The worlds bee population is in the process of being wiped out.
It's called "Colony Collapse Disorder", which is the kind of name doctors tend to give things when they have no idea what the problem is, but want to be able to refer to it in an unambiguous manner that makes other people feel they know what the're talking about.
Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD is wiping out VERY large numbers of honey bee hives. People that keep bees professionally have closed up shop after losing all their bees.
A while ago, a clerk at the patent office named Albert said, "If all the bees were to disappear, humans would have 4 years before we were wiped out.", but as far as I know he wasn't a bee expert, but was a very clever man.
The reality is that bees make food grow. almost all our food crops rely on the honey bee to make their fruit, nuts and seeds. Without them we will either learn to eat grass and ferns, or die.
In the last half of this summer, we have not seen a single bee.
I've been looking for them, and I'm pretty good at looking.
I hand pollinated half my cucumber flowers with a small artists paint brush, and left the other half to nature, and not one of natures flowers bore fruit.
Not one.
I'm trying to arrange some native blue banded bees to try to fix the problem.
Some time ago I set up a time lapse photography shot of some cucumbers that I thought I had hand pollinated, but half way through the shoot, I realised I had the memory stick that was for the camera on my desk.
Oh well. At least it wasn't as big a fail as the idiot that coded the little beep noise that tells you it's working. Their design work means the device continues to make the I've just taken a picture "beep" even when there's no card in the device.
Clever.
Anyway...
Here's some time lapse of the second setup where I used the plants that were not being hand pollinated. Pay particular attention to the 3 already formed little cucumbers just to the right of centre. (sorry about all the black dead space at the end, youtube's edit says it doesn't exist so you must be imagining it just like me) ...
youtube is giving me some grief. The clip works around 50% of the time in the different ways I test stuff.
This might work http://youtu.be/z85OlJScCEE
If it's not fixed soon I'll redo it.
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