Where are the bees?

Where are the bees? We need bees for pollination; without pollination there can’t be crops; without crops there can’t be food; honey gives them strength, so we need bees for honey because we need strong bees; we like honey on our tea, we like honey on our cereal, we like honey on our toast, and we like honey on our sore throats; we use honey to suppress our coughs, to treat infections and diabetic ulcers; some of us like to cover our apples with honey to bring us a sweet new year; and some of us give honey to monks on Madhu Purnima; we need honey to make mead, baklava, and globuli; a few of us believe bears are the ones who know where honey lies; many of us use honey to moisturize: our chapped lips, our skin, our cuticles, and our hair; we say honey, honey bun, and hon to endear our loved ones; when we get hurt, some of us use honey to prevent the dressing from sticking to our wounds; a few of us make a living moving honeybees to pollinate crops; and because of it, some bees suffer from migratory stress, when they bounce in trucks with fluctuating temperatures, on the way to distant crops; bees need to feed on a variety of crops; our farms used to be diversified; now most of our farms only provide many miles of a single crop; consequently a few of us are feeding bees unnatural diets with sugar, water, and soy-based feeds; though, some bees were found to treat soy-based feeds as debris; external parasites weaken bees and spread viruses, so some of us treat our hives with chemicals and miticides; most of us treat our crops with pesticides and fungicides; a few of us knew sprayed pesticides affected bees, so we moved our hives away from our farms during spraying season, and invented what we call systemic pesticides; unlike their sprayed version, systemic pesticides remain within the plant throughout its life, and are expressed in the leaves and nectar of our blooming plants; our new pesticides weaken the bees’ immune systems, affect the bees’ digestive systems, impair the bees’ abilities to navigate, and harm the bees’ brains; if lost or separated from their colonies, bees cannot survive; when bees pollinate our pesticide-rich crops, we don’t know what they bring back to their hives, or what they feed their young; some bees are dying, others are getting weak, and most are getting disoriented – millions have mysteriously disappeared; we can’t prove our pesticides are killing all the bees, but we know that most bees collapse several months after being exposed to our chemicals; we know bee colonies have lost a large numbers of workers, but not many dead workers have been found. Where are the bees?
 – Juliana Swenson

All of us need to work together to save the bees. If you want to know more about what's happening to the bees watch the movie Vanishing of the Bees, and visit their website for information of how you can help.