Disappearing bees, and other myths and conspiracies

[urbpan]

I've been feeling some pressure to write about the great bee disappearance even though I don't really know too much about it, and the fact that the mainstream media is all over it kind of turns me off. I do feel like my role is to straighten people out about the hype, and to correct some important misconceptions. The phenomenon is spooky, because the bees that are disappearing are just disappearing. They aren't dropping dead in their hives, they are flying away and leaving the hives empty.

Anyway, important things to know: We are talking about honeybees, semidomestic insects native to Eurasia that have been kept for honey production for millennia. Not any of the other several thousand species of bees, wasps, hornets, etc. (But then again, if those disappeared, it wouldn't be as obvious, because people don't keep them in semi-captive colonies.) So if you are worried about how wild plants in North America are going to reproduce without honeybees, don't, because those wild plants will be pollinated by whatever was pollinating them for the millions of years they existed before honeybees were introduced.

The big problem (and the reason that the corporate controlled media would bother to cover a story about an insect species' decline) is that honeybees are used to pollinate commercial crops. Hives are put in to trucks and driven hundreds of miles to farms, and allowed out to pollinate fields of melons, or orchards of plums or whatever crop needs a pollinator to 'bear fruit.' These large scale beekeepers are the ones who are finding big chunks of their (flock? herd?) animal collections simply empty. They are also the ones putting their bees through the stress of a ride on a truck, they are the ones feeding their bees high fructose corn syrup to make up for the fact that many crops are poor nectar producers, and they are ones exposing their bees to crops that have been given insecticides that make all parts of the plant poisonous including the nectar and pollen.

"Why are the bees declining?" begins to sound a little coy, if not naive. (If only someone would write a groundbreaking book about the dangers of widespread insecticide use...)

If you continue to be curious about the missing bees, please read this article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=1829

Comments

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

I wish they could reduce the population of bees in Australia. I'm sure they're just as valuable commercially here (and admittedly, I don't mind a bit of honey), but they are a terrible pest that likes to invade potential nesting hollows of birds and mammals. And most of the time once bees have been there - even if they have been removed - an animal won't live there anymore.

And they sting and make me swell up. Hence my mild phobia of the bloody things.

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

I worked in a greenhouse in Vermont almost ten years ago, and there was a lot of talk about disappearing bees and problems in orchards and the perennial plant community. I've also heard that Sevin and other pesticides are largely to blame for the disappearance, but then people say it's the mites, or that it's not the mites. There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around, or confusion, and hopefully people will start getting together in conferences and workshops and sharing information from different parts of the country.

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

I was actually just at a local entomological society meeting and there were a couple presentations on investigations involving bees that were semi-related to CCD, though they weren't addressing it directly. There is some sharing goin on, and yeah, it's not a new problem, just one that's gotten worse.

Part of the problem that we're not entirely certain what's causing the elevated loss of bees. I mean, yeah, what Urbpan said concerning pesticides and the stress of moving, etc are part of it, but a lot of research is focused on a cause; there's been very little work (I'm aware of) on finding the synergistic causes. I highly doubt any particular element is to blame, but combinations of issues.

And, Urbpan, thanks for clearing up some of the misconceptions on the subject (such as the fact that it's only Apis mellifera affected, and that there are millions of other pollinators).

[interglossa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this post. We had been wondering about the colony collapse syndrome stories in the news ourselves.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

[morbidloren.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Since these stories have been coming out, I've been seeing more bees than ever this spring. They seem to be everywhere in San Francisco, happily going about their business. I've been amazed at the variety of things that are striped and yellow and going from flower to flower. It seemed impossible to me that in San Francisco, the land of cell phones and wireless networks, that the bee population had been driven off. You've provided some of the information I was missing. Good theories, too.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

my pleasure. partial information is one of my pet peeves.

[weavingfire.livejournal.com]

I've also seen more bees than usual, but mostly bumblebees here in Oregon.

I think this line says it all Anyone who’s ever taken a cat to the vet, much less cross-country, knows that most animals do not like car rides. Now imagine taking a flying insect across the country in the back of a truck, where it’s unable to fly and stays in complete darkness. Bees, which function almost entirely by smell, spend days on end inundated with car exhaust and diesel fumes.

