After watching my little honeybee friend buzz around my raspberry plant today, I decided to write about the worrisome decimation of bee populations in the U.S., Germany and Italy, just to mention a few countries.

In 2005, the Italian Corriere della Sera reported that the bodies of millions of bees had been found dead, scattered around their hives, throughout Italy. Bees began to die in France in the late 1960s, when the molecule of an insecticide sprayed on corn and sunflower seeds contaminated the plants (once they had grown) and the bees that carried the poisonous molecule back to their hives and well, you can imagine the rest. And the really sick part? This insecticide was banned in 1999 but the producers were allowed to continue to sell their stock, rather than destroy it. This article can be read in Italian: http://tinyurl.com/2dojyh

According to a March 22, 2007 Der Spiegel article, millions of bees have been disappearing everywhere. Why is this happening? The reasons given: herbicides, the practice of monocultures, the use of genetically-modified plants. The article can be read (in English) at: http://tinyurl.com/2c5mvc In the U.S., bee deaths have reached the level of catastrophe. Yet I hadn’t read anything about it. Then, just recently, two of the alternative newsletters that I subscribe to contained reports about the bee calamity. I began to get worried.

An April 2007 article from the British Independent (http://tinyurl.com/3cutao) offers the theory that the radiation emitted by our cell phones and other gadgets is causing bees to lose their sense of orientation so that they cannot make it back to their hives. As weird as that sounds, a recent German study has shown that bees will not return to their hives when cell phones are placed near it. My husband and friends used to get annoyed with me because I always keep my cell phone switched off. Well, perhaps I was right after all. (Are you turning your cell phones OFF?)

Aside from the obvious, why am I so concerned? I use organic honey instead of sugar. I know, it’s not like eliminating sugar altogether, but honey has so many medicinal properties that it would be classified as a drug under the new FDA S1082 bill. And keep in mind what Albert Einstein said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”