And their other job is collecting grants serving as global warming experts
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“Garbage! Their claims are garbage, and so are they!”
Here’s how many bees you’re killing with your car — and why that’s dangerous for the environment
New research finds that millions upon millions of bees are killed in collisions with cars in the United States annually — posing a major problem for the economy and environment, experts insisted in a buzzy new report.
The study, published in the journal Sustainable Environment, was conducted in Utah using sticky traps fixed to the bumpers of mid-sized cars — that were then driven at length around The Beehive State.
… “We estimate that hundreds of millions [of] bees could be killed every summer, just considering the roads on which we conducted our surveys,” they wrote.
“Regardless of what the number is — if it’s millions or billions — it’s a large number of bees that are being impacted,” author Joseph Wilson told Sciencenews.org.
“My gut says we’re likely underestimating, because every time I drove, I hit at least one bee.”
Reed Johnson, a researcher in Ohio State’s Department of Entomology with no affiliation to the new data, has warned for years that bee populations are at serious risk.
Losing so many winged insects — he said bees are the most important pollinators around — will sting worse than we imagine.
Johnson explained that bees pollinate about a third of the world’s food supply and their natural services are valued at nearly $20 billion annually.
He also noted that the populations are “declining at a rapid, unprecedented rate.”
Scary stuff, and absolute bullshit:
Honeybee populations are hitting record numbers. Weren’t they dying off before?
Between January 2015 and June 2022, the US lost 11.4 million honey bee colonies and added 11.1 million.[2]
Annual loss rates for honey bees have improved compared to previous decades, such as the 1980s when rates were as high as 9% nationwide. The highest loss rate over the past decade has been 4%, indicating a concerning but manageable decline for those who rely on bees for crop pollination.
A little more than a decade ago, environmentalists and agriculturalists were sounding the alarm for bees. Some 10 million beehives had been lost in the previous years, and scientists weren’t completely sure why. The consequences of this widespread loss could have been dire for crops and humans.
Today though, bees are still around. In fact, the U.S. might have more honeybees than ever, with more than 1 million bee colonies added in the last five years, bringing the total to nearly 4 million. Bees are still struggling in many ways, but they’re far from endangered.
Bryan Walsh, editorial director at Vox, joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about how we all got it so wrong, and what the reality is for bees today. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: So you wrote in Time Magazine, like 10-ish years ago, about bees. The headline was “A World Without Bees.” And yet we still have bees. What happened?
Bryan Walsh: We clearly do. Yes. I mean, sometimes that happens. When you’ve done this as long as I have, like 20 or 25 years, sometimes you were right and sometimes you’ll be wrong. As it turns out, the bees were a lot more resilient than perhaps some of us expected. But also, I think the reason why they are is because they turned out to be really valuable to us. I think a lot of it came down to the fact that we just looked at honeybees in the wrong way. We saw them as kind of a wild species at risk of extinction. They’re actually more like a domesticated species.