[droserary.livejournal.com]

From what I've read and heard, the phenomenon isn't as pronounced here in the Western US.

People also seemed to get into a panic about not having enough food. 1) We are now a net food importer (for the first time since the James River Colony... That tells ya something right there), so we won't be running out of food any time soon. 2) Many crop plants are anemophilous, or pollinated by wind. I spoke to a bee keeper friend of mine who doesn't seem to be too worried about all of this and actually sees it as a good sign--that perhaps the large commercial bee operations may be replaced by smaller, local ones that can promote organic use of their bees and further perpetuate the local foods movement. (There's an idea for you to write about: Local foods vs. organic food--if you had to pick, which should it be?)

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

preferably local *and* organic? That said, it's a good question. Trucking food in with the resultant costs of that in oil and gas, never mind packaging (at least from the perspective of living in Nova Scotia, where the bulk of our food is shipped from either Ontario and Quebec, if not further west, or the New England States at least) vs artificial fertilizer and hothouse plants, but less oil and gas waste. There there is also the infrastructure based around the vast amount of trucking, and the degradation of the environment based on that, with no incentives for rail usage.

[droserary.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. I prefer local and organic as well, but it's often the case that you can't find both.
I'm always reminded of this movement at the college my partner works at. The institution purchased an old building downtown (a dying downtown in a small community near Columbus, Ohio) and is turning it into a functional community building with available storage and kitchens that are up to FDA codes. Local farmers will be able to come to this location, store their goods, make their products, and then sell them to local businesses. The problem often was that big buyers like grocery store chains wouldn't sell their products (jams, jellies, etc.) because it hadn't been made in a kitchen that was up to FDA codes. So now the college is facilitating this new way for people to move their product from field to plate and also help the locals begin to think about where their food really comes from. It's truly fascinating.

http://rurallife.kenyon.edu/FFT/index.html

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

I'm very fortunate here in Halifax (Nova Scotia) that the farmer's market is both on a bus route and downtown so is also easily accessible. I can get meat, veggies, and fruit - so long as they are in season - at the market. The one exclusive organic store, is again, on an accessible bus route.

Now, if only I can convince my roommates to actually get up early in the morning on Saturday to go...

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

I've heard the Halifax farmer's market is very good. I haven't been there though.

Unfortunatley, the local grocery stores are not very helpful to our local producers, causing them to lose a lot of crop. They won't put in orders for large quantities of produce early enough for the producers to harvest the orders and are too willing to go to imported products for lower costs (and generally quality), resulting in producers not knowing if an order will even be placed. I'm glad I'm not trying to make a living in agriculture :P

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

The Halifax market is huge, and very diverse, never mind labyrinthine. I'd have to check about whether the local groceries do that here as well. They probably get more money from the larger growers in Ontario and the New England States (incentives) than local. I remember reading a paper that states only 15-20%, if that, of food is grown in the Maritimes for the Maritimes. I found this rather disturbing.

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

Sobey's seems to be particularly uncooperative in working with local producers, though Superstore isn't fantastically cooperative either, but a bit better. At least this is what I've gathered from working with a few growers on CB. The growers in the Valley and Truro might have an easier time, but I doubt it.

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

That's the feeling I got, which is why farmer's markets are rather big here. And with that article on the insecticides used on a lot of crops that bees pollinate, I'm even more leery of buying crops shipped from away, never mind the honey, and with practices I know nothing about.

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for posting this! I garden and raise chickens at my home in Columbus. Next year I'll be looking to lease some land to expand our operations and get in on one of the local farmers markets. My wife and I have thought of all kinds of ways to boost profits by selling value-added products rather than just raw produce, chicken, and eggs, but the one thing holding us back is not having access to a commercial kitchen. This is a useful link you've posted. Thanks!

[droserary.livejournal.com]

No problem. If I understand correctly, the commercial kitchen is still in the planning phases and I'm not sure when it's scheduled for completion (as far as I know, rennovation hasn't even begun), but definitely get in touch with the folks at Kenyon. Their food services tries to use all local products as well. You might have something they need or beat the price of someone that already supplies it to them.

Also getting in touch with them will encourage Kenyon that there's interest in their Food for Thought campaign and the commercial kitchen.

Best of luck in your efforts!

