Colony collapse harms bees but not agriculture ...at least not yet.

Darkfrog submitted, created time 2 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

Colony collapse disorder might be messing with bees and other insects like there's no tomorrow, but nevertheless, a new day dawns for human agriculture. It seems that we don't need them quite as much as we thought.

A study out of UC Berkeley mines data from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization from 1961 to 2006 and compared the yields of both pollinator-dependant and non-pollinator-dependant crops. They found that in developing countries and developed, crop yields were still going up. In the tropics, there was no difference between seed- and wind-pollinated crops.

However, what the UC study gives us are averages. Other, more dramatic impacts have been found on smaller scales, and some of the UC data may be affected by the way farmers are adapting their own methods. Passion fruit growers, for example, now pollinate crops by hand.

Keywords: agriculture colony collapse Colony Collapse Disorder Bee Colony Collapse bees honeybees