Summary: Abuzz For Bees
Bernardo Nino, a research technician at a research laboratory in the University of California is taking a very close look at a beehive. He notices something extremely strange about one of the bees. It has a tiny red spot on its body about the size of a pinhead and the bees wings are crumpled like a piece of paper. It turns out that the tiny red spot is a varroa mite and it sucks out the honeybees blood. The bees that are weakened by the varroa mites are more likely to get other diseases and could infect the rest of the hive causing the colony to die out. Scientist worry that threats to bees could hurt many of our food supplies. Honeybees pollinate at least 90 North American crops and produce more than one-third of the worlds crops. Now Elina
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It must have been very hard to study the bees and combine substances to test on the honeybees to get rid of the varroa mites and make sure it is still safe for the bees. What really stunned me was the a normal healthy bee colony can have up to 60,000 bees. I found that honeybees pollinate at least 90- North American crops, and one-third of the world’s food crops, like apples almonds, broccoli and carrots. Those are many types of food we eat on a daily basis, without honeybees pollinating those very important crops, we would not have as many or none of those delicious fruits and vegetables. A remarkably absorbing fact is that pesticides that could kill the varroa mites on the honeybees is human-made, it hurts the honeybee colony, and also stunted the queens growth. They then turned to using biopesticides. I found it very interesting that the research team was testing chemicals that are found in nature on the bees to get rid of the mites. Bernado and the rest of their team tested their chemicals on 80 experimental beehives. This was amazing to me because that is around 4,800,000 bees that they were testing these chemicals on and they had no idea how the chemical would effect the colony. I did not like how they were putting 80 colonies in danger to test there pesticides. I assume it is for the better good of saving many more bees in the long
It must have been very hard to study the bees and combine substances to test on the honeybees to get rid of the varroa mites and make sure it is still safe for the bees. What really stunned me was the a normal healthy bee colony can have up to 60,000 bees. I found that honeybees pollinate at least 90- North American crops, and one-third of the world’s food crops, like apples almonds, broccoli and carrots. Those are many types of food we eat on a daily basis, without honeybees pollinating those very important crops, we would not have as many or none of those delicious fruits and vegetables. A remarkably absorbing fact is that pesticides that could kill the varroa mites on the honeybees is human-made, it hurts the honeybee colony, and also stunted the queens growth. They then turned to using biopesticides. I found it very interesting that the research team was testing chemicals that are found in nature on the bees to get rid of the mites. Bernado and the rest of their team tested their chemicals on 80 experimental beehives. This was amazing to me because that is around 4,800,000 bees that they were testing these chemicals on and they had no idea how the chemical would effect the colony. I did not like how they were putting 80 colonies in danger to test there pesticides. I assume it is for the better good of saving many more bees in the long