Vanishing ALARM of the Bees,

PLEASE SIGNE THIS IMPORTANT PETITION!If you do, sign on to this petition and pass it along to all you know.

50°/. of bees and butterfiles desappears since lust 20 years, is alot and is ALARM signe of very, very bad news !!!

Pollution Killing Flower's Fragrance
Environmental Scientists Fume About Disappearing Flower Fragrances!

Biochemists have shown that air pollution inhibits the distance that flower's fragrances can travel. Scent molecules usually travel easily in the air, but pollutants break them apart, which destroys the smell. The researchers found that these delicate odors responsible for attracting bees and other pollinating insects are traveling as little as one-third of their former distances.

Atmospheric and environmental scientists report that flower's scents are being destroyed. What's to blame for the disappearing aromas? Pollution. Fumes from cars and factories are pumping pollutants into the air, which may be destroying flower's fragrances.

"What we find is that these fragrances only travel one-third of the distance that they used to travel," Dr. Fuentes says.

Flowers produce scent molecules that travel easily in the air. Pollutants break apart the fragrance molecules, destroying their smell. Our noses will miss the pleasant fragrance, but bee's depend on it.

"The pollinators are spending more time trying to locate food and less time trying to actually harvest food that they need," Dr. Fuentes notes.

Wiping out flower scents could have a major impact on bee populations. But we can help bring back the bees and flower smells.

Entomologists are studying the reasons behind an enormous bee die off happening across the country. They call it Colony Collapse Disorder, and if they cannot find a solution the 80% of fruits and vegetables that require pollination may not make it to market. The cause appears to be related to diseases from pesticides, but no one is certain.

Don't be afraid of the buzz of a bee. If it wasn't for bees, many fruits and vegetables we enjoy wouldn't exist. They are vital for pollination of plants, but lately, they've been disappearing by the billions, possibly putting food supplies at risk.

"We need them for the food that we eat, for the color and variety that's on our plate," says Dewey Caron, Ph.D., an entomologist from University of Delaware. But this year, bees are dying by the billions, a problem threatening to wipe out crops dependent on bees for pollination. Fewer bees could cost us all at the grocery store.

Jay Evans, Ph.D., a geneticist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says, "What was striking is the suddenness with which the bees disappeared." Entomologists call the mass disappearance, colony collapse disorder, or CCD. The cause is most likely toxins that make bees more susceptible to or cause disease.

"We've seen collapses of colonies in the past, thought they were related to stress, related to nutrition, this seemed to be very widespread," Caron says. Bees pollinate 80 percent of fruits and vegetables by transferring pollen from one flowering plant to another. This starts fertilization that helps the plant grow seeds that turn into the food we eat.

"It's really this pollination service that we cannot live without if we want the very inexpensive food, the abundance and the variety of foods that we're accustomed to," Caron says.

Bee keepers are now taking steps to control CCD so higher produce prices won't be all the buzz.

BACKGROUND: An alarming drop in honey bee populations has beekeepers fighting for survival, and crop growers wondering whether enough bees will be available to pollinate their crops this spring and summer. Entomologists, in turn, are scrambling to find answers to what's causing the affliction, which appears to be becoming more severe and is now appearing in Europe. As much as one-third of the food we consume comes from pollinated crops, so the shortage of bees could mean that certain foods will be in short supply.

 

HOW POLLINATION WORKS: Flower nectar is one of two food sources used by honeybees. The other is pollen, which the worker bees gather daily on foraging flights. As bees forage for nectar, pollen sticks to the tiny hairs covering their bodies, and some of that pollen rubs off on the next flower the bee visits. This fertilizes the flower, resulting in better fruit production. The bees unload the remaining pollen when they return to the hive, which is stored in the honeycomb, providing protein and other nutrients for the bees. The honeycomb is the central feature of the beehive, made of beeswax produced by glands in the worker bees. The comb is two-sided with cells on both side, some meant to contain food, others to serve as a nursery for the queen bee to lay her eggs.

The number of bee colonies in Central Europe has decreased over recent decades. In fact, the number of beekeepers has been declining in the whole of Europe since 1985. This is the result of a study that has now been published by the International Bee Research Association, which for the first time has provided an overview of the problem of bee colony decline at the European level.

Scientists assume the cause for this to be the social and economic changes over recent decades. Rising incomes of the rural population made other sugar-based products affordable, the replacement of jobs by machines in agriculture speeded up the rural exodus to urban regions and thus beekeeping as a hobby lost its attractiveness. "The price of treating bee diseases has increased to the extent that the cost of treatments may equal or exceed the income from a colony for an entire year, thus making it uneconomic to keep bees on a small scale," explains Dr. Simon G. Potts of the University of Reading in England. "Moreover, the effort for treating disease, in particular V. destructor, has probably also reduced the attractiveness of beekeeping as a hobby."

Through the investigation, the mystery of bee losses has by no means been solved, emphasize the scientists, who were however able to add another piece to the puzzle. Furthermore, the data would have to be interpreted very carefully because of the very different evaluation methods in individual countries. "With the limited evidence available it is neither possible to identify the actual driver of honey bee losses in Europe nor to give a complete answer on the trends for colonies and beekeepers. This obviously creates an urgent demand for a standardization of evaluation methods, especially on colony numbers. Such harmonized reliable methods will be the obvious backbone for any research to understand and mitigate honey bee colony losses," adds Dr. Josef Settele from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ).

The loss of pollinators such as bees, bumble bees and butterflies is one of the four pillars of the EU project ALARM. ALARM stands for "Assessing Large scale environmental Risks for biodiversity with tested Methods" and was the largest research project of the European Union in the field of biodiversity. But how we can STOP this ALARMING CALL?

ANSWER: By fight for lower Air pollution!!!!

ABOUT AIR POLLUTION: Air pollution is made up of many kinds of gases, droplets and particles that can remain suspended in the air. This makes the air dirty. The easiest way to visualize airborne particles (also called aerosols) is to exhale outside on a cold day and watch the fog come out of your mouth when water vapor forms water droplets. The same thing happens in the atmosphere, but for different reasons. Under certain conditions individual molecules come together and form particles -- a chemical soup. In the city, air pollution may be caused by cars, buses and airplanes, as well as industry and construction. Ground-level ozone is created when engine and fuel gases already released into the air interact when sunlight hits them. Ozone levels increase in cities when the air is still, the sun is bright and the temperature is warm.

 GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY PROTECTION

www.globalbiodiversityprotection.org