Reference no: EM133290132

Assignment:

Almond butter is a delicious, upscale alternative to peanut butter and we love it. But its price has increased nearly three-fold over the last two years while that of peanut butter has changed very little. The reason for this is surprising: almonds are much more dependent on honeybees for pollination than peanuts. The California almond crop, by farm the world's largest, used an unbelievable 40 billion honeybees to pollinate it in 2005 and about a third of that number of bees is no longer available (Benjamin and McCallum, 2009).

Since 2007, nearly a third of the honeybees in North America, Europe, and South America have died for unknown reasons.

How important is this to our lives? A U.S. Department of Agriculture/Cornell University study estimates that honeybees pollinate nearly a third of everything that we eat (beeculture.com, 2000). If these bees disappear, fruits, vegetables, and nuts will go with them, meat production will severely decline, and we will be in very bad shape, indeed.

Two significant changes have occurred in the world of honeybees in the United States since the mid1970s:

there has been a steady increase in the amount of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) consumed by honeybees, and about one-third of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. have "collapsed" and are no longer available.

The latter phenomenon is called colony collapse disorder (CCD) (Kaplan, 2009). It must be noted, however, that while these phenomena correlate, correlation can exist without causation. This case study will consider whether recent research establishes a causal link between these two observations.

Many things, ranging from pesticides to cell phone use to virus infestations, have been blamed for CCD and it is likely that there may be multiple causes for this phenomenon (Millus, 2009). In this case study, however, our focus will be limited to recently disclosed problems that reportedly arise when HFCS is used to feed honeybees. HFCS is produced using an enzyme (alpha-amylase) to break down cornstarch, a high molecular weight glucose polymer, into smaller, approximately eight glucose unit fragments. These units are then treated with a second enzyme (amyloglucosidase) that breaks them into individual glucose molecules (Crabb, 1999). Glucose isomerase, a third enzyme, then converts the glucose molecules into fructose.

A blend of 45% glucose and 55% fructose, called HFCS-55, has been found to closely approximate the taste of sucrose (table sugar) and is the most widely used form of HFCS in the U.S. It has become ubiquitous in our diets. A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report demonstrates how dramatically the use of HFCS has increased. It indicates that the per capita consumption of HFCS has increased from 318 grams to 18 kilograms over the period 1970 to 2006 (LeBlanc, 2009).

Sucrose is a disaccharide that undergoes hydrolysis to form two monosaccharides, glucose and fructose, when it is consumed. Why then should there be any significant difference between consuming sucrose and HFCS-55?