947 were down to 2.5 million in 2007 and still falling. In the winter of 2018–19, about 40 percent of the country’s honeybees died.
But what caused it is a mystery. For no apparent reason, the worker bees, who keep the colony going, just got up and went. They just disappeared without a trace.
The first step in solving the mystery was to give it a name, of course. Scientists called it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), because whole colonies (each with thousands of bees) were collapsing all at once. The worker bees were abandoning the hive, leaving behind the queen, the brood, and some nurse bees to care for the baby bees. Without the worker bees though, the remaining bees would die.
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