the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees

"Today bees are telling us something, and we need to listen."-Paul Sheehan

The mysterious vanishing honeybees is a thread of conversation that keeps weaving itself into the conversations I've had with diverse people all year. At least once every couple of weeks, someone new will remark on the phenomenon of vanishing bees. The other day it was my own mother who said something to the effect that she hadn't seen bees working over the clover in ages.

Thinking about my own front yard (which is mostly clover), I realized it's exactly the same story here. I haven't had to watch where I've stepped in the yard for ages...there just aren't any bees to accidently tread upon. On my usual rambles about the neighborhood, I see many things, but definitely few (if any) honeybees. This past spring, the neighbor's appletree bloomed in eerie silence, its sweet blossoms unvisited by the familiar humming of bees (who usually greatly relish such things as apple blossoms). The lavender goes unvisited, flowers go ignored...the only insect pollinators I've seen at all are a few bumblebees, and a couple of varieties of flies and small wasps . In this neighborhood, there are many backyard fruit trees...and the persistent lack of bees has dire consequences for their productive future.

As urban dwellers, most of us do not notice bees. They are not on our radars and not something we typically notice or think about in the frantic pace of our daily lives. Yet the truth is that everyone needs bees, more than they can imagine. Most of us, if we think of bees at all, we think of honey (which for many of us is something marvelously sweet and sticky that comes in a plastic bottle that sits on a shelf near jellies and jams at the grocery store). For many of us, this is perhaps our only point of awareness of the lives and doings of bees. "What is known is that the commercial honey industry in the US is in distress." Although there are many species of bees and wasps that are pollinators, for agricultural purposes, we have historically relied on a single species introduced from Europe - Apis mellifera, (Western Honeybee) the western honey bee and all of its numerous subspecies.
"This species is a crucial pollinator in the commercial production of apples, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, cucumbers, watermelons, pumpkins, almonds and other crops". From my own experience, I can assure you that you cannot expect any degree of fruit set from the Cucurbitaceae family without the presence of bees.
As a point of reference, a more complete list of potentially affected crops is the Pollination Handbook at beeculture.com. As a person who eats food, this greatly concerns me (and should concern you) because most of modern agriculture is dependent on bee pollinated crops. The consequences for our food supply will be rather severe if things continue along these lines.

Many of us have noticed that there seems to be a relative absence of bees. Outside of urban areas, the absence is even more striking. "Bees are not just disappearing in large numbers, they are vanishing. Entire colonies of honey bees have been deserting freshly made honey and newly hatched eggs, leaving behind no bodies, no signs of struggle, no evidence of the usual insect predators. Hundreds of apiarists have been coming upon scenes similar to the boat found drifting in open water, with food on the table, no signs of distress, no lifeboat missing, and no occupants...The recent phenomenon of the missing bees has been given a name: colony collapse disorder".

"Today bees are telling us something, and we need to listen."

At first I thought it was eerie, but now quite frankly, I find the disappearance of bees rather alarming. I remember one of the many joys of spending long days out in the garden was watching them with amusement as they hummed, doing their pollination chores, bouncing from flower to flower. I always as a habit, let the brassicas go to seed, not out of laziness, but knowing how well bees love their yellow spikes of flowers. One year I let the leeks go to seed, refusing to let anyone pull them up to make space for other things...why? Because I noticed that the bees absolutely loved their beautiful purple flowers. It is my humble belief that there are certain things one should always leave behind as a gift to the bees that do so much of the work of ensuring the growth of our food.

"When bees began to disappear from the landscape - and in America and Europe they are disappearing in their billions - it is an alarm signal." Bees play a critical role in our environment, and like taking a pulse, are indicators of the overall state of physical health in the kingdom of plants. Like Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, bees are a wakeup call from a world that is badly out of balance and one that is becoming moreso all the time.

