Biodiversity's rather important for without it, earth dies, including us. With this in mind, consider the plight of honeybees, insects that pollinate approximately 33% of the food we eat, based on what we are doing to our planet as we speak.
While the decline of European honeybees in the United States and beyond has been
well publicized in recent years, the more than 4,000 species of native bees in North
America and Hawaii have been much less documented. Although these native bees
are not as well known as honeybees, they play a vital role in functioning ecosystems and also
provide more than $3 billion dollars in fruit-pollination services each year just in the United
States.
For this first-of-its-kind analysis, the Center for Biological Diversity conducted a systematic
review of the status of all 4,337 North American and Hawaiian native bees. Our key findings:
- Among native bee species with sufficient data to assess (1,437), more than half (749) are declining.
- Nearly 1 in 4 (347 native bee species) is imperiled and at increasing risk of extinction.
- For many of the bee species lacking sufficient population data, it’s likely they are also declining or at risk of extinction. Additional research is urgently needed to protect them.
- A primary driver of these declines is agricultural intensification, which includes habitat destruction and pesticide use. Other major threats are climate change and urbanization.
- These troubling findings come as a growing body of research has revealed that more than 40 percent of insect pollinators globally are highly threatened, including many of the native bees critical to unprompted crop and wildflower pollination across the United States.
Time to wake up about caring for the environment don't you think?
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