IŽll received this from another list ... the cover picture is here
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/77914801/PortadaTimes.jpg as it is not
allow to send pictures attached at Bee-l
There is also a post of the same author in the Times Blog
http://science.time.com/2013/08/09/the-trouble-with-beekeeping-in-the-anthropocene/#
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2149141,00.html
*The Plight of the Honeybee*
*Mass deaths in bee colonies may mean disaster for farmers -- and your
favorite foods*
By Bryan Walsh
Monday, Aug. 19, 2013
You can thank the Apis Mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee, for
1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you'll eat today. >From the almond orchards
of central California--where each spring billions of honeybees from across
the U.S. arrive to pollinate a multibillion-dollar crop--to the blueberry
bogs of Maine, the bees are the unsung, unpaid laborers of the American
agricultural system, adding more than $15 billion in value to farming each
year. In June, a Whole Foods store in Rhode Island, as part of a campaign
to highlight the importance of honeybees, temporarily removed from its
produce section all the food that depended on pollinators. Of 453 items,
237 vanished, including apples, lemons and zucchini and other squashes.
Honeybees "are the glue that holds our agricultural system together," wrote
journalist Hannah Nordhaus in her 2011 book, The Beekeeper's Lament.
And now that glue is failing. Around 2006, commercial beekeepers began
noticing something disturbing: their honeybees were disappearing.
Beekeepers would open their hives and find them full of honeycomb, wax,
even honey--but devoid of actual bees. As reports from worried beekeepers
rolled in, scientists coined an appropriately apocalyptic term for the
mystery malady: colony-collapse disorder (CCD). Suddenly beekeepers found
themselves in the media spotlight, the public captivated by the
horror-movie mystery of CCD. Seven years later, honeybees are still dying
on a scale rarely seen before, and the reasons remain mysterious. One-third
of U.S. honeybee colonies died or disappeared during the past winter, a 42%
increase over the year before and well above the 10% to 15% losses
beekeepers used to experience in normal winters.
Though beekeepers can replenish dead hives over time, the high rates of
colony loss are putting intense pressure on the industry and on
agriculture. There were just barely enough viable honeybees in the U.S. to
service this spring's vital almond pollination in California, putting a
product worth nearly $4 billion at risk. Almonds are a big deal--they're
the Golden State's most valuable agricultural export, worth more than twice
as much as its iconic wine grapes. And almonds, totally dependent on
honeybees, are a bellwether of the larger problem. For fruits and
vegetables as diverse as cantaloupes, cranberries and cucumbers,
pollination can be a farmer's only chance to increase maximum yield.
Eliminate the honeybee and agriculture would be permanently diminished.
"The take-home message is that we are very close to the edge," says Jeff
Pettis, the research leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bee
Research Laboratory. "It's a roll of the dice now."
That's why scientists like Pettis are working hard to figure out what's
bugging the bees. Agricultural pesticides were an obvious
suspect--specifically a popular new class of chemicals known as
neonicotinoids, which seem to affect bees and other insects even at what
should be safe doses. Other researchers focused on bee-killing pests like
the accurately named Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that has ravaged
honeybee colonies since it was accidentally introduced into the U.S. in the
1980s. Others still have looked at bacterial and viral diseases. The lack
of a clear culprit only deepened the mystery and the fear, heralding what
some greens call a "second silent spring," a reference to Rachel Carson's
breakthrough 1962 book, which is widely credited with helping launch the
environmental movement. A quote that's often attributed to Albert Einstein
became a slogan: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man
would have no more than four years to live."
One problem: experts doubt that Einstein ever said those words, but the
misattribution is characteristic of the confusion that surrounds the
disappearance of the bees, the sense that we're inadvertently killing a
species that we've tended and depended on for thousands of years. The loss
of the honeybees would leave the planet poorer and hungrier, but what's
really scary is the fear that bees may be a sign of what's to come, a
symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around us. "If we
don't make some changes soon, we're going to see disaster," says Tom
Theobald, a beekeeper in Colorado. "The bees are just the beginning."
Sublethal Effects
If the honeybee is a victim of natural menaces like viruses and unnatural
ones like pesticides, it's worth remembering that the bee itself is not a
natural resident of the continent. It was imported to North America in the
17th century, and it thrived until recently because it found a perfect
niche in a food system that demands crops at ever cheaper prices and in
ever greater quantities. That's a man-made, mercantile ecosystem that not
only has been good for the bees and beekeepers but also has meant steady
business and big revenue for supermarkets and grocery stores.
