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Silent spring is a thing

While we worry about nuclear war, pandemics, rogue asteroids and all sorts of other existential threats, we seem to have forgotten about another threat that is becoming increasingly real.

A crucial link in the food-chain on which our very survival depends appears to be failing.

All of our food is dependent on this one small link and that link appears to be vanishing at an ever-increasing rate.

We should be worried.

What is that crucial link?

Honey bees of course.

We've been hearing of "sudden colony decline" or Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) for quite a few years now but things have recently taken a very worrying turn.

According to media reports out of the USA, the honeybee population is predicted to decline by around 70 percent in 2025.

That's a massive loss -- and nobody knows for sure why this is happening.

Theories include the effects of insecticides, radio-frequency polution, changing weather patterns brought about by climate change and other possible factors but nothing seems to stand out as anything more than a possibility.

If the decline continues to increase at the rate it has in recent years, the very existence of honeybees may be under threat and if they disappear we will have far more difficulty feeding ourselves.

Whether your a herbivore, omnivore or carnivore, the food you eat is reliant on the polination of plants and one of the primary polinators is the humble honey bee.

I've written several columns lamenting the much lower population of honey bees today than when I was a kid back in the 1960s. Beestings were a very common occurance whenever kids played on grassy lawns during summer because bees were everywhere and flocked to clover flowers in large numbers. Today you'll probably be very hard pressed to find a honey bee in your garden, regardless of the time of year or how many flowers are in bloom.

That's got to be a worry.

The USA seems to be particularly hard-hit right now and there's some sobering reading on this page from Washington State University.

While Americans are occupied worrying about how much their next order from Temu is going to cost them, the food chain on which their very survival relies could well be crumbling around them.

And... where the USA goes, the rest of the world will likely follow in the fullness of time.

Carpe Diem folks!

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