The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously...
What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans?
And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size.
I heard that pollen are more aggressive in areas with high emissions - on a reputable German radio show.
This could be one reason for worse allergies, especially when you add in lifestyle changes such as moving to a city.
Personally, I could not remember a situation where I felt this could be true.
I'm not a biologist, but, if there's less bees, wouldn't that also mean there's less pollination done by them which would reduce the amount of seeds produced which in turn reduces the amount of plants?
Bees aren't the only pollinators by a long shot, they're just the most commercialized/domesticated one. Take corn/maize, you have to rely on a pollinator speices or manual pollination if you grow small amounts in your garden but if you grow acres and acres of it wind alone will sufficiently pollinate it.
The plants still produce the pollen though. Pine trees for example produce copious amounts of pollen but it offers a relatively poor protein source so most pollinating insects don't make use of it.
Bees consume pollen as one of their food sources though, they just happen to pollinate plants due to accidental transfer while collecting pollen for their own use. You can then harvest some of the wax and honey as a commercial product and it's much easier to load up box after box of honey bees on a truck to transport to the next field than it is moths, butterflies, beetles, mosquitoes etc. Modern farming outright relies on domesticated bees, domesticated bees aren't remotely 'natural' though and nature has plenty of other means of spreading pollen sufficiently for reproduction.
A recent figure puts just domesticated honey bees at 80-100 million colonies worldwide. An average-size colony may bring in 100 pounds of pollen in a season so 8-10 billion pounds of pollen annually.
If you saw just a 10% die off of those domesticated colonies, you're talking about an insane amount of pollen. 2000 maize pollen grains weigh one milligram, so 907 million grains per pound for maize.
So the NAB scale, depending on the type of pollen, 5-89 grains per cubic meter of air is moderate and 20-1499 grains per cubic meter is a high pollen count.
Yeah, there's a LOT of air but you can see how even a small reduction in colonies could drastically increase average pollen counts. Add in global warming which can extend the growing season and open up new regions and you also see an amplification of pollen during a given period.
The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously...
What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans?
And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size.
sigh