Author Archives: Cllr Patrick Smith

The 140 million year reign of the dinosaurs on the Earth ended abruptly without any discernible human scientific explanation. Most dinosaurs were vegetarian and therefore depended on plants, as a main source of food supply, just as we humans do today.

Was there a dramatic change in temperature as a result of climate change during an earlier pandemic of global warming? In the US, the first half of 2006 was the warmest since records began! Australian bee keepers now regularly ship bee swarms to California to pollinate and make viable the lucrative fruit, like blueberry cash crops.

Since 2006, about one third of the population of honey bees has been wiped out, by a mysterious inability of adult bees to return to their hives, leaving the Queen and hatching larvae, to become destitute and die.This new phenomenon has been happening on such an increasing scale word-wide, that it is now referred to as ‘Bee Colony Collapse Disorder’ and heralds the alarming prospect, unless resolved, that human habitat, the food chain and our human diet are all in doubt now and will be changed drastically at best within the next century.

About one-third of all human food is dependent on the honey bee pollination of plant and cereal crops and includes many everyday fruits and nuts, such as almonds, raspberries, cranberries, water-melons, cucumbers and strawberries. There are at least 90 fruit and vegetables dependant on honey bee pollination.

In the UK over the last 60 years, the bee hives have been reduced from 360,000 to 270,000 hives, and the cycle escapes definition in risk assessment terms and is destined to continue so, unless the bee pollutions are better understood and rate of decline arrested.

The popular honey bee, ‘Apis Mellifera’, is reputed to have existed in the UK for over 30 million years and clearly before that time bees were able to pollinate plants. But the question now arises as to how much longer the honey bee will be alive if the trend of decline is not corrected and populations of honey bees are not soon replenished world-wide.

There has been much speculation as to what is causing the adult honey bees to become lost.