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| Bees shortage happen from 2009, the trend did not change |
But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally. They're out there because they need to eat. Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar. They're flower-feeders, and as they move from flower to flower, basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart, they end up providing this valuable pollination service. In parts of the world where there are no bees, or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees, people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand. These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon. Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator. Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter) Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower, the anther, and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it. So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it, and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C. So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it, and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh, and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body, and she takes it home as food. Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it's done naturally and
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| US bees colony loss history in winter |
Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there's something about honeybees that draws people into their world. Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history, mostly to harvest their honey, which is an amazing natural sweetener. ( 現在，蜜蜂往往是魅力的代表，其他19,900+ 物種有關蜜蜂，吸引人們進入他們的世界，因為有什麼東西。月初以來的歷史記錄人類注意蜜蜂，主要是有收穫的蜂蜜，這是一個驚人的天然甜味劑。)
I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke. I was 18 years old and bored, and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it. I had never thought about insects living in complex societies. It was like the best of science fiction come true. And even stranger, there were these people, these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family, and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself. So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper, a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico. And I was permanently hooked.
Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms. Now this society has no central authority. Nobody's in charge. So how they come to collective decisions, and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor, how they communicate where the flowers are, all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing. My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years, is their system of healthcare. So bees have social healthcare. So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy. For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy. And more recently, we've been studying resins that bees collect from plants. So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very, very sticky resins off the leaves, and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis. We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant. It's a natural antibiotic. It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity. Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times. We've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine, but we didn't know how good it was for the bees. So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years.
So seven years ago, when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse, first in the United States, it was clear that there was something really, really wrong. In our collective conscience, in a really primal way, we know we can't afford to lose bees. So what's going on? Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes, and I'll go through each of these. The bottom line is, bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system. ( 所以七年前，當蜂群就要集體死去，首先在美國，它是明確的，有一些真的錯了。在我們的集體良知，在一個非常原始的方式，我們知道，我們不能失去蜜蜂。所以，這是怎麼回事呢？蜜蜂死於由多個相互作用的原因，我會去通過這些。底線是，蜜蜂死去，反映了無花的景觀和一個不正常的糧食系統。)
