Over 25,000 dead bees found in Oregon Target parking lot
Workers on Friday plan to wrap bee-proof netting around blooming trees in the parking lot of an Oregon shopping center in an attempt to prevent the deaths of more bees.
photo Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel via Flickr
Portland-area bee experts with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation were contacted after the bees were discovered in the Target parking lot. The group estimates at least 25,000 bumble bees have died in the lot since last weekend.
The bees were clustered under dozens of European linden trees.
“They were literally falling out of the trees. To our knowledge this is one of the largest documented bumble bee deaths in the Western U.S. It was heartbreaking to watch,” says Rich Hatfield in a press release from the Xerces Society.
Oregon Agriculture Department officials confirm thousands of dead bees.
The Oregonian reports that Agriculture officials are working with the Xerces Society, the city of Wilsonville and the distributor of an insecticide.
State officials say tests to confirm the cause of the deaths could take two or three more days.
They are checking for insecticides as well as possible natural causes.
“On the other hand,” said Scott Hoffman Black, Executive Director at the Xerces Society, “if pesticides are the cause, we need to spotlight this as a real-world lesson in the harm these toxic chemicals are causing to beneficial insects. It would be especially alarming to find out whether pesticides are the cause in this case because the linden trees are not even an agricultural crop. Any spraying that happened would have been done for purely cosmetic reasons.”
Read the full statement and the see the photos from the Xerces Society here
THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCES IN THIS ARTICLE ARE, ” … linden trees are not even an agricultural crop. Any spraying that happened would have been done for purely cosmetic reasons.”
AS A WESTERN-ART MUSICIAN, I KNOW AMERICANS’ LOVE FOR THE GENRE IS PRIMARILY BASED ON THE WORKS OF EUROPEAN COMPOSERS LIKE, Johann Sebastian Bach AND Frederic Chopin – NOT, THE WORKS OF AMERICAN COMPOSERS. MY POINT IS, THE WESTERN UNITED STATES IS NOT A NATIVE HABITAT FOR LINDEN TREES. SO, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY – IN 2013 – UNITED STATES IS STILL OBSESSED WITH CULTURAL PRODUCTS FROM EUROPE. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IS MONIKERED A “WORLD SUPER-POWER;” IT SHOULD BE MONIKERED A “WORLD-IMITATOR.”
CHRISTOPHER ALLEN HORTON