What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?
By Gina Covina, Terrain
Posted on October 16, 2007, Printed on October 16, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65289/
On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of
glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street.
Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on
the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was
produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last
fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the
world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.
The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled
"colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a
heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic
images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's
corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the
wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously
gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather
pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring
cross-pollination.
Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the
protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they
make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the
bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs
made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it
reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to
keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to
do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide
stretch of the year.
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee
species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large
colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long
history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and
continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life
painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial
agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have
many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological
limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a
pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse
disorder.
It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey.
The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey
for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that
hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only
income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are
rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go
south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make
clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to
offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the
brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are
a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the
drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this
year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more
intensively and try to increase their numbers.
Every commercial beekeeper has different arrangements, but each involves
long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely
dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can't get crop
insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at
almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for
heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond
trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute
worst -- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of
bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted
landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees
before or after the almond bloom.
Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the
nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated
pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down
the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards
for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup
meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen.
(Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer
though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity:
"When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate
an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out
agricultural system."
Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten percent --
follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central
Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He
attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture
forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. "Some of
these guys move their bees a dozen times a year," he says. Popular
pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees
for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30
percent). Farmers won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get
beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on
honeybee pollination.
It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a
combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most
crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson's area; now there
are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using
petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land
have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all
except the target crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown
this way. That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.
Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal mine," a
different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert
Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: "If the bee disappeared
off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left.
No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more
man." Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says
everything.
Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in
trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects small
enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species to honeybees,
another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First
tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites in the '90s -- even before
last winter, the world's honeybee population had declined by half in 30
years.
UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived,
winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the
norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and
now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and
others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of
the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's
losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have
decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing
substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical
mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding -- in
other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination
income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.
The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified cause,
and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites,
beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan Wilson
successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint
extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the
slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until the mid-'90s nobody
dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver says. Once they did, the
race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck
with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the
varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an
Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it
labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not
eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites).
According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we continue
to use chemical treatments."
Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy
load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used
to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses
carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that's tolerated by
healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there's the
stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every
year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida
hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the
beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.
Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on
reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the
presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory
must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with
enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results.
No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study,
would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by
landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions
are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point.
Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most
consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence more
obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It's the
stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee malnutrition.
High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for
bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and
between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods.
Compounding the problem, we're talking genetically modified corn and soy,
every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects?
US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or
brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to
"significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives already
weakened by varroa mites.
We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and
low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's best bee forage
habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a
source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges
usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen
sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will
overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO
pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured
diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture --
nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're
exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and one more
influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather can damage the
protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global
warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend.
Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered a
surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one
specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking
that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, "the only hope is the
USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all
year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy grail" of bee research. The USDA's
proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented
and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may
manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled
from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom.
How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of
beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their
colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened without a
change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee
businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees
to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a
queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The
receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper
nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be
expanding the colony.
The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis
cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The
Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads
to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was
the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it
was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers
realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the
entire US honey crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next
year's almond season.
To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing with
this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like
"organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of
survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are
potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more
diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up
to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops
have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest
remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30
percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination.
Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas.
Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars of restoration
agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big picture that's harder
to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the
biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the
motivation we need to change -- do we want to continue to eat?
The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is
published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. (510-548-2235). The
material is to be circulated for educational purposes only, and is not to be
reprinted in any publication, or distributed for commercial purposes,
including copying for sale, without the permission of the editor of Terrain.
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