蜜蜂麻煩大了
Honey Bees in Trouble

In the natural world, bees are the best pollinators.
蜜蜂是自然界最好的授粉者。

You can treat the minor ailments yourself.
你自己可以治療這個輕微的病痛。

This farmland is too poor in quality to produce crops.
這塊農田太過貧瘠，以至於無法耕作。

In this country, food was often scarce in the winter.
糧食在這個國家的冬季通常變得非常稀少。

By some extraordinary alchemy, he turned the ordinary ingredients into the delicious dishes.
像用了魔法似的，他把普通的食材變成美味的菜餚。

A hive is a small box where bees are kept.
蜂巢就是蜜蜂停留聚集、像一個小盒子的地方。

An organophosphate is a chemical used for killing insects that damage crops.
有機磷酸酯是一種化學物質，用來消滅損害農作物的昆蟲。

Farmers had to use massive amounts of chemical pesticides for such vast areas of monoculture.
為了如此大範圍的單一作物，農夫不得不使用大量的化學殺蟲劑。

Native bees are as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest.
自然生長的蜜蜂和任何農作物的害蟲一樣，容易被殺蟲劑傷害。

The field researchers had to trek for miles through inhospitable countryside.
這些田野調查員不得不在條件惡劣的鄉野艱苦跋涉數英里。

Honey Bees in Trouble

Can native pollinators fill the gap?

Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder(CCD), which is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.

But what few accounts acknowledged is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy. It’s industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native bees outright—they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest—and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new, in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.

If that “Fruitless Fall”, has not—yet—occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee, “says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modern system of industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out some of the resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems.