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If you need another reason to buy organic food and avoid pesticides beside hormone disruption, consider the humble little bee. Nobel Prize laureate Maurice Maeterlinck said "If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Pollinators are pretty darn important. About every third bite of food that goes in your mouth required pollination to become food. About $600 billion worth of commercial crops depend on pollination. 75% of flowering plants require an animal pollinator, and the vast majority are insects. Bees are the most important. Wild bees especially, but moths, butterflies, beetles, - even ants are also active pollinators. Mass spraying of crops genetically modified to be unaffected by the toxins also land on these pollinators to the point where 40% of insect species are threatened. Yet only 1% of all insects are pests.1 They don't do well when exposed to agrotoxins. You can see the potential for disaster here if we keep killing off the insects. Everything in connected, and some more than others! What will happen when we lose too many of these pollinators?
Scientists have stepped up with a solution. RoboBees. But can a robot bee drone really do everything a bee can do? Do we even know everything a bee does? You notice the solution to any problem big ag introduces is always to adapt nature? Shouldn't it be the other way around? It's pretty arrogant to think we can create a replacement for the genius that is in a bee that has been around for hundreds of millions of years? And what happens when it breaks on duty and drops to the ground battery and all, or a bird eats it?
Triplehorn, C. A., & Johnson, N. F. Borror and DeLong’s Introduction to the Study of Insects, 7th Edition. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Thomson Learning, 2005
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