Article Excerpt:
It’s not exactly news that bee populations have been suffering, especially those that live in or nearby human-populated areas.
But according to a new long-term study, published in the journal Current Biology, even pollinators that live in remote, human-free forests, away from humans and aren’t directly exposed to harmful behaviors like chemical pesticide use and habitat destruction, are disappearing in pretty horrifying numbers — yet another troubling sign that our much-needed pollinators are disappearing at alarming rates.
Bees, as The Bee Conservancy puts it, “lie at the heart of our survival.” Human agricultural processes rely on these precious pollinators, which play a critical role in growing the crops that we and our livestock eat; they play a similarly critical role in natural food systems, too.
In short, if we lose bees, we lose a lot of plants, which means that we lose a lot of animals, habitats, and crops in turn. Not good.