True Left

Leave it to Western Civilization to invent a Rube Goldberg pollinating machine when you could just do it with a piece of cloth on a stick:

In parts of rural China, humans are doing the work bees once did.

Striking new photos show farm workers in Hanyuan county, in China’s Sichuan province, painstakingly applying pollen to flowers by hand.

Hanyuan county is known as the “world’s pear capital.” But pesticide use has led to a drastic reduction in the area’s bee population, threatening the fruit crop. Workers now pollinate fruit trees artificially, carefully transferring pollen from male flowers to female flowers to fertilize them.

For photographer Kevin Frayer, the images of human pollinators tell a story of both loss and human creativity.

“On the one hand it’s a story about the human toll on the environment, while on the other it shows our ability to be more efficient in spite of it all,” Frayer told The Huffington Post.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/humans-bees-china_n_570404b3e4b083f5c6092ba9

If the pesticides directly poisoned the bees, then that is an unfortunate amount of initiated violence against them. However, at least millions of future generations of bees will never become victims of birth or future poisonings if the species goes extinct. The pesticides certainly do poison the humans who have to spray them on the crops, however! Another health hazard brought to us by Western Civilization.