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Sticky paper on bumpers reveals scale of bee deaths due to car collisions

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2024-11-08 17:00:05

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

A team in Utah has found that bee deaths due to collisions with automobiles in the western parts of the United States may be in the tens of millions every day.

In their paper published in the journal Sustainable Environment, Joseph Wilson, Thomas Porter and Olivia Messinger Carril, described how they calculated likely bee deaths due to collisions by counting the number that were killed by their own vehicles on driving trips around Utah.

Prior research has shown that bee populations around the world are shrinking, which is very bad news for food growers, as bees are a major pollinator. It is currently believed that the decline is due to a variety of factors, all based around human activity; from encroachment, to pesticide use to global warming. In this new effort, the team in Utah suggests collisions with vehicles should be added to the list.

The work by the team involved applying sticky paper to the bumpers of their vehicles and then driving them around Utah on 29 different trips over the years 2018 to 2021. After each trip, the dead bees stuck to their bumpers were removed, identified by genus and counted. In all, the researchers drove 9,334 kilometers and found that every trip resulted in at least one dead bee.

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