The Plight of the honeybee - Essay Example

Ethos on the other hand is the use of authority be it moral or technical expertise to make an authoritative argument while logos is the use of reason to make a persuasive argument. The article is littered with the use of logos or logical reasoning to make an argument. This is expected because the author discussed a scientific phenomenon which is the mass deaths in bee colonies. This was very obvious with the use of factual figures to quoting studies by experts in the field both by individuals and institutions.

This may make the paper a difficult read but it was necessary to make the case convincing why the mass deaths of honeybee is alarming. The paper began in this note to establish credibility using hard figures such as citing 237 items out of 453 items vanished when honeybees are removed from the produce section of Whole Foods store in Rhode Island making a thesis that honeybees "are the glue that holds our agricultural system together" (Walsh). The phenomenon of honeybees mass deaths were also assigned a scientific term by the experts as colony-collapse disorder (CCD) where the number of honeybee colonies that disappeared had increased causing honeybee keepers money and their business as well as endangering our staple food from the perspective of science.

The research leader at the U.S. Department of Agricultures Bee Research Laboratory says that “we are very close to the edge” (Walsh). Another aspect in the article that used the logos approach is the discussion of the causes of such mass deaths among honeybees which are the pesticides particularly the compound neonicotinoids, the Varoa mites and poisoned environment. The destructive mites Varoa was explained as a microscopic mite that kills billions of bees by burrowing into the brood cells that host baby bees and also on how to kill it such as “Monsanto’s RNA-interference technology that