Jim Doan has been keeping bees since the age of 5, but the apiary genes in
his family go back even further. Doan's father paid his way to college with
the proceeds of his part-time beekeeping, and in 1973 he left the bond
business to tend bees full time. Bees are even in the Doan family's English
coat of arms. Although Jim went to college with the aim of becoming an
agriculture teacher, the pull of the beekeeping business was too great.
For a long time, that business was very good. The family built up its
operation in the town of Hamlin, in western New York, making money from
honey and from pollination contracts with farmers. At the peak of his
business, Doan estimates he was responsible for pollinating 1 out of 10
apples grown in New York, running nearly 6,000 hives, one of the biggest
such operations in the state. He didn't mind the inevitable stings--"you
have to be willing to be punished"--and he could endure the early hours.
"We made a lot of honey, and we made a lot of money," he says.
All that ended in 2006, the year CCD hit the mainstream, and Doan's hives
weren't spared. That winter, when he popped the covers to check on his
bees--tipped off by a fellow beekeeper who experienced one of the first
documented cases of CCD--Doan found nothing. "There were hundreds of hives
in the backyard and no bees in them," he says. In the years since, he has
experienced repeated losses, his bees growing sick and dying. To replace
lost hives, Doan needs to buy new queens and split his remaining colonies,
which reduces honey production and puts more pressure on his few remaining
healthy bees. Eventually it all became unsustainable. In 2013, after
decades in the business, Doan gave up. He sold the 112 acres (45 hectares)
he owns--land he had been saving to sell after his retirement--and plans to
sell his beekeeping equipment as well, provided he can find someone to buy
it. Doan is still keeping some bees in the meantime, maintaining a revenue
stream while considering his options. Those options include a job at
Walmart.
Doan and I walk through his backyard, which is piled high with bee boxes
that would resemble filing cabinets, if filing cabinets hummed and
vibrated. Doan lends me a protective jacket and a bee veil that covers my
face. He walks slowly among the boxes--partly because he's a big guy and
partly because bees don't appreciate fast moves--and he spreads smoke in
advance, which masks the bees' alarm pheromones and keeps them calm. He
opens each box and removes a few frames--the narrowly spaced scaffolds on
which the bees build their honeycombs--checking to see how a new population
he imported from Florida is doing. Some frames are choked with crawling
bees, flowing honey and healthy brood cells, each of which contains an
infant bee. But other frames seem abandoned, even the wax in the honeycomb
crumbling. Doan lays these boxes--known as dead-outs--on their side.
He used to love checking on his bees. "Now it's gotten to the point where I
look at the bees every few weeks, and it scares me," he says. "Will it be a
good day, will they be alive, or will I just find a whole lot of junk? It
depresses the hell out of me."
Doan's not alone in walking away from such unhappy work. The number of
commercial beekeepers has dropped by some three-quarters over the past 15
years, and while all of them may agree that the struggle is just not worth
it anymore, they differ on which of the possible causes is most to blame.
Doan has settled on the neonicotinoid pesticides--and there's a strong case
to be made against them.
The chemicals are used on more than 140 different crops as well as in home
gardens, meaning endless chances of exposure for any insect that alights on
the treated plants. Doan shows me studies of pollen samples taken from his
hives that indicate the presence of dozens of chemicals, including the
neonicotinoids. He has testified before Congress about the danger the
chemicals pose and is involved in a lawsuit with other beekeepers and with
green groups that calls on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to
suspend a pair of pesticides in the neonicotinoid class. "The impacts [from
the pesticides] are not marginal, and they're not academic," says Peter
Jenkins, a lawyer for the Center for Food Safety and a lead counsel in the
suit. "They pose real threats to the viability of pollinators."
American farmers have been dousing their fields with pesticides for
decades, meaning that honeybees--which can fly as far as 5 miles (8 km) in
search of forage--have been exposed to toxins since well before the dawn of
CCD. But neonicotinoids, which were introduced in the mid-1990s and became
widespread in the years that followed, are different. The chemicals are
known as systematics, which means that seeds are soaked in them before
they're planted. Traces of the chemicals are eventually passed on to every
part of the mature plant--including the pollen and nectar a bee might come
into contact with--and can remain for much longer than other pesticides do.
