Pollinator Decline

We have posted in the past about "colony collapse"...a phenomenon where the bees all just disappear and or die.  Recently there has been something killing of the bats...some type of fungus.

Scientists are scrambling trying to figure it all out because these two, plus butterflies, do an awful lot of pollinating.

Albert Einstein told us that if the pollinators disappear that mankind would only have 4 years left on earth before they all died of starvation...so this is a pretty serious topic.

The fate of bees is important because they pollinate so many plants, said David Goulson, a biologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland who led the study involving bumblebees. Losing too many of the world's bees could endanger wildflowers, which in turn would affect birds and butterflies, he said.

Bees also help pollinate scores of fruit and vegetable crops, a service that's estimated to be worth $15 billion to the agricultural industry. In California alone, growers rely on honeybees to pollinate 90 crops, including avocado, almond, cherry and plum trees as well as vegetables grown from seeds. In the absence of plentiful bees, California growers could be forced to spend about $250 million renting bees to fertilize their crops.

The new findings lend support to the notion that pesticides contribute to colony collapse but leave open the likelihood that habitat destruction and illness play a role too, scientists said.

"There are a whole lot of things that stress the honeybees," said Eric Mussen, a honeybee specialist at UC Davis. "You can't point your finger at one thing and say, 'That is the problem.' "

"There's a general phenomenon of pollinator decline — bats, bird, butterflies, all kinds of things," he said.

Here;  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-bees-pesticides-20120330,0,4969345.story

Holy extinction!  What's going on with all the bats, birds, butterflies and all kinds of things?  Could this be one other canary in the mineshaft that is warning us that something big is happening on planet earth?

Whose going to pollinate all our food?  I don't think we can hire it done.

I guess we truly are reliant on God for ALL things.  Maybe science doesn't have it all figured out?