This is our life with bees, and this is our life without bees. Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals. More than one third of the world's crop production is dependent on bee pollination.
有蜜蜂,我们的生活是这样的 没有蜜蜂,我们的生活会变成这样 蜜蜂是水果,蔬菜,花朵的 最重要的传粉者 我们喂给农场动物的苜蓿草,也是由蜜蜂授粉的 世界上三分之一的农产品都是依靠 蜜蜂来传授花粉。
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 they get better quality tomatoes.
但是讽刺的是,蜜蜂并不是 有意地為我們的食物传授花粉的。 他们在那里是因为它们需要进食。 蜜蜂从花粉中获得 每日所需的蛋白质 并从花蜜中获得所需的碳水化合物。 它们依靠花朵生存, 当它们从一朵花移到另一朵花的时候, 就像在逛当地的鲜花市场, 它们不经意间也传授了花粉。 在世界上没有蜜蜂的地区, 或者某些地区所种植的树木花草对蜜蜂不具吸引力, 必须雇佣工人进行人工授粉 这些人用刷子将花粉 从一朵花转移到另一朵花上。 如今,手工传授花粉这一工作 其实并不少见。 西红柿种植者通常用手持振动仪 帮助西红柿花传授花粉。 这是一张西红柿花粉振动器的照片(笑声) 这是因为西红柿花的花粉 被紧紧锁在 花的雄性部分,即花药之中, 释放花粉的唯一方法是震动花药。 大黄蜂是世界上少数蜜蜂中 可以握住花朵并将其震动的, 他们通过抖动飞行肌来震动花朵 震动的频率类似于音乐的C大调。 它们震动花朵,用近声波的频率震动花朵, 在高效的振动中,释放花粉, 花粉因而聚集到毛茸茸的蜜蜂身上, 她把花粉作为食物带回家。 现在,西红柿种植者为了授粉西红柿 把大黄蜂的蜂巢放在温室里 因为它们在自然授粉时 更有成效 他们从而得到更好的西红柿。
So there's other, maybe more personal reasons, to care about bees. There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they're absolutely gorgeous. These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees.
然而还有其他更个人的理由 去关心蜂。 全世界拥有超过20,000个品种的蜂 它们非常让人赞叹。 这些蜂度过其生命周期的大部分 隐藏在地下或在一个空心茎内 而且很少数这些美丽的品种 已经像蜜蜂一样有高度进化的社会行为。
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.
蜜蜂倾向于是超凡魅力的代表 相对于其他 19,900多的蜂种 因为有一些关于蜜蜂的事情 吸引人们进入他们的世界。 人类自早期有记录的历史 开始就被蜜蜂所吸引, 主要是为了收获他们的蜜, 蜜是很棒的的天然甜味剂。
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.
我被吸引到蜜蜂世界 完全源于偶然。 我那时18 岁,很无聊 我在图书馆随便拿起一本关于蜂的书 当晚阅读了这本书。 我从没想过昆虫 生活在复杂的社会。 这就像最好的科幻成真。 而更奇怪的是,这些人, 这些养蜂人,像家人一样爱着蜜蜂, 当我放下这本书,我就知道我要亲自看看。 于是我去为商业养蜂人工作, 一个拥有 2,000 个蜂箱的新墨西哥州的家庭。 我从此被迷住了。
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.
