bees

The TV is on pretty much all the time here. Today I had some TV time to myself, during which time I discovered the National Geographic Asia channel. To celebrate ten years of “Nat Geo in Asia”, they were counting down the top 30 documentaries. The one I saw was about how bees are disappearing. CCD is what it’s called—Colony Collapse Disorder. Basically a third of the food we eat and something like 70% of the plant life out there depends on bees for pollination (and thus reproduction), and for a variety of reasons bee populations in various countries including the U.S., France, and possibly England experienced massive decreases last winter (I assume they meant 2006-07?). Here in Sichuan, China, the town of Hanyuan has no bees at all because a couple decades ago they killed them all using pesticides. Hanyuan provides something like 80% of the pears in the region, and they way they do this, now that there are no bees, is by hand-pollination by humans. It’s extremely labor-intensive, and unsustainable—with people increasingly moving to the cities nowadays hand-pollination probably won’t be a viable option in ten or fifteen years.