Heres how many bees youre killing with your car and why thats dangerous for the environment

Bee-ware.New research finds that millions upon millions of bees are killed in collisions with cars in the United States annually — posing a major problem for the economy and environment, experts insisted in a buzzy new report.The study, published in the journal Sustainable Environment, was conducted in Utah using sticky traps fixed to the bumpers of mid-sized cars — that were then driven at length around The Beehive State.During 29 different drives on a mix of road types, researchers logged 58,000 miles under various conditions, causing considerable carnage, researchers said.“We estimate that hundreds of millions [of] bees could be killed every summer, just considering the roads on which we conducted our surveys,” they wrote.Just one 230-mile trip from Salt Lake City to Moab could claim up to 175 lives, they revealed.Local transportation data estimated about 94,000 cars travel that route daily.

The team speculated the bees’ true casualty number is much higher.“Regardless of what the number is — if it’s millions or billions — it’s a large number of bees that are being impacted,” author Joseph Wilson told Sciencenews.org.“My gut says we’re likely underestimating, because every time I drove, I hit at least one bee.”Reed Johnson, a researcher in Ohio State’s Department of Entomology with no affiliation to the new data, has warned for years that bee populations are at serious risk.

Losing so many winged insects — he said bees are the most important pollinators around — will sting worse than we imagine.Johnson explained that bees pollinate about a third of the world’s food supply and their natural services are valued at nearly $20 billion annually.He also noted that the populations are “declining at a rapid, unprecedented rate.”Commercial honeybee colony losses have been reported with an average dropping rate of around 30% each winter for almost two decades.

The bee expert also explained that the number once was closer to 10%...