蜜蜂可以被视为一个超级有机体, 蜂巢就是这个有机体 它由 4万至5万只 蜜蜂有机个体组成。 这个社会并没有中央权力。 没有人统领。 所以他们如何做统一的决定, 以及他们如何分配他们的任务和工作, 他们如何沟通鲜花在哪里, 他们所有的集体社会行为让人叹为观止。 我个人最喜欢的,也是我研究多年的, 是他们的保健系统。 蜜蜂有社会医疗保健。 所以在我的实验室,我们研究蜜蜂如何保持自己身体健康。 例如,我们研究卫生, 一些蜜蜂能够找到并驱赶 生病的个体,离开蜂巢,離開聚居地, 保持蜂巢的健康。 最近,我们一直在研究 蜜蜂从植物收集的树脂。 蜜蜂飞到一些植物上,从叶子上刮取 这些非常、 非常粘的树脂, 然后带它们回巢 粘合成蜂巢结构 我们称之为蜂胶。 我们发现蜂胶是天然的消毒剂。 它是天然的抗生素。 它杀死了蜂巢里的 细菌,霉菌和其他菌 从而,它奠基了蜂巢的健康和社会免疫功能。 人类早已知道蜂胶的功能 从圣经时代开始。 我们一直从蜂巢中收集蜂胶 作为人类的药物, 但是我们不知道它给蜜蜂带来了多大的益处。 蜜蜂一直有这些非凡的天然防卫 来保持他们健康和繁荣 在过去的5000万年里。
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,当蜂巢 头一次在美国 被报道正逐渐集体消亡时, 很明显,这意味着有些事情很严重地错了。 以我们集体意志出发,以最原始的点出发, 我们知道我们不能承受失去蜜蜂。 所以,到底怎么了? 蜜蜂正消失缘于很多交互的因素, 我会一一讲解。 底线是, 蜜蜂的消失反映了没有花朵的景观 和功能失调的食物系统。
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.
现在我们拥有最好的蜜蜂数据, 我会以它为例。 在美国,蜜蜂其实 从二战时期就开始减少。 现在我们只拥有半数的蜂巢 相较于1945年的美国。 我们估计,我们只剩大约200万的蜂巢 原因是,在二战后, 我们更改了耕作方式。 我们停止种植氮肥作物。 我们停止种植三叶草和苜蓿, 它们是天然的肥料,可以固定土壤里游离氮, 然而,我们开始使用人工肥料。 三叶草和苜蓿是能提供蜜蜂高营养食物的植物。 并且二战后,我们开始使用除草剂 杀死农田里的杂草。 很多这些杂草是开花植物 蜜蜂需要这些花存活。 而且我们开始种植越来越大片的单一作物。 我们现在讨论的是食物沙漠, 在我们城市的很多地方,附近没有杂货店。 那曾经维持蜜蜂生计的农田 现在成了农作物荒漠, 只有一两种植物 例如玉米和大豆。 从二战开始,我们一直在系统地 消除很多开花植物 蜜蜂赖以生存的植物。 这种单一栽培甚至延伸到 对蜜蜂有益的作物,像杏树。 五十年前,养蜂人会放几箱蜂箱, 在杏树中间,为了授粉, 同时也因为杏树开花期的花粉 富含蛋白质营养。对蜜蜂很好。 现在,杏树单一耕作的规模 要求我们全国大多数的蜜蜂, 超过150万蜂箱的蜜蜂, 由全国运送到这里 为这单一作物授粉 它们被装入大货柜车运输来, 它们还必须被运输走, 因为开花期后,杏树果园 会是一片很大的无花地景。
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.
过去的50年间,蜜蜂一直在消亡, 而我们种植了更多需要它们的植物。 需要蜜蜂的植物 已经增长了超过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?
接下来是杀虫剂。 二战后,我们开始大规模使用杀虫剂 这变成必要的, 因为单一耕作模式 为害虫提供了一顿盛宴。 最近,来自宾夕法尼亚州立大学的研究人员 开始研究花粉上的杀虫剂残留物 这些蜜蜂将当做食物带回家的花粉, 他们发现 蜜蜂收集的每批花粉 都至少含有六种可测的杀虫剂, 覆盖了各类杀虫剂, 除草剂,除菌剂, 甚至杀虫剂中 惰性的和未标示的成份 都可能比活性成份更有毒性。 小小的蜜蜂正举着一面巨大的镜子。 要污染到人类需要多少呢?
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.
其中的一类杀虫剂, 新类烟碱化合物, 正在全世界各大头条中出现。 你可能听说过。 这是一类新的杀虫剂。 它包含在植物中,所以害虫, 食叶害虫, 只要吃一口植物 就会得到致命剂量的毒素并死去。 如果其中之一的neonics, 被高浓度的应用, 比如在这耕地应用, 足够的化合物会通过植物 到达花粉和花蜜中, 那里蜜蜂会进食,在本例中, 高剂量的这类神经毒素 会使得蜜蜂抽搐并死去。 大多数农业状况下,在我们的多数农场中, 只有种子会被涂上杀虫剂, 所以只有较小浓度通过植物 到达花粉和花蜜中, 如果蜜蜂摄入较少剂量, 可能什么都不发生 或是让蜜蜂中毒并失去方向 它可能找不到回家的路。 在所有这些原因之外,蜜蜂 有它们自己的疾病和寄生虫。 蜜蜂的头号公敌是这个。 它叫做瓦螨。 它被很巧妙的命名。 它是大吸血寄生虫 损害蜜蜂的免疫系统 和传播病毒。
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.
