What if bees went extinct? They contribute to about 35% of global crop production by volume. No bees? No apples, almonds, avocados, blueberries, cucumbers, melons, strawberries, and worst of all—no coffee.
Bees are threatened by monoculture crops, like endless cornfields, the same junk food diet that plagues us. The neonic pesticides sprayed on crops cause Alzheimeresque symptoms for the bees pollinating them. In the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, worker bees vanish, abandoning the queen and brood.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Varroa destructor mite latches onto bees and sucks their fluids like a vampire, except, not fictional. These bugs are in nearly every honeybee colony worldwide. In North America, they are the top driver of winter bee colony losses, with 50–80% mortality rates in bad years.
What if the solution could be — mushrooms?
By now you’ve heard all kinds of stories about mushrooms. Most of the accurate stories trace back to Paul Stamets. Like the Jacques Cousteau of mycology, Paul has been exploring, researching and sharing his findings for decades. From Paul’s activism, I learned about mycelium networks that trees use to communicate with each other; mushrooms that can have extraordinary health benefits; and of course the positive potential in psychedelics like psilocybin.
Paul and his team figured out how to naturally accelerate the incredible adaptability of fungi to create a biopesticide that kills these mites. Soak this in for a minute — an all-organic pesticide that doesn’t harm bees, is actually good for them, and safe for humans.
Quorum Earth has spun out of the Paul Stamets orbit to take this on. They’ve tuned Metarhizium to target the Varroa mite. Simply dropping a tea bag of their mushroom spore into a beehive can save the entire colony.
That’s just the start. The team has developed an entire biopesticide tech stack to target other invasive species of pests using mushroom spores.