Nerve 14 - Where have all the honey bees gone?

Where have all the honeybees gone?

Imagine a diet without apples, nuts, citrus, onions, broccoli, carrots, melons, blueberries, cherries, pumpkins, sunflower, carrots, avocadoes, strawberries or peaches, just some of the 90 bee pollinated crops worldwide that make up a third of the food we eat.

The honeybee has been in decline for a long time, but it has only recently become news. The worst stories are from America where bees mysteriously disappear from their hives overnight in a phenomenon termed ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ (CCD), a third of US honeybees have died two years running, a rate at which if it continues could lead to the disappearance of all US honeybees by 2035. In Southern Sichuan, a region of China, uncontrolled pesticide use has already killed off their honeybees, their pear trees have to be pollinated by hand. In January 2007 a London beekeeper lost his 14 honeybee colonies, a survey one year later found one in four bee colonies across Britain had died. Despite this 25% decline in the UK honeybee population, the British government refuses to accept that CCD has reached these shores, although farming minister Lord Rooker has warned that if the trend continues unchecked Britain could lose its 270,000 bee colonies within 10 years. The government has finally agreed to allocate £10 million to bee research following demands for some time from the British Beekeepers Association.

What is bee-hind it all?

Certain pesticides have had the finger pointed at them, namely a group of neurotoxic, systemic insecticides called neonicotinoids. Two of these, marketed under the names Gaucho and Regent, made by Bayer and BASF Agro respectively, were banned in France in 1999 following the loss of a third of its 1.5 million bee colonies. The ban appeared to stem the massive bee die offs, although mortality rates have recently shot up again. Scientists argue though that these pesticides can’t be the cause of CCD, as they are not in use in all the areas where CCD has occurred. Anti-GM campaigners will feel vindicated that in some cases transgenic pollen also has sublethal effects on bees.

It is suspected that the narrowing of honeybees' gene pool also has a part to play. The selective breeding of bees with traits desirable to humans produces the opposite of what natural selection would - docile, honey productive bees which start pollinating early so are more vulnerable cold snaps and aren’t able to adapt naturally to pests and diseases. The entire US honeybee population is descended from only eight races of Western honeybee.

The Varroa mite has been heavily associated with CCD and honeybee decline. These mites suck the bees blood but it is the transmission of viruses by them around the beehive that does most harm. Although in places where colonies struck by Varroa have been left untreated, eventually the bees adapt to cope with them and parasite and host are able to co-exist, generally beekeepers respond by applying miticides. These have been accused of severely compromising bee health and the mites have now developed resistance to them. The unregulated trade in bees and bee products has also been blamed for the spread of diseases. There are a number of bee viruses and fungi identified which have been associated with different instances of bee colony death and decline but none have been proven as a single cause responsible for the recent wave of CCD in the US.

Bees in the US are put under particular stress due to their role in pollination, half the US bee population is trucked around the country each year to pollinate various crops, they commonly cover 11,000 miles per year and are often on the road for 2-3 days at a time. They have been referred to as ‘battery bees’ yet US beekeepers argue they’ve been doing this for years without problems, so it can’t be to blame for CCD.

Poor diet is another factor, with an increased tendency towards monoculture bees can’t get the balance of nutrients they need, weakening their immunity to disease. The decline in wild patches and hedgerows on farms doesn’t help, as these provide supplementary nutrition as well as habitat for other pollinating species. Urbanisation has also reduced the amount of habitat available to bees. Even gardens don’t necessarily help if they are filled with lawns and non-native flowers that often lack pollen and nectar in sufficient quantities to meet bees’ needs.

Changing weather patterns have wreaked havoc on many species, in parts of the US some trees are blossoming before it’s early enough for the bees to fly while others are flowering too late. The changing climate is also enabling the spread of exotics such as the African Honey bee as well as bee pests.

Then there’s mobile phones, one beekeeper in New York is convinced they are to blame, but the original study into the affect of radio frequencies on bees which the Independent newspaper erroneously reported as linking mobile phone signals with bee colony collapse actually studied the effects of cordless-phone base stations, and its authors are keen to stress that other factors are probably more important. Inner city pollution is another problem for urban bee keepers, by destroying the smell of flowers before it has time to spread it makes it more difficult for urban bees to find food.

Researchers around the world have been working hard testing these theories to try and find the cause of CCD but with each research team trying to prove a single cause for the problem, are they failing to see the bigger picture that we need to look at in order to make the necessary fundamental changes to agriculture to truly address the problem?

The Canary at the Coalface?

Rather than focussing on individual causes, a more holistic view recognises that in reality all of these factors have some responsibility for this most dramatic episode of the honeybees’ history to date, and that all of these factors are human-induced, and have become an accepted part of modern life and food production. Industrial agriculture seeks to make the maximum profit from the land regardless of the consequences both for the environment and for future generations’ ability to feed themselves. Perhaps the honeybee’s decline is actually a blessing in disguise, the wake up call the world needs to realise that our current agricultural methods are unsustainable and need to change. If the driver for food production shifted from greed to human need it would shift to a system based on organic, local mixed crop permaculture-based food production, which would enable everyone on the planet to have sufficient, healthy, variable, good quality nutritional food now and in the future, without sacrificing the environment or compromising animal welfare (including that of bees). Perhaps then the honeybee will be in with a chance, and we won’t have to give up eating nuts apples, strawberries after all.

Many thanks to Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, authors of the book A World Without Bees, for putting much of the above information all in one place. A great read available from News From Nowhere.

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