Wednesday, May 20, 2015

United States realizes that honeybees and butterflies are important and need protection


The population of honeybees and monarch butterfly is on the decline and, in order to reverse the trend, the federal government plans to make more federal land bee-friendly, and also increase spending on research. There are also plans to consider less use of pesticides.
This has been reported in foxnews.com dated 19 May 2015.
Bees are crucial to pollinate many crops and, this has suffered due to a combination of declining nutrition, mites, disease, and pesticides.
The federal plan envisages a strategy that calls on everyone from federal bureaucrats to citizens to do what they can to save bees. If bees are saved, it will provide more than $15 billion in value to the U.S. economy, as indicated by the White House science adviser John Holdren.
The number of monarch butterflies that spend the winter in Mexico's forests is believed to have dipped by 90 percent or more in the past two decades. Therefore, the U.S. government is working with Mexico to expand monarch habitat in the southern part of that country.
Under the plan, 7 million acres of bee habitat must be restored in the next five years. Moreover, efforts must be made to grow plants that are more varied and better for bees to eat because, in the opinion of scientists, large land tracts that grow only one crop have adversely affected bee nutrition.
The administration has earmarked proposed spending of $82.5 million on honeybee research in the upcoming budget year. (Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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