Here’s how many bees you kill with your car when you drive

Bee goods.

New research shows that millions upon millions of bees are killed in car collisions in the United States every year – posing a major problem for the economy and the environment, experts emphasized in a high-profile new report.

The study, published in the journal Sustainable Environment, was conducted in Utah using sticky traps attached to the bumpers of mid-sized cars – and then driven extensively across the Beehive State.

In 29 different trips on different types of roads, the researchers covered 58,000 miles in a variety of conditions, which researchers say caused considerable bloodshed.

“We estimate there are hundreds of millions [of] Bees could be killed every summer just considering the roads we conducted our research on,” they wrote.

They revealed that just a 230-mile journey from Salt Lake City to Moab could claim up to 175 lives.

It is estimated that around 94,000 cars travel this route every day. The team suspected that the actual number of bee victims was much higher.

“No matter what the number is – millions or billions – it is a large number of bees that are affected,” author Joseph Wilson told Sciencenews.org.

“My gut feeling is that we are probably underestimating because every time I drove I hit at least one bee.”

Reed Johnson, a researcher at the Ohio State Department of Entomology who is unrelated to the new data, has been warning for years that bee populations are at serious risk.

The loss of so many winged insects – he said bees are the most important pollinators of all – 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 worth nearly $20 billion a year.

He also noted that populations are “declining at a rapid, unprecedented pace.”

Losses of commercial honey bee colonies have been reported for nearly two decades, with an average loss rate of about 30% per winter. The bee expert also explained that the number was once closer to 10%.

Wilson’s article also suggested that there may be a way to mitigate the damage. Similar reports state that bees often avoid crossing roads if there is no vegetation growing in the median.

Planting on the sides of the road instead of in the middle may save them a one-way ticket to the big flower in the sky.