By Staff
Education never stops. I've learned lots of things in the past week and quite frankly, I'm amazed at some of the new information that now wanders around in my brain.
I saw a report on Wednesday that boggled my mind, which isn't such a hard task these days. It seems we have a problem with honeybees.
Now the problem isn't that the honeybees are taking over as predicted by someone years ago, just the opposite appears to be true.
A National Geographic report stated &#8220Bees, via pollination, are responsible for 15 to 30 percent of the food U.S. consumers eat. But in the last 50 years the domesticated honeybee population-which most farmers depend on for pollination-has declined by about 50 percent, scientists say. Unless actions are taken to slow the decline of domesticated honeybees and augment their populations with wild bees, many fruits and vegetables may disappear from the food supply.”
The report I watched also indicated the increase in the number of cell phones and their use is one of the problems causing the decrease in numbers of bees.
I realize that bees do pollinate plants that we depend on, but could my using a cell phone to place an order at a local restaurant really cause me not to be able to get a good apple in the future?
Apparently, the answer is yes. According to the man on the video report that I saw, for some reason the cell phones disturb the atmosphere in such a way that bees can't find their way home. Apparently bees have a homing device that allows them to return to their proper hive after traveling for miles looking for nectar that is turned into their food. Those disturbed airwaves around them have somehow thrown off their ability to find their way home and they are lost. During their search for their hive, they become further disoriented and die from exhaustion.
It all may be very true, and the effects of losing all those bees may have dire consequences on our future. As a matter of fact, Sigmund Freud once suggested that if honeybees were to become extinct, the world would only be able to produce enough food to sustain mankind for four years.
That's really kind of scary when you think about it. I mean, really, how long has Freud been dead? If my memory is correct, he died in 1939, so that means he has been gone for 68 years. I don't think even he could have imagined how much the world's population would grow after his death. So when he gave us a four-year window of survival after the loss of honeybees then, I can imagine that window would be more like four months by today's standards.
Scared yet? Maybe you're not, but keep reading. Some of the things seen around the world today hail the coming of the end of time. I'm not one to go around quoting Bible scriptures too much (maybe I should do more of it), but I do know this from my years of Sunday school lessons: at the end of the world, &#8220there will be wars and rumors of wars