As Honeybees Continue to Vanish, Einstein's Prediction Looms...Or Does It?

With the bee populations in terrible decline for the second straight year in 35 states in North America and for reasons that still defy a definite explanation, some beekeepers and researchers are becoming increasingly troubled by an apocalyptic prediction attributed to a well-known thinker who went by the name of Einstein.

"Einstein's theory-- it's been, oh, a couple years ago-- was that within about four years, there would be no more food to sustain life anywhere on the planet, to pollinate orchards, pollinate everything out there...Without the bees, there is no life, there is no food to eat. So we're going to get real hungry really soon without bees," says migratory beekeeper Daniel McLaury of Montana.

McLaury's business lost about 70 percent of its bees last year.

However, as disturbing as the bee loss is, for now we can take some comfort in one thing: Einstein never said what McLaury believes he said.

"You can't always go by an absence of proof is proof of absence kind of thing. But with someone who is as well documented as Einstein, who lived in the [20th] century, everything he said is pretty well documented and collated," says David Mikkelson, who with his wife owns the urban myth-debunking website Snopes-dot-com.

Nevertheless, while all the bees of planet Earth are not disappearing, there is something deeply distressing going on with the bee population-and without the bees, mankind's food supplies will suffer huge losses, and suffer them in short order.

In the United States alone, the bee population is needed to pollinate 130 crops worth $15 billion.

The mysterious disappearance of the bees has been named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Scientists and bee keepers have been speculating on the precise cause or causes of CCD.

Their theories have included some kind of bee-afflicting pathogen, a new bee parasite or bee-feeding pest, environmental stress caused by mankind's altering of landscapes and by transporting of bees from place to place by professional bee keepers, drought (which lowers flowering plants' nutritional value that bees need for sustenance), pesticides, or a mixture of some or all of the above.

One research scientist named Raj Singh says, "We have found some of the honey bees that are uninfected bringing in pollen pellets from the field, and those pollen pellets were actually infected - that's one of the routes of virus transmission that we've found."

One thing that federal researchers and private colleagues are seriously looking into is the cultivation of native bee species, which are not disappearing like the pervasive honeybee. There are approximately 3500 such species and most of them are specially adapted to pollinate only one flowering plant or one species of flowering plant. There are squash bees, blueberry bees, the hornfaced bee that pollinates apple trees, and alfalfa leaf-cutter bees.

Scientists and agricultural professionals are investigating ways to attract or mimic the nesting habits of these specialist bees.

The great advantage of these bees is that, since they are specialists, they can pollinate with vastly greater efficiency than the dominating honeybee. For instance, 200 alfalfa leaf-cutters can pollinate the same amount of crop as 20,000 honeybees.