让我给你一个全面概念。 我不知道那是什么感觉 带着一个在身上游荡的吸血虫 我也不知一只蜜蜂感染了病毒会有什么感觉, 但我知道,我患流感的感觉, 我知道让我(生病时)去杂货店买有营养的食物 有多难。 尤其,如果我生活在食物荒漠中呢? 如果我一定要走很远的距离 才能到达杂货店, 而最终当我虚弱的身体到达那里时 我说吃的食物中, 含有足够的杀虫剂,神经毒素, 让我不能找到回家的路? 这就是我们所说的 多重交互的死亡原因。
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.
而且这不仅仅关于我们的蜜蜂。 所有美好的野生蜂类 都在危险中,包括那些给西红柿传粉的大黄蜂。 这些蜂类是我们蜜蜂的后备力量。 他们在提供传粉保险 同我们的蜜蜂一起。 我们需要所有的蜂类。
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.
所以,我们应该怎么做呢? 我们要怎么处理我们制造的 这个巨大的蜂类无赖? 结果是,它是充满希望。它是充满希望。 你们中的每一个人都可以通过 两个非常直接、 简单的方式帮助蜜蜂。 种植蜂类友好的花类, 并且不用杀虫剂污染这些 是蜂类食物的花朵 所以上网并搜索当地的开花植物 并种植它们。 把它们种到你门口台阶的花盆中 将它们种植到你的前院,你的草坪上, 你的林荫大道上。 提倡运动将它们种植到公共花园里, 社区空间,草地上。 撇开农田不说, 我们需要美丽的多样的花 在整个生长期盛开, 从春天到秋天。 我们需要在路边种上花,为了我们的蜜蜂, 也为了迁徙的蝴蝶和鸟类 和其他野生动物。 所以我们需要认真考虑 重新种植固氮作物,滋养我们的土地 也滋养我们的蜜蜂。 我们需要让我们的农田多样化。 我们需要种植有花的稻物边界和缓冲田埂 瓦解农作物食物沙漠 并更正我们曾创建的 机能失调的食物系统。
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,也许它看起来是个 对应巨大的问题很小的对策--仅仅去种花-- 但是当蜂类能够得到更好的营养, 我们就能够得到更好的营养 通过他们的授粉服务。 当蜂类能够得到更好的营养, 它们就能更好的使用它们自己的天然防御 它们曾经 依赖了几百万年的保健系统。 这种帮助蜂类的动人之处,对我来说, 在于我们每个人都需要表现得 更像蜂类社会一些,一个昆虫社会, 那里我们每个人的行动 可以成就一个巨大的解决办法, 一个新兴的财富, 它比我们每个人的小小行动的加和 要大得多。 所以让我们这微小的种花行动 及保持它们无杀虫剂 成为大规模改变的动力。
On behalf of the bees, thank you.
代表所有的蜂类,谢谢。
(Applause)
(鼓掌)
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?
Chris Anderson:谢谢。几个小问题。 最近的关于消亡蜂类的数据 有没有任何迹象显示会走出低谷? 你对这件事情的希望或者绝望程度是多少?
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.
Maria Spivak:是。 至少在美国, 平均30%的蜂巢 在每年冬天消失。 大约20年前, 这个数据是15%。 所以越来越危险。
CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's -- MS: Yes, thirty percent a year.
CA:不会是每年30%。那是--- MS:是的,每年30%。
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.
CA:每年30%。 MS:但是那时养蜂人会把他们的蜂巢分出来。 这样他们可以维持同样的数量, 他们可以弥补一些损失。
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.
我们近乎在临界点 我们其实不能承担失去更多了。 我们真的需要感谢 所有的养蜂人。种花者。
CA: Thank you.
CA:谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)