Worldwide bee populations in recent years have seen a sharp decline, a lot of them dying-off at very concerning rates. In 2016 alone, close to half, or roughly 44% of the bee colonies in the United States have succumbed to the effects of pesticides, burned fuel, and corporate farming practices, causing environmental groups to sound the alarm. The EPA warns that if bee numbers don’t recover to what they were 10 years ago, the world could be facing a food crisis unlike anyone has ever seen before.
But how could losing a creature so tiny affect us in such a profound way you ask? Well, these tiny workers help pollinate up to 80% of the agricultural crops that we enjoy. If we lose them, we lose the ability to grow the plants that provide us with the food we eat. To help them recover their numbers, people and organizations are now moving towards saving the bees, providing them with safe places to proliferate and reproduce.
Some McDonald’s stores in Sweden, for example, have set up beehives on their rooftops. Others have also planted flowering plants in efforts to make their surroundings bee-friendly. But their efforts don’t stop there.
To pay tribute to the efforts in helping bees recover their numbers, the food chain hired an expert to create their smallest store ever, a fully-functioning beehive that looks like a miniature McDonald’s restaurant complete with the Golden Arches, a drive-through, and an al-fresco dining area.
The European Union has recently inked an accord to fully-outlaw the use of bee-killing neonicotinoids being used by commercial farms to help prevent the killing-off of bees. However, the opposite is happening in the USA. The current administration recently approved the dumping of pesticides on large swathes of land in order to save cotton crops. While this may have helped in the short-term, it isn’t difficult to guess how it would affect the environment in the long-run.
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