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The Silence Of The Bees
Big Gav, Peak Energy (Australia)
I’ve been following the travails of the world’s bee population for quite a while now, and am somewhat surprised at how little attention it gets from the doomer community. While global warming and peak oil are the more obvious examples of the limits to growth being reached, bees are actually kind of important (likely much more so than the lack of petrochemical fertilisers that doomer mythology believes will cause starvation when we are past the peak).
Albert Einstein once said “If bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live.”. The causes of bee dieoff (known as colony collapse disorder) seem to be hard to pin down (and not entirely without precedent), with mites, pesticides (fipronil), gm crops, viruses, fungus, lack of wild flowers to forage on and the hives used by commercial bee-keepers amongst a number of factors blamed for what is going on. Rudolf Steiner (an odd person to pair with Einstein, but there you go) apparently predicted back in 1923 that commercial beekeeping would wipe out bees within 100 years – hopefully he wasn’t right…
(3 March 2007)
Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril
Alexei Barrionuevo, NY Times
VISALIA, Calif., – David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.
“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”
The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.
Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why.
(23 Feb 2007)
See comments from Tom Philpott below.
Bee here, now (victim of industrial agriculture)
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
… The Times piece paints a pretty grim picture of what’s become of bees, and beekeeping, under industrial agriculture.
Like the rest of the farming world, beekeeping has been in an extended phase of consolidation: small players exit the business and big players get bigger.
According to the NYT, “Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.”
One reason has been low honey prices, the result of globalized markets. “A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices,” the article states.
Another has been attacks from mites — bees’ natural predator. “Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers,” according to the article.
Here the Times is understating the problem. AP reported two years ago that “A tiny pest is decimating honeybee colonies across the country, worrying beekeepers and farmers who depend on the insects to pollinate their crops.”
Dig deep into the AP story and you’ll find this nugget:
Reproducing quickly and in a closed environment, the mites have developed a resistance to pesticides — a trait they’ve been able to spread to their progeny faster than scientists have been able to develop new compounds to fight them off. [Emphasis added.]
Let’s get this straight. Mites and wild bees co-evolved for eons, living in rough balance. And domesticated bees have lived in balance with mites for thousands of years.
But the modern agricultural practice of attacking mites with pesticides has created a kind of supermite that the chemical industry evidently can’t stop. Mites have already wiped out wild honey bees. Wild bees that don’t produce honey, but do pollinate crops, are resistant to the supermites. But they, too, are dropping in number — under severe pressure from habitat loss, much of it due to monocrop agriculture, as well as pesticides sprayed on crops.
Thus a huge portion of the blame for the pollination crisis can be laid directly on industrial ag. This is a hugely an underreported scandal — another externalized cost of our food system.
So, under pressure from cheap imported honey and supermites, beekeepers are forced to seek profits by trucking their hives out to California to get paid by farmers to pollinate crops. Farmers there have little choice but to pay up for this: Vast monocropped fields, along with creeping suburban sprawl, have evicted wild bees in the nation’s fruit basket.
“California’s almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country’s bee colonies in February,” the Times reports.
What? How much oil goes up in smoke to truck a million beehives to California? The mind reels.
(28 Feb 2007)
Honeybees Dying At Alarming Rate
Jeff Ferrell, KSLA
Honeybees are dying off at an alarming rate in almost half the country. It’s a mystery scientists are calling “colony collapse disorder.” Now, some Ark-La-Tex beekeepers are beginning to see the same signs.
Bees are far more than a picnic inconvenience. They are the givers of honey and the providers of pollination to 14-billion dollars in U.S. crops. Even clover needs bees. “Lots of farmers put this on their land and it requires pollination by bees and other pollinating insects,” said beekeeper James Aulds, as he grabbed a handful of clover from the ground.
(1 Mar 2007)
State insect at risk
Tamara Scully, AmericanFarm.com
…In France, beekeepers began noticing that colonies began to disappear or to be found dead in front of the hives. Other colonies were found shivering and unable to move in the hives, Tassot said. He believes that the situation now occurring in the United States may prove to be related to the situation in France.
The colonies affected in France were found to be those that were pollinating sunflower fields. Dead bees were also found on the sunflowers. A pattern also began to emerge with colonies that had stored pollen from the corn crops. As the stored pollen was eaten by the emerging spring bees, the same symptoms associated with the sunflower pollination occurred.
The missing link between the two crops was the use of systemic pesticides known as “imidacloprid” and “fipronil,” according to Tassot. These and similar chemicals belong to a newer class of pesticides called neonicotinoid pesticides.
…Along with the strong potential for pesticide poisonings, there is also the possibility that GMO plants, which have been genetically engineered for insect resistence, are detrimental to honeybees, Simone said.
(1 Mar 2007)
‘Systemic pesticides’ are pesticides which rather than sitting on the surface of a plant, are absorbed and continue acting long after spraying. Some poison nectar and pollen. -AF
Deaths of honeybees puzzling
John Dobberstein, Tulsa World
Along with producing honey, bees pollinate about 90 commercially grown crops in the U.S. — including California’s $1.5 billion almond crop.
Pollination is thought to boost yields dramatically with some crops. In Oklahoma, honeybees primarily pollinate cotton, watermelons and alfalfa.
In attempts to find the cause for CCD, researchers have flocked to California during the pollination season to compare bee colonies from different states.
No specific cause has been found yet. Theories center around an autoimmune disease, a virus, bacterial disease, a buildup of parasitic mites, pesticides or chemicals, or genetics.
“Out here, we’re seeing tremendous losses. It’s really frightening,” said Grose, manager of Tipton Valley Honey Co. LLC, who owns about 1,000 colonies of honeybees in southwestern Oklahoma.
“We had a yard out here with 160 colonies, and when we checked there were five alive. Three weeks ago, they were all doing good.”
…Kenneth Hammond, president of the Oklahoma State Beekeepers Association, believes CCD is being caused by a virus called nosema ceranae that originated in Europe. The virus, which disrupts a bee’s digestive system, was first studied overseas in 1995 and may be taking hold in the U.S., he said.
Hammond admitted that he can’t prove the virus is the cause, but “everything is pointing in that direction.
“The odd thing about this case is that the bees are just gone. Normally, if a hive dies, something dies with it,” Hammond said.
Another unusual factor, he said, is that bees sensing a dying colony nearby aren’t going in right away and killing the other bees and robbing the hive of honey, like they usually do.
“They leave it alone for a couple of weeks and then go about the business of taking honey out and taking it back to their place,” Hammond said.
Researchers have also noted few signs of damage from wax moths and small hive beetles taking advantage of dead colonies.
(16 Feb 2007)