There's really no way to prevent bees from being exposed to some level of
neonicotinoids if the pesticides have been used nearby. "We have growing
evidence that neonicotinoids can have dangerous effects, especially in
conjunction with other pathogens," says Peter Neumann, head of the
Institute of Bee Health at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Ironically, neonicotinoids are actually safer for farmworkers because they
can be applied more precisely than older classes of pesticides, which
disperse into the air. Bees, however, seem uniquely sensitive to the
chemicals. Studies have shown that neonicotinoids attack their nervous
system, interfering with their flying and navigation abilities without
killing them immediately. "The scientific literature is exploding now with
work on sublethal impacts on bees," says James Frazier, an entomologist at
Penn State University. The delayed but cumulative effects of repeated
exposure might explain why colonies keep dying off year after year despite
beekeepers' best efforts. It's as if the bees were being poisoned very
slowly.
It's undeniably attractive to blame the honeybee crisis on neonicotinoids.
The widespread adoption of these pesticides roughly corresponds to the
spike in colony loss, and neonicotinoids are, after all, meant to kill
insects. Chemicals are ubiquitous--a recent study found that honeybee
pollen was contaminated, on average, with nine different pesticides and
fungicides. Best of all, if the problem is neonicotinoids, the solution is
simple: ban them. That's what the European Commission decided to do this
year, putting a two-year restriction on the use of some neonicotinoids. But
while the EPA is planning to review neonicotinoids, a European-style ban is
unlikely--in part because the evidence is still unclear. Beekeepers in
Australia have been largely spared from CCD even though neonicotinoids are
used there, while France has continued to suffer bee losses despite
restricting the use of the pesticides since 1999. Pesticide makers argue
that actual levels of neonicotinoid exposure in the field are too low to be
the main culprit in colony loss. "We've dealt with insecticides for a long
time," says Randy Oliver, a beekeeper who has done independent research on
CCD. "I'm not thoroughly convinced this is a major issue."
Hostile Terrain
Even if pesticides are a big part of the bee-death mystery, there are other
suspects. Beekeepers have always had to protect their charges from dangers
such as the American foulbrood--a bacterial disease that kills developing
bees--and the small hive beetle, a pest that can infiltrate and contaminate
colonies. Bloodiest of all is the multidecade war against the Varroa
destructor, a microscopic mite that burrows into the brood cells that host
baby bees. The mites are equipped with a sharp, two-pronged tongue that can
pierce a bee's exoskeleton and suck its hemolymph--the fluid that serves as
blood in bees. And since the Varroa can also spread a number of other
diseases--they're the bee equivalent of a dirty hypodermic needle--an
uncontrolled mite infestation can quickly lead to a dying hive.
The Varroa first surfaced in the U.S. in 1987--likely from infected bees
imported from South America--and it has killed billions of bees since.
Countermeasures used by beekeepers, including chemical miticides, have
proved only partly effective. "When the Varroa mite made its way in, it
changed what we had to do," says Jerry Hayes, who heads Monsanto's
commercial bee work. "It's not easy to try to kill a little bug on a big
bug."
Other researchers have pointed a finger at fungal infections like the
parasite Nosema ceranae, possibly in league with a pathogen like the
invertebrate iridescent virus. But again, the evidence isn't conclusive:
some CCD-afflicted hives show evidence of fungi or mites or viruses, and
others don't. Some beekeepers are skeptical that there's an underlying
problem at all, preferring to blame CCD on what they call PPB--piss-poor
beekeeping, a failure of beekeepers to stay on top of colony health. But
while not every major beekeeper has suffered catastrophic loss, colony
failures have been widespread for long enough that it seems perverse to
blame the human victims. "I've been keeping bees for decades," says Doan.
"It's not like I suddenly forgot how to do it in 2006."
There's also the simple fact that beekeepers live in a country that is
becoming inhospitable to honeybees. To survive, bees need forage, which
means flowers and wild spaces. Our industrialized agricultural system has
conspired against that, transforming the countryside into vast stretches of
crop monocultures--factory fields of corn or soybeans that are little more
than a desert for honeybees starved of pollen and nectar. Under the
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the government rents land from farmers
and sets it aside, taking it out of production to conserve soil and
preserve wildlife. But as prices of commodity crops like corn and soybeans
have skyrocketed, farmers have found that they can make much more money
planting on even marginal land than they can from the CRP rentals. This
year, just 25.3 million acres (10.2 million hectares) will be held in the
CRP, down by one-third from the peak in 2007 and the smallest area in
reserve since 1988.