Now we have the best data on honeybees, so I'll use them as an example. In the United States, bees in fact have been in decline since World War II. We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945. We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think. And the reason is, after World War II, we changed our farming practices. We stopped planting cover crops. We stopped planting clover and alfalfa, which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil, and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers. Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees. And after World War II, we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms. Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival. And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures. Now we talk about food deserts, places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores. The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts, dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans. Since World War II, we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival. And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees, like almonds. Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies, hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination, and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein. It's really good for bees. Now, the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation's bees, over 1.5 million hives of bees, be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop. And they're trucked in in semi-loads, and they must be trucked out, because after bloom, the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape. ( 現在，我們有最好的數據蜜蜂，所以我會用它們作為一個例子。在美國，蜜蜂其實自二戰以來一直在下降。我們有一半的人數相比，現在至1945年在美國的管理蕁麻疹。我們下降到約200萬蜂巢的蜜蜂，我們的想法。原因是，二戰結束後，我們改變了我們的耕作方式。我們停止種植覆蓋作物。我們停止種植三葉草，苜蓿，這是天然的肥料，土壤中的氮固定，相反，我們開始使用合成肥料。三葉草和苜蓿植物對蜜蜂高營養的食物。二戰結束後，我們就開始使用除草劑殺死雜草在我們的農場。許多這些雜草開花植物，蜜蜂需要為自己的生存。我們開始越來越大的作物單一種植。現在我們談論食物沙漠，在我們的城市的地方，沒有雜貨店的街區。蜜蜂用於維持農場現在農業食品沙漠，由一個或兩個植物物種，如玉米和大豆為主。自第二次世界大戰以來，我們一直在系統地消除許多開花植物，蜜蜂需要為自己的生存。這些甚至延伸單一種植農作物，良好的蜜蜂，像杏仁。五十年前，養蜂人將採取幾個殖民地，入杏仁果園蜂箱的蜜蜂，授粉，也因為實在是高蛋白質的杏仁花中的花粉。蜜蜂真的很好。現在，杏仁單一種植規模的要求，我們國家的大部分蜜蜂，超過150萬個蜂巢的蜜蜂，被運往全國各地的授粉作物。他們用卡車運在半負荷，他們必須用卡車運出去，因為杏仁果園開花後，是一個巨大的和無花的景觀。)
Bees have been dying over the last 50 years, and we're planting more crops that need them. There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination. ( 蜜蜂已經死在過去50年，我們更多需要它們的農作物種植。已經有需要蜜蜂授粉作物產量增加了300％。)
And then there's pesticides. After World War II, we started using pesticides on a large scale, and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests. Recently, researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food, and they've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it, and this includes every class of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient. This small bee is holding up a large mirror. How much is it going to take to contaminate humans? ( 再有就是農藥。二戰結束後，我們開始大規模使用農藥，而這也成為必要的，因為單一種植農作物病蟲害。最近，賓夕法尼亞州立大學的研究人員已經開始尋找在負載花粉，蜜蜂帶回家作為食品的農藥殘留，他們已經發現，蜜蜂採集花粉，每一批有至少六個檢測農藥，包括每一個類殺蟲劑，除莠劑，殺真菌劑，即使是無反應性的和未標記的成分的農藥製劑的一部分，可以是活性成分的毒性比。這小蜜蜂拿著一個大鏡子。要多少來污染人類嗎？)
One of these class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids, is making headlines around the world right now. You've probably heard about it. This is a new class of insecticides. It moves through the plant so that a crop pest, a leaf-eating insect, would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die. If one of these neonics, we call them, is applied in a high concentration, such as in this ground application, enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar, where a bee can consume, in this case, a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die. In most agricultural settings, on most of our farms, it's only the seed that's coated with the insecticide, and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar, and if a bee consumes this lower dose, either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home. And on top of everything else, bees have their own set of diseases and parasites. Public enemy number one for bees is this thing. It's called varroa destructor. It's aptly named. It's this big, blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee's immune system and circulates viruses. ( 這些類殺蟲劑， neonicontinoids ，現在世界各地的頭條新聞。你可能已經聽說過它。這是一類新的殺蟲劑。移動通過植物，使作物害蟲，食葉昆蟲，咬了一口的植物，並得到一個致命的劑量和模具。如果這些neonics之一，我們給他們打電話，適用於高濃度，如在這地面應用，足以通過植物的複合移動並進入花粉和花蜜，蜜蜂可以消耗的地方，在這種情況下，高劑量的這種神經毒素，使蜜蜂抽搐和死亡。大多數農產品設置，我們的大多數農場種子與殺蟲劑的塗，這樣一個較小的濃度移動通過植物和獲取到的花粉和花蜜，和如果一隻蜜蜂消耗這個較低的劑量，無論是什麼發生或蜜蜂變得陶醉和迷失方向，她可能無法找到回家的路。一切之上，蜜蜂疾病和寄生蟲都有自己的一套。頭號公敵蜜蜂是這件事情。這就是所謂的蜂析構函數。它恰當地命名。這是這個大，吸血的寄生蟲，危害蜜蜂的免疫系統和循環病毒。)
