If You Don't Have Enough Woes, Try Fretting About Bees. 
Wall Street Journal, New York, NY. Nov. 7, 1974.

Remember the old saying about how a horse and rider were lost because somebody neglected to tend to a small matter like a missing horseshoe nail! Some scientists and agriculturists are worried that the same sort of ballooning consequences may stem from what many people probably consider to be a minor irrelevancy: The nation's honeybees slowly but steadily are being exterminated.

Not on purpose, of course. But as the honeybees forage for pollen and nectar they increasingly are gathering poison also - pesticides that farmers apply to protect their crops from destructive insects.

So there are 20% fewer honeybee colonies in the U.S. today than there were 10 years ago - about four million versus five million. In California, the leading bee state, as much as 20% of the state's honeybees have been killed in some recent years - a mortality rate double that of the early 1960s.

All the indications are that it's going to get a lot worse," says Ward Stanger, an apiculturist at the University of California at Davis. "It's a serious situation," Mr. Stanger says - so serious that he's seeking to have the honeybee declared an endangered species.

It is even more serious in another respect: Nearly 106 crops with a farm value of $1 billion annually depend on honeybees for pollination; another $3 billion worth benefit from bee pollination in terms of higher and better-quality yields. Among these crops are apples, cherries, plums, broccoli, cucumbers, cabbage, melons indeed, virtually all fruits and berries as well as many vegetables and even some livestock-forage crops such as alfalfa.

Thus, at a time when boosting food production is becoming a global priority, the fate of honeybees takes on some of the significance of the proverbial horseshoe nail.

Floyd Moeller, research leader at the North Central States Bee Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, says that the economic value of honey bees as pollinators is twenty times their value as honey makers. Far from being an esoteric ecological concern, the dwindling number of honeybees bodes ill for the nation's food supply. "You just can't pollinate as efficiently with fewer bees," Mr. Moeller says.

Some crops already are threatened by a lack of: bees. Most notable is the California almond. Each of the 200,000 acres requires two colonies of bees for pollination, but there are now only 300,000 colonies in the entire state. Last year, almond growers had to import more than 100,000 colonies of bees, some of them hauled from as far away as Montana in tandem-trailer trucks to pollinate their fields. obviously isn't a very practical way to do things," says the University of California's Mr. Stanger. "I just don't know how long we can keep it up." 

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