[droserary.livejournal.com]

A more specific link that was buried in text might help explain the initiative in depth:
http://rurallife.kenyon.edu/FFT/Buckeye.html

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I suspected it was a lot of nothing, or that there were important parts of the story that were missing from the mainstream media reports. Frigging truck traveling bees, and they wonder that things get screwy. Sheeesh.

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

Heya Jef. I've enjoyed your work for so long, and I respect your writing, but that throwaway line about "corporate-owned media" represents such a profound misunderstanding about how media work that I felt I had to speak up.

I've worked for corporate-owned papers and I currently work for an independantly-owned paper, one of the last indy dailies left. I can't speak for other media, but in print, content control from a corporate owner is so rare that it's considered remarkable and outrageous, and people are known to quit over it.

The real problem with corporate-owned media is money. Big corporations want to make a lot of it. Newspapers, however, are not big money makers and never have been. A paper that's running a 20 % profit margin is doing very well, but from a corporate standpoint it's doing so poorly that layoffs may be in the works.

So the papers cut corners. They can't affort to pay for foreign bureaus. They can't afford to send reporters to breaking stories out of state. They can't afford to keep a book section, or a science section, or a music critic. So these things get axed.

So you end up with reporters whose job it is to cover business, politics, and sports, because these things sell the most papers to the most people.

Now, if a large group of insect in the wild disappeared, I and many of my colleagues would find it fascinating, but few of us would have the opportunity to write it because it doesn't fit in the beats that were left after the cut backs.

So the bee story gets shoehorned in to "business," a surviving beat.

Corporate news IS a bad thing, but not for the reason you imply.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what it appeared I was implying, but I meant basically exactly what you said. Since media is driven by money, it is driven by pandering to the lowest common denominator. A story about insects is only going to run if it has an economic impact, or somehow can appeal to people who only pick up the paper for the sports.

There doesn't have to be an explicit control of media content--just the dictum that the content has to sell papers is controlling enough.

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

AH - my bad. Usually when people start talking about the Corporate Meda (TM) they are implying that So Called News is Dictated by The Man. I get this from friends on both the right and the left, so I've gotten a wee bit oversensitive. Thanks, and please forgive me for underestimating your considerable intelligence : )

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Not at all! There are certain buzz words or phrases ("corporate media" or perhaps "liberal media") which have meaning beyond or less than literal. I should avoid them. I was a little lazy writing this screed at 7 this morning. :)

[hhw]

I still like the rapture theory best.

[harrietbrown.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to that article. It filled in a lot of missing information for me. It's still alarming, though.

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

I was at a Backyard Beekeeper meeting in Ct. recently and some scientists from the Agricultural Experiment Station at University of Connecticut (a chemist, and entomologist, and someone else) spoke. They said that while they're still seriously researching the pesticide angle (especially a relatively new class called, I think, neonicotinoids, at the moment, they are leaning toward a parasitic or viral cause. The reason that commercial bees would be more affected by whatever it is than backyard-kept bees, they think, is the same reason that TB spreads faster in slums than in rural areas: population density and stress. When they're trucked around they're exposed to many more same-species bees from other hives than they would normally be, so the opportunity to get infected is far greater.

[squid-ink.livejournal.com]

OMG I might be going to a meeting at the end of the month (in Weston on the 26th). Turns out I'm from a line of beekeepers and wanted to find out more (I'm in lower Litchfield)

I've heard that these sort of 'collapses' happen alot in the insect world.. it's just that the bees have gotten alot of press because of their commercial value and lets face it, they're cute.

[stealthww.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that hobby beekeepers don't always report hive problems they are experiencing. It's a problem we're experiencing here in Kansas right now.

[macabre-grrl.livejournal.com]

Thank you for clearing that up.

[stealthww.livejournal.com]

Colony collapse disorder is not only happening to those bees being transported for mass pollenation. It's happening to many hobby beekeeper's hives as well as hived in Europe. Several possibilities have been suggested such as pesticides and such but the bottom line is they have no idea what causes it. It's not quite as simple a situation as you suppose. If it was just a pesticide problem then you could observe the characteristic die off underneath the hive and we would not see this weird mass transit abandoning of the hive. Just thought I'd let you know as I've been hearing about it from several different sources besides the popular media :)