Lonely Spring
For all the enemies that are massing against honeybees, a bee-pocalypse
isn't quite upon us yet. Even with the high rates of annual loss, the
number of managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. has stayed stable over the
past 15 years, at about 2.5 million. That's still significantly down from
the 5.8 million colonies that were kept in 1946, but that shift had more to
do with competition from cheap imported honey and the general rural
depopulation of the U.S. over the past half-century. (The number of farms
in the U.S. fell from a peak of 6.8 million in 1935 to just 2.2 million
today, even as food production has ballooned.) Honeybees have a remarkable
ability to regenerate, and year after year the beekeepers who remain have
been able to regrow their stocks after a bad loss. But the burden on
beekeepers is becoming unbearable. Since 2006 an estimated 10 million
beehives have been lost, at a cost of some $2 billion. "We can replace the
bees, but we can't replace beekeepers with 40 years of experience," says
Tim Tucker, the vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
As valuable as honeybees are, the food system wouldn't collapse without
them. The backbone of the world's diet--grains like corn, wheat and
rice--is self-pollinating. But our dinner plates would be far less
colorful, not to mention far less nutritious, without blueberries,
cherries, watermelons, lettuce and the scores of other plants that would be
challenging to raise commercially without honeybee pollination. There could
be replacements. In southwest China, where wild bees have all but died out
thanks to massive pesticide use, farmers laboriously hand-pollinate pear
and apple trees with brushes. Scientists at Harvard are experimenting with
tiny robobees that might one day be able to pollinate autonomously. But
right now, neither solution is technically or economically feasible. The
government could do its part by placing tighter regulations on the use of
all pesticides, especially during planting season. There needs to be more
support for the CRP too to break up the crop monocultures that are
suffocating honeybees. One way we can all help is by planting bee-friendly
flowers in backyard gardens and keeping them free of pesticides. The
country, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a research scientist at the University
of Maryland who has studied CCD since it first emerged, is suffering from a
"nature deficit disorder"--and the bees are paying the price.
But the reality is that barring a major change in the way the U.S. grows
food, the pressure on honeybees won't subside. There are more than 1,200
pesticides currently registered for use in the U.S.; nobody pretends that
number will be coming down by a lot. Instead, the honeybee and its various
pests are more likely to be changed to fit into the existing agricultural
system. Monsanto is working on an RNA-interference technology that can kill
the Varroa mite by disrupting the way its genes are expressed. The result
would be a species-specific self-destruct mechanism--a much better
alternative than the toxic and often ineffective miticides beekeepers have
been forced to use. Meanwhile, researchers at Washington State University
are developing what will probably be the world's smallest sperm bank--a
bee-genome repository that will be used to crossbreed a more resilient
honeybee from the 28 recognized subspecies of the insect around the world.
Already, commercial beekeepers have adjusted to the threats facing their
charges by spending more to provide supplemental feed to their colonies.
Supplemental feed raises costs, and some scientists worry that replacing
honey with sugar or corn syrup can leave bees less capable of fighting off
infections. But beekeepers living adrift in a nutritional wasteland have
little choice. The beekeeping business may well begin to resemble the
industrial farming industry it works with: fewer beekeepers running larger
operations that produce enough revenue to pay for the equipment and
technologies needed to stay ahead of an increasingly hostile environment.
"Bees may end up managed like cattle, pigs and chicken, where we put them
in confinement and bring the food to them," says Oliver, the beekeeper and
independent researcher. "You could do feedlot beekeeping."
That's something no one in the beekeeping world wants to see. But it may be
the only way to keep honeybees going. And as long as there are almonds,
apples, apricots and scores of other fruits and vegetables that need
pollinating--and farmers willing to pay for the service--beekeepers will
find a way.
So if the honeybee survives, it likely won't resemble what we've known for
centuries. But it could be worse. For all the recent attention on the
commercial honeybee, wild bees are in far worse shape. In June, after a
landscaping company sprayed insecticide on trees, 50,000 wild bumblebees in
Oregon were killed--the largest such mass poisoning on record. Unlike the
honeybee, the bumblebee has no human caretakers. Globally, up to 100,000
animal species die off each year--nearly every one of them without fanfare
or notice. This is what happens when one species--that would be us--becomes
so widespread and so dominant that it crowds out almost everything else. It
won't be a second silent spring that dawns; we'll still have the buzz of
the feedlot honeybee in our ears. But humans and our handful of preferred
species may find that all of our seasons have become lonelier ones.
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