Let me put this all together for you. I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big, bloodsucking parasite running around on it, and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus, but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus, the flu, and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. But what if I lived in a food desert? And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store, and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed, in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin, that I couldn't find my way home? And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death. ( 讓我把這一切放在一起給你。我不知道是什麼感覺像蜜蜂有一個大的吸血寄生蟲上跑來跑去，我不知道是什麼感覺像蜜蜂有病毒，但我不知道這是什麼感覺當我有一個病毒，流感，我知道我去雜貨店得到良好的營養是多麼困難。但是，如果我住在食品沙漠？如果我不得不長途跋涉去雜貨店，我終於得到了我虛弱的身體在那裡，我在我的食物，消耗足夠的殺蟲劑，毒素，我無法找到我的路回家嗎？這就是我們的意思是由多個相互作用的死因。)
And it's not just our honeybees. All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk, including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees. These bees are providing backup for our honeybees. They're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees. We need all of our bees. ( 它不只是我們的蜜蜂。我們美麗的野生蜂的種類的風險，包括那些番茄授粉熊蜂。這些蜜蜂為蜜蜂提供備份。他們與我們的蜜蜂授粉保險。我們需要我們的蜜蜂。)
So what are we going to do? What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we've created? It turns out, it's hopeful. It's hopeful. Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides. So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them. Plant them in a pot on your doorstep. Plant them in your front yard, in your lawns, in your boulevards. Campaign to have them planted in public gardens, community spaces, meadows. Set aside farmland. We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season, from spring to fall. We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees, but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife. And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees. And we need to diversify our farms. We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we've created. ( 那麼，我們該怎麼辦？什麼是我們做的，我們已經創造了這個大蜜蜂無賴？事實證明，這是有希望的。這是充滿希望的。在那裡可以幫助你每一個蜜蜂在兩個非常直接和簡便的方法。植物花蜜蜂友好，不會污染這些花，蜜蜂食品，農藥。所以去網上搜索花原產區和植物他們。他們栽在一個鍋裡在您的家門口。他們栽在你的前院，在你的草坪，在您的林蔭大道。運動讓他們栽在公共花園，社區空間，草地。設置撥出農田。我們需要一個美麗的鮮花盛開在整個生長季節，春季到秋季的多樣性。我們需要為我們的蜜蜂在花叢中路旁接種，但也遷移蝴蝶和鳥類和其他野生動物。我們需要仔細想想放回覆蓋作物來滋養我們的土壤和滋養我們的蜜蜂。我們需要分散我們的農場。我們需要破壞農業食品沙漠植物開花裁剪邊界圍籬，並開始糾正不正常的糧食系統，我們已經創建。)
So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big, huge problem -- just go plant flowers -- but when bees have access to good nutrition, we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services. And when bees have access to good nutrition, they're better able to engage their own natural defenses, their healthcare, that they have relied on for millions of years. So the beauty of helping bees this way, for me, is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society, an insect society, where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution, an emergent property, that's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions. So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change. ( 所以也許它看起來像一個真正的小對策，巨大的一個大問題 - 只是去養花 - 但是當蜜蜂有良好的營養，我們有良好的營養，通過他們的授粉服務。而當蜜蜂有良好的營養，他們能夠更好地從事自己的天然防禦能力，他們的醫療保健，他們所依靠的數百萬年。所以愛美幫助蜜蜂這樣，對我來說，是我們每個人都需要表現多一點點像蜜蜂社會，昆蟲社會，我們每一個人的行動可以促進一個盛大的解決方案，一個新興的物業，這是遠大於區區我們每一個人的行動。因此，讓小種植鮮花和保持它們不含農藥的行為是司機的大尺度變化。)
On behalf of the bees, thank you.
Chris Anderson: Thank you. Just a quick question. The latest numbers on the die-off of bees, is there any sign of things bottoming out? What's your hope/depression level on this?
Maria Spivak: Yeah. At least in the United States, an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter. About 20 years ago, we were at a 15-percent loss. So it's getting precarious.
CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's -- MS: Yes, thirty percent a year.
CA: Thirty percent a year. MS: But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number, they can recuperate some of their loss.
We're kind of at a tipping point. We can't really afford to lose that many more. We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there. Plant flowers. ( 我們是那種在一個轉折點。我們不能真的輸不起。我們要真的很感謝所有的養蜂人那裡。植物的花朵。)
註：
- 有害農藥、殺蟲劑、基因除野草農藥已經逐漸傷害人類，也傷害蜜蜂及正常的糧食系統，人類曾幾何時有如此多蜂群集體死去、有如此多人得過癌症，我們真的必須改善這些問題。
- 愛因斯坦曾說過：「如果蜜蜂 ( Bee ) 從地球上消失的話，人類只能再活四年。沒有授粉，就沒有植物、就沒有動物、就沒有人。」。蜜蜂今日的處境對每一個人來說都是一個警告。2009 ~ 2010，美國境內有三分之一或更多的蜜蜂離奇死亡（二○○七年損失大約八十萬個蜂群；二○○八年則是一百萬個蜂群）。從二○○六年年底以來，一些蜂農列舉高達百分之九十的蜜蜂損失。2011 顯然問題持續擴散到其他國家，破壞增加。
