World's No. 1 pesticide brings honeybees to their knees, say scientists

[NickB79]

58. Here's a crazy thought: stop relying on honeybees for pollination

Honeybees are not native to most of the world; they were exported from Europe as Europeans settled around the planet over the past millennia.

The only reason we need honeybees at all is because we practice highly destructive land practices that encourage farmers to grow monocropped thousand-acre fields, plow them fencerow to fencerow, clearcut every forest they find, plow under grasslands, and spray every nook and cranny of their property with more and more chemicals. We've given the many native bee species in North America, who are perfectly capable of pollinating crops, no place to survive, no habitat left to call their own.

Banning a certain chemical to save the honeybees is at best a short-term fix that will not last. Even without the neonics in circulation, the loss of bee habitat will continue to harm them, requiring the remaining colonies to be more and more dependent on their human owners to feed them and move them more frequently to areas in flower. It's a house of cards that cannot hold. We've already seen this with the monarch butterfly, with their overwintering populations on the verge of all-out collapse as their summer and winter habitats are destroyed and poisoned.

The only way we will get ourselves out of this hole is to ultimately abandon the forms of factory-modeled megafarming we currently employ and return to a system where farms were smaller, run by families, and cropped a diverse array of food. Multiple fields of different crops, using crop rotation, livestock grazing and permaculture techniques to maintain soil fertility and wildlife diversity. Such a system is far more resilient to climate change and the eventual depletion of fossil fuels, and would provide ample habitat for native bees to flourish and pollinate.

It might sound crazy and naive to some, a longing for a "Little House on the Prairie" lifestyle, but ultimately it's either this, or we continue to rely on farms run more like chemically-powered food factories to make sure we get our daily ration of "food-like product" every night for dinner.