Question

Question
Read the following excerpt from “Are Commercial Honeybees Making Wild Bees Sick?” by Berly McCoy and answer the question that follows.

If human-managed bees and bee-friendly flowers are acting as hotspots for pathogens, keeping more bees and planting more flowers may be contributing to the steep losses in commercial pollinators seen in the U.S. each year, as well as fueling the decline of wild bees. The more that bees are transported and concentrated for larger-scale pollination events, the more opportunities for diseases to spread.

“It’s likely the transmission is going both ways,” said Scott McArt, a pollinator ecologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study. Even if diseases in commercial bees are eliminated, new infections from the wild bee population, which are known to harbor pathogens, could spill back into managed populations, making disease eradication even tougher than it is now.

“But in some cases you might actually be increasing disease levels when you plant those flowers,” said Sheila Colla, a conservation biologist at York University who was not involved in the study. “Maybe we need to have a [buffer] area without flowers to stop diseases from spreading to wild bees.”

Nobody is suggesting we stop planting flowers altogether. “We know that habitat loss is already a big problem for bees,” said Alger. Instead, she’s now investigating if increasing plant diversity, or culling certain plants could help decrease disease transmission.



A student claims: “While planting bee-friendly flowers usually helps pollinators, in some cases it can actually make disease spread worse.”



Which sentence from the excerpt best supports this claim?



(1 point)
Responses

“The more that bees are transported and concentrated for larger-scale pollination events, the more opportunities for diseases to spread.”
“The more that bees are transported and concentrated for larger-scale pollination events, the more opportunities for diseases to spread.”

“It’s likely the transmission is going both ways.”
“It’s likely the transmission is going both ways.”

“But in some cases you might actually be increasing disease levels when you plant those flowers.”
“But in some cases you might actually be increasing disease levels when you plant those flowers.”

“Nobody is suggesting we stop planting flowers altogether.”

Answer 1

“But in some cases you might actually be increasing disease levels when you plant those flowers.”