Our cellphone towers confuse them and make them lose their way; our ‘concretisation’ of green spaces leaves them starving and our vehicle fumes deaden their senses. Now, discarded paper cups are drowning thousands of worker bees every day. Those that survive a dip in a coffee/tea cup are getting hooked to refined sugar, rather than nectar, making their honey a farce.
A study by a Madurai Kamaraj University professor and his students has shown that worker bees across the country have now adopted a ‘scavenger’ mode of food gathering — but they do not realise it.
“The poor bees are attracted by the residual sugar stuck to the bottom of the paper cups that are thrown outside any roadside coffee kiosk. They do not know they are humans’ garbage — they mistake them for large white flowers,” said Dr S. Chandrasekaran, whose study was published in the journal Current Science late last year.
“When the bees enter the cups to collect sugar, they tend to fall into the residual coffee or tea left in the cup — on an average, a person leaves around 3-6 ml of liquid back in the cup which is enough to drown a bee,” said Dr Chandrasekaran, who presented his study at ‘Pollinator1’, to an eclectic audience of artists, ecologists and bee-farmers.
The study group realised that it takes the bees around a month to identify a particular coffee kiosk or tea shop as ‘foraging ground’ — the bees visit only kiosks where more than 300 coffee cups are thrown every day. “We conducted several experiments to understand this foraging behaviour.
In Kodaikanal, for instance, there are a variety of flowers for the bees to choose from, but, still, thousands are seen swarming around coffee and juice stalls, to collect sugar. While a bee visits 30 to 50 flowers per minute to collect nectar, they realise that these huge coffee cup flowers yield more sucrose in a short time, with hardly any effort,” he explains.
While at least 400 bees drown per coffee kiosk, per day, many of them are also killed by the shopkeepers, who burn the discarded cups or pour hot water to get rid of the bees ‘threatening their customers’.
“This coffee cup death trap is just one of the many we have set for honeybees,” stresses Dr Chandrasekaran.The next time you drink your coffee in a disposable cup, spare a thought for the bees. If you cannot carry a re-usable coffee mug with you, the least you could do is finish your coffee.