Walking around the Urban Farm, if you are observant and listen, you will hear the buzz of busy bees working hard to gather pollen and making our garden come alive with fruits and veggies.  Our friends the bees are an essential part of the garden ecosystem. Without them and our other pollinators, we would not have all of the delicious food that we have available to us. The importance of taking care of our pollinators cannot be understated. As gardeners, recognizing this fact and loving pollinators comes with the job.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the term for the vanishing and dying off of bee colonies. This phenomenon is happening all across the world, even at the Urban Farm. Many theories have arose as to why colonies are dying off, but the likelihood that the cause is from one factor is doubtful. What is more probable is Colony Collapse Disorder is the result of a combination of different factors.

The main causes of CCD are:

• Varroa destruct – a type of mite that attack bees externally.
• Stress – from being transported from large farm to large farm and habitat change
• Pesticides – poisoning from pesticides that are applied to the crops where the bees are pollinating
• Virus – a new virus is attacking the bees

One of the first steps that we need to take to stop CCD we need to change our mindset towards bees and our agricultural system. In today’s agricultural world bees are thought of just as one of the many tools used to get the desired crop and enough yield to produce the amount of desired money. Bees are often not considered a living and essential organism. Changing our perspectives to view bees as more than just a tool used to make money and viewing them more in the light of a living organism that should be treated fairly will be the first step in stopping CCD.

Pollinators are vital to our lifestyle. Without them, the amount of food available to us would go down dramatically. The inter-workings of large scale agricultural production is still unknown to many. Educating the population on how crops are grown and knowing the implications of where your food is coming from will hopefully being to bring about change to our agricultural system.