Bee-Ing and Nothingness
Why have the bees left the environment?
By Mick Farren
To liken the present decade to a low-budget science fiction movie is hardly original, but, all too often, dangerously apt. In this case, what lurks inexplicably is the mystery of the vanishing bees. Since the fall of 2006, millions of bees have simply disappeared. They are seemingly dead, although, in many cases, no corpses are found. The story has received a certain degree of media play, but the possibility has largely been ignored that these millions of lost bees could be an indication that much more may be amiss with our planetary environment that just greenhouse gases and rising temperatures.
Back in February, The New York Times ran a report from Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley, about how beekeeper David Bradshaw inspected his hives last January and found half of his 100 million bees gone without trace. And this weird, X-Files phenomenon - dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - isn't merely confined to California. It's being repeated in at least 24 states in the U.S., and similar reports are coming in from all over Europe. In Spain, hundreds of thousands of colonies have been lost. Eight-hundred miles away, beekeepers in Croatia estimated five million bees had died in just 48 hours. In Poland, the beekeeper's association estimated up to 40 percent of their bees were wiped out last year, while Greece, Switzerland, Italy, and Portugal report similar losses.
The majority of us generally associate the active little insects with the production of honey, but, in both agri-industry and the global ecology, the major function of bees is to pollinate plants. A Cornell University study estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables, and nuts. "Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation told the Times. In addition, a huge industry exists, moving multiple bee colonies from one location to another to pollinate commercial crops.
German bee expert Joergen Tautz, a professor at Wurzburg University, amplifies the bee's crucial role in quotes on the Daily Kos website: "They are vital to biodiversity. Bees are essential to the pollination of over 130,000 plants, from melons to pumpkins, raspberries, and all kinds of fruit trees, as well as animal fodder like clover." Tautz makes it clear that this depopulation of bees has the potential for environmental catastrophe, and, in a worst-case scenario, crops, fodder - and therefore livestock - could die from a lack of pollinating insects.
The hunt for the cause of CCD and the decimated beehives is currently taking multiple directions. Fingers have been pointed at some of the usual corporate suspects like Monsanto and its Triple Hybrid genetically modified corn, and also Bayer's Gaucho pesticide. Each may have caused neurological damage and altered the bees' sense of orientation, but little hard evidence has yet to be produced that they are the culprits. Among the stranger suggestions is that mobile phone signals can disrupt the bees' complex "internal navigation systems." According to a report in UK online science magazine The Register, German researchers at Landau University placed cordless-phone docking units, which emit electromagnetic radiation, into beehives. They found that "70 percent of bees exposed to radiation failed to find their way back to the hive after searching for pollen and nectar."
Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota has suggested on various academic websites that the beekeeping industry itself could be causing the problem. Using California as an example, where hundreds of millions of bees are transported each year to pollinate almond plantations, Spivak argues, "Such high density could create competitive stress for bee colonies. And to avoid food shortages, beekeepers often supplement hive production with high-fructose corn syrup, which may poison the bees if the syrup is not properly prepared. Beekeepers also use pesticides to control insect pests. They want to kill the mite, not the bee, but mites and bees are related! And now the mites have evolved resistance to the pesticides."
And yet, neither mites nor poisons, while potentially lethal, should create such a bizarre inconsistency in the way CCD plagues non-migrating colonies as well as the mobile hives of the pollination business. Response to the crisis is equally diverse. At one extreme, the House Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture will hold hearings, and, at the other, no less than Fidel Castro cites the bee tragedy in an attack on the Bush administration's treatment of the environment. Meanwhile, the rest of us simply repress a gnawing unease that things might actually be worse than we already imagine.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
Published: 04/19/2007
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