In November of 2006, David Hackenberg, commercial beekeeper in Pennsylvania was one of the first people to raise a public alarm about the disappearance of bees:

"...One of Pennsylvania's biggest commercial beekeepers, Dave Hackenberg, of Lewisburg, Union County, found in mid-November he had lost about half of the 2,700 colonies he manages...'What the consumer does not realize is that one of every three bites of what they eat is pollinated by honeybees,' Hackenberg said. 'We'd be back to eating nothing but corn and potatoes without bees.'" (Forget the spy mystery -- what's killing the bees?, Rick Willis, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Saturday, December 9, 2006)

"As soon as he went public, other beekeepers from around the US began reporting the same experience. Although there are many diseases and pests that typically afflict honey bees, these did not seem to be suffering from any of these specifically...but rather a whole spectrum of viruses. Like people living with HIV, once their immune system becomes weaker they come down with full-blown AIDS, and can be brought down by any number of obscure ailments. The bees tend to be infected with every known bee virus, plus new pathogens never seen before." When the bees become this stressed, they just give up.

Doug Somerville: "In Australia is that we rely very heavily on native flora, especially eucalyptus, for our honey production, whereas they [the US] rely extremely heavily on agricultural crops. That means their bees’ interface with chemicals is much heavier." It has been long known that the use of agricultural chemicals is particularly harmful to bees. Given the rapidly decreasing decline of the bee population, it is high time for anyone still using chemical-intensive non-organic growing practices to really reconsider the merits of doing so (assuming all the other arguments aren't convincing enough in and of themselves). After all, are all of you really planning on going out and hand-pollinating all of your crops? I should think not. This is also a particularly good argument for eliminating the use of herbicides and pesticides in our residential landscapes and planting more native plants which do not need as much "chemical intervention" to sustain. Native perennial plants are an importance source of nectar and pollen for bees, and they often fill the gap when annual agricultural crop plants are not flowering. (An example of a plant with an off-season flowering schedule is ivy, which blooms in the wintertime). Many shrubs and plants bloom at times other than summer and provide both visual interest as well as a critical food source for bees.

"It should be no surprise, then, if the underlying cause of colony collapse disorder proves to be the same environmental evil that has already caused so much damage to the food chain - the systemic use of chemicals - which compounds the loss of biodiversity caused by factory farming."

Here in the US, wild honey bees were once much more common and diverse. If you get bored, you can read descriptions of gathering wild honey in Foxfire. Now apiculture (the keeping of bees) is dominated by the reliance on a single introduced species, brought over from Europe. Since they have essentially replaced many of the native honey bees, and if their population continues to decline, there won't be any other major pollinator to step in and cross-pollinate our crops. Because our agricultural systems are locked into a relationship of mutual codepedence, the loss of one dictates the loss of both.

Now is the time to really pay attention. By now it should be apparent that "business as usual" doesn't cut it. We've pushed nature about as far as it can be pushed and frankly things are desperately out of balance. Agriculture, if it intends to survive into the 21st century and beyond really needs to return to a place of harmony with the earth which gave it life in the first place. We used to have a much better understanding of how to live on earth recieve its abundance with an attitude of gratitude and humility. To the extent that we have moved away from the understanding of mutuality into this present mindset of dominance, a false sense of superiority over nature and linear thinking (which in agriculture is expressed by planting monocultures of the same crop, having severe subsequent pest infestations, then chosing to eradicate said pest by spraying, then having worse problems the following year...etc.) we have failed both the earth, and ultimately betrayed ourselves. In the process we have poisoned ourselves for so long that we are biting the proverbial hand that feeds us. One of the casualties of our blind stupidity of course is the humble honeybee, an almost invisible player whose presence is one of the sources of our greatest strength as a species in our long historical quest to survive on the planet earth by feeding ourselves.

Sections in Quotations come from: Eerie Saga of the Vanishing Bees
by Paul Sheehan, Sunday, August 19, 2007 Sydney Morning Herald/Australia
Of further reading interest is:
Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe.