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The decline of bees won't just affect honey production - they're as important as the sun and rain in making crops grow
Britain's honeybees have suffered catastrophic losses this year according to the first survey of UK beekeepers. Close on one in three hives failed to make it through this winter and spring - that's about 80,000 colonies - leaving us with a potential crisis on our hands. Fewer honeybees will, as you'd expect, mean less honey. But as British honey only accounts for around 10% of the honey we consume in the UK, we should still be able to spread the sweet stuff on our toast well after the indigenous varieties run out, albeit at a higher price, as droughts in Argentina and the conversion of land for biofuel production reduce global supply.
More worryingly, insects pollinate a third of everything we humans eat - most fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, and forage for our livestock. As we become more and more dependent on a monoculture system of growing food, we become more reliant on the honeybee to do the bulk of this work; trucked into an area for just a few days or weeks when a single crop is blossoming, they can be moved in their hives to more fertile pastures when the orchards and fields turn into a barren wasteland. Not so the bumblebees, solitary bees, moths and butterflies who have suffered a sharp decline as a result of modern farming practices.
US farmers have already warned Congress that they are being forced to reduce their acreage of crops because of a shortage of honeybees for pollination and the subsequent rising cost of renting hives. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), the term used to describe the mysterious wipeout of more than a third of US honeybees - a million this year, 800,000 the year before - has not yet been confirmed in Britain.
Wet weather, the varroa mite and inappropriate controls to reduce the parasite are being blamed for our bee decline.
Whatever the causes, how long before the yields from British apple orchards are affected?
We could just import more food, but with honeybees dying on a similar scale around the world, our global food production is far from secure. Better to find the culprit. But that entails spending more money on research, something the UK government seems loath to do as made clear by its response to a petition backing the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) call for £8m over five years to "fund scientific research into maintaining UK bee stocks".
But measures could be put in put in place now that don't cost anything, most importantly tighter pesticide controls. EU agriculture ministers have backed proposals for more stringent safety tests on pesticides including extra safeguards to ensure chemicals are not toxic to bees. Britain was one of the few countries that abstained from agreeing to this plan despite current tests being woefully inadequate for protecting honeybee colonies. Researchers have found that widely used pesticides can interfere with honeybees' sophisticated communication systems and impair memory. They have not been ruled out as one of the factors contributing to CCD in the US. British farmers warn that tighter controls could destroy their crop production - a view not shared by their European counterparts. Although the National Farmer's Union supports the BBKA's campaign for more government funding of bee research, it would do better to throw its weight behind stricter pesticide testing. The very chemicals it wants to save could be the ones aiding the destruction of honeybees which we need as much as the sun and rain to make their crops - and our food - grow.
Alison Benjamin is deputy editor of the Guardian's Society section and co-author of A World Without Bees and Keeping Bees and Making Honey.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
45 Comments so far
Show AllThanks Mr. Obvious!
And you too KEM.
EconomyJetSetter - not sure if anyone can leave out politics and personalities, but the National Geological Survey may be as close as you can get.
http://www.usgs.gov/
I spoke with a lady yesterday who works for a state enviromental agency and she and I are going to do some talking to the proper authorities here. She was aware of the lower bird populations and the bees demise, but hadn't given much though abut the decline of other inscets, but when we started discussing it, her husvand agreed right away, sanying he hadn't seen any ladybugs, praying mantis, etc either. It was like it just dawned on him.
Yep ~JC~ the fishing is a big problem every place now also. Then when you do catch some, it isn't safe to eat them. We use them for fertilizer. We have squash plants that are almost five feet high and the tomato plants are even larger. It is sort of sad to dump a nice big sunfish in a hole and see it's eye staring rather sadly at you though. Of course they're already dead. ___ Suffocated em.
~JET SETTER~ Your account of the dinner in Brooklyn was really nice. Thanks for sharing it. ___ Humans are good.
KEM: Sent along your comments to my friend. Thanks for all the detail. And part of my 'economy' travels had the most extensive Easter dinner at an Italian family's home in Brooklyn. Went on for hours - with an intermission. Was staying at the Y downtown waiting for a freighter to Europe. That dinner was the most fun I had in NYC.
MR.OBVIOUS: I agree with you entirely. Have you found a web site that collects the pieces of this patchwork of changes around the world? One that leaves out the politics and personalities - a global nature watch?
Kem Patrick - Thanks for the tip o the hat to Brooklyn. About the Italians - I grew up in the Bronx and whereas others paved over or planted some desultory grass in their little yards, the Italians planted lilacs, tomatos, grapes and climbing roses on trellises and made their yards into little paradises.
The fishing out of Sheepshead Bay is in trouble periodically though.
Thanks Jason and especially Kem for sticking with the issue. Kem, I don't know where you get the patience. I mostly ignore people who are obviously out to provoke.
Kem - Have you contacted your state Department of Natural Resources? Our local folks would get engaged and bring in the Fish and Wildlife folks as well. Such a dramatic change should get their attention, since this sounds pretty dire. The trees not setting fruit may be the "smoking gun" for showing that something is up.
Thanks for the info "all". I'm certain there are places where there are birds and the bees. How many in comparrison to three years ago? I am saying what we see in a few hundred square mile of mostly BLM and government land area, compared to what was normal up until three years ago.
My major thought, is it is not just honey bees, it's every type of inscet imaginable, from lady bugs to moths, frogs, bats and even house flies that are totally absent or very scarce. It is abnormal. No one sprays chemical poison anywhere near here and I've read many articles here at Common Dreams about this being a world wide issue.
Thank you for the info on the oaks, but when we did have bees, they swarmed the oak trees, sounded like a small chain saw buzzing with literally millions of them up there. They probably take pollen even though the oaks can self pollinate.
BTW, if you ever want to see a neat area, drive all through Brooklyn. It's a nice surprise in almost all areas. The people really take care of it and the homes are beautiful. Whe you are in an Italian area, every porch has some potted tomatoes and then you can drive down along the shore line and there are the beautiful lined up party fishing boats.
Parking is never a problem. When someone wants to park and run in and pick up some bagels, or their laundry, they just stop in the right hand lane and park. They do have a attitude there that takes some getting used to.
Should have mentioned that our "wild" honey bee population crashed several years ago due to mites, but the new Siberian queens, that the bee keepers brought in, escaped and have restocked the "wild" population nicely. We know of three hives in trees on our farm.
KEM PATRICK,
As you predicted, someone logged in to say that the bees were doing just fine where they live. I did the same in a similar thread last year, but this year I have observed that honeybees are notably sparser in my area (although as yet I've seen no corresponding decrease in other species). They haven't vanished completely, but it's clear that the population has plummetted. The majority of the honeybees in our area are from managed hives with feral bees making up only a tiny portion of the local population. There has clearly been a major shift in the local distribution (such as CCD die-offs, or shipping hives out of state to make up for collapsing populations elsewhere). The honeybees are spread thin.
Regarding your own local shortage of nuts, though, it may not be related to a lack of pollinators. Oak species are wind pollinated. The bee population has no causal relationship to the number of acorns.
Drought would explain the lack of insects and nuts of multiple species that you are seeing. The poor seasons for mesquite on top of that is very troubling, though. Mesquite tends to be drought resistant. But it needs pollinators, which from your description are experiencing a population crash in your area. That could be a problem long after the drought is gone.
Today we took a walk to a fair sized Botanic Garden. Along the way there was a pocket sized community garden. In both places there were good numbers of several different species of bees, as well as butterflies, dragonflies.
We live in Brooklyn, where there is little agriculture. Therefore we have little use of herbicides and not too much pesticide use (except for spraying against mosquitos, which I feel does more harm than good.) I am hoping that small organic gardens scattered here and there will be sanctuaries to keep bee DNA going until we can change our way of treating the earth.
KEM Patrick: Thanks for the answer to her question - about drought! That was the first thing she asked. I passed your answer along. I also left a private email at TruthDig - if that is you?
Mr. Obvious: Thank you too. I realize that any one problem is not insurmountable - but it is good to collate all of them to get a more global picture. The bee problem is happening now in many places on earth. Not good. These symbiotic systems took ions to evolve and seem to be coming apart much faster than anyone predicted. The Arctic melting is also happening much faster. I haven't found a site that assembles all these reports of change to the ecology and mankind, have you?
Unfortunately, from my perspective, each group of scientists, ecologists, economists, researchers, etc. only focus on their area of expertise - not the combination of problems / catastrophes that are intersecting. While not a scholarly work, "The Long Emergency" by James Kunstler at least showed more of the broad picture facing the planet and mankind and while not a "fun" read, it is instructive. I've done deeper amateur research on many of his summaries and they seem to hold water. Only time will tell.
The honey bee situation is serious, but a couple clarifications. The quote by Einstein above is a common urban legend. There is no evidence that Einstein ever commented on honey bees. Maybe the current US population cannot survive without honey bees, but native Americans did it for 30,000 years before European honey bees were brought to North America. Many crops such as fruits and vegetables are pollinated by commercial colonies of honey bees but our commodity crops are not. Commodity crops may not be appetizing, but they keep the poor in developing countries from starving. The honey bee situation will seriously impact several areas of agriculture, but we will not starve; just less of a selection and higher prices at the grocery store.
Kem's situation is perplexing and disturbing, but not widespread. Here in the Midwest, in the heart of industrial monoculture, both wild insects, feral honey bees, birds, and other wildlife are thriving and on the increase. Our apple crop is the largest ever (pollinated by those invasive wild honey bees - tongue and cheek). I too wait to see what the retired professor has to say. Kem - Thank you for commenting on the recent weather in your area, this would have been my first guess. Next I would look at some basic biological resource that has been impacted, and for the birds, I would look to habitat in areas where they migrate from.
Oh ~JETSET~, Let her know that our rainfall this last 18 months has beeen slightly higher than average other than that the weather has been fairly normal. The mountains that feed the river much further south had less rain than normal three years ago and last year, but above normal this year.
Hey Thank you ~Jet Setter~. I'll keep an eye on this thread even when it's buried here in the archive cellar. Let us know what she says.
KEM PATRICK: I also live in that region at about 7100'. I passed your posting on to a well-respected research professor in plant biology who has retired here. I will pass along what she says about the die-off of symbiotic insect and animal species in the food chain when I hear from her.
We're in a small town which is on the edge of BLM & National Park lands. The state forest ranger says the black bears love Kentucky Fried Chicken scrap when they can get it out of the dumpsters - a different kind of symbiosis.
We live in the Southwest ~JET SETTER~. Our aceraage is at the 5,500 foot level. There are two small mountain streams which snake through our property and feed a small river, which is now been dry for at least half of the year for three years.
We're surrounded by hundreds of square miles of heavily forrested land with four variety of oak and pinion nut trees, sycamore, hackberry, misquite and pines. No one within a hundred miles or more has commercial bees and no one sprays the land with pesticides. Our gardens are organic, except we use a little horse apples and steer manure in our compot heaps. No problems whatsoever until the past two years.
The loss of "natural" pollinating inscets and the resulting lack of oak nuts and mesquite beans the past two years has been devistating for the natural wild life which depend upon them for a staple food, black bear, deer, javalina, fox, rabbits, caota-mundi and squirrls.
Until three years ago, our back yard and patio areas were a bird watchers paradise. Not anymore. Specie count dropped from 86 to eleven in two years. Not including every humming bird in the book came here in droves. This year we have seen six total insteas of 70 or more at a time.
We humans ALMOST everywhere, do have a serious problem and the birds are our canaries in the coal mine. I must say "almost", because sure as God made green tomatoes, someone may correct me and say they have lots of birds and inscets and tell me how to raise bees properly. ___ It is not just the honey bees!
KEM:
What region do you live in? I didn't realize that other
species of 'helper' insects were also disappearing. I had
heard about frogs & bees - both very scary die-offs.
On a lighter note, I once tried to 'farm' a hive of bees
in our suburban home in Ohio. I'm a klutzes with a black
thumb, but the bees sure knew what they were doing! They left
me! Which was very, very wise. My neighbors were already talking
about lynching me when a few kids got stung in the summer.
Fortunately, bees don't have license plates so they couldn't
prove they were my bees.
First hearing about the bees disappearing en-mass sent ice down
my spine. It was when I came to the realization that we had tipped
the earth's carrying capacity for people/pollution.
I agree with that ~DELTALORA~, but what happened to the other 19,999 species of bees? What happened to the hornets, wasps, prayin g mantis, butterflies, lady bugs, birds, etc?
There have been numerous articles posted here these last two years about the sudden and dramatic loss of many other species of inscets, amphibians and bird life.
It's a world wide problem, with very few areas of the planet and or here in the United States, where that rather troubling issue and obvious clues that something is very wrong with the atmosphere and our enviroment is not prevelant.
A few have posted comment that they don't observe any serious loss of inscets or birds.___ A very few.
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/nativebee.html
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/nativebee.htmlThank you RonR. This is the best I found. Looks like you can attract bees with common straws.
Kem,
I was waiting for the next bee loss article to suggest that you try planting bee-friendly native flowering plants and establishing your own small hive.
To everyone -- I agree absolutely with Freia. Get rid of your "green desert" and grow a garden; vegetables, fruit, and flowers, all native to your area. My new emphasis on native plants is inspired by reading "Bringing Nature Home" by Douglas W. Tallamy. Tallamy is a professor of entomology whose lifelong research and interest has been how insects function in the food chain. Bottom line: invasive exotic plants break the food chain because they displace native plants which insects rely on for food (especially larvae) and are themselves inedible by these insects.
Grow your own garden and bees -- it's a delightful passtime, good for the planet, bad for Monsanto, restorative to your soul!
ezflyer - There was another article about a proposal to deal with tainted cow meat by implanting all cows with chips. So yes, it was a joke about our irrelevant high tech approaches to biological-practical issues.
Bees? What bees? Of the 20,000 specie of bees, we have seen none for two years, except for ONE DAY a few weeks ago we saw a few.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/update-on-colony-collapse-disorder-oct-200...
"The Pennsylvanis State Department of Agriculture and Columbia University linked CCD with a virus imported from Australia, IAPV or Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. Over the past three years, genetic tests on bees collected from stricken colonies around the U.S. found the virus in 96 percent of bees from hives affected by Colony Collapse Disorder."
"Discovering the IAPV was a lead but not the end of the story. We're looking at IAPV as a marker. It's there. It's present in colonies but viruses by themselves are not known to be that dangerous," says Pettis. Pettis and other scientists believe that CCD is not caused by one single factor, but by a whole host of forces including pesticides, parasites, poor nutrition, and stress. Any of these may leave bees vulnerable to infection and make IAPV lethal. "We know all of those things have affected bees in the past," says Pettis. "We have to look at combinations of factors."
You see...it's a combination of factors. And it is very, very serious. Watch the video of the full episode here:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/video-full-episode/251/
...and be horrified.
Curious though, that they don't explain why it is called "Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus"
zaz. Google orchard bees/ Mason bees & see what you get. Nests are vwery easy to make.As simple as large drinking straws cut 4" long and shoved in a tube. Ron.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/12/eacharles112.xml
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43557
Bees, admirable and valuable though they bee, can be scary to the soft-skinned layman.
Bee = when see, scared.
A hive of bees is one living organisms. Commercial beekeeping does not honor this and feels free to cut and paste the hive with introduced queen, elminating drones, feeding sugar, treating them with poisonous sprays and placing them in monoculture environment. What effect do you suppose this has on that being. Could the bee be the canary in the coalmine?
jclientelle August 14th, 2008 2:14 pm said:
"No - we don't need tighter pesticide controls. Let's implant chips in the bees and study their habits."
You're joking, right?
This particular agricultural disaster did not start with Monsanto, but with Bayer, the company that markets the agrichemical most likely responsible for the bee die-off, neonicotinoids, under the brand names Gaucho and Poncho. (Aren't those names precious?)
Ironically, Bayer is blaming seedmakers (Monsanto markets seeds), saying that we need to spend more time and money investigating any nonchemical causes of this problem.
Instead of spending more millions of dollars investigating this problem to death, while Bayer rakes it in with Gaucho and Poncho, our EPA needs to change its current policy that no independent testing is necessary to market an agrichemical, and that any chemical can remain on the market until it is proven to be a risk.
http://goodgirlroxie.blogspot.com/2008/07/neonicotinoids-are-likely-source-of-bee.html
"When all the bees are gone man has three years left"
Albert Einstein
Et, tu ... bees?
Lets' keep this simple.
No bees = no commercial crops = no food for most of the world.
Scary? You bet your ass. And lost.
Say no to GMO. Buy local. Eat organic.
Not just slogans. Common sense.
"... the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) call for £8m over five years to "fund scientific research into maintaining UK bee stocks"."
Without wishing to denigrate the BBKA's efforts, I think the answer to this catastrophe is already well known. What is lacking is anyone with any balls who is in any position to do anything about it.
Are you listening, our "humble servants"?
We've gone from bees being a pest at the hummingbird feeder to none. A hummingbird feeder might help for a home garden. I've been looking for plans or cheap home for bees to put out back. Can't find.
The organic beekeepers continue to not see colony collapse disorder. Best guess, it's partly new pesticides just introduced, it's partly the greed of the commercial beekeepers pushing their hives to the limit in many different ways.
Commercial beekeepers use slightly larger honeycombs. This creates slightly larger bees each of which hauls much more honey, but it also gives the Varroa Mites more of a chance of killing bee larvae and multiplying. The beekeepers then fight the mites with an insecticide. If you have CCD, try slightly smaller honeycomb diameters.
I think the predator drones can sprinkle Monsonto proprietary pollen on the flowers. Who needs bees?
We can play our part in restoring the bee population. GET RID OF YOUR LAWN. We did that and replaced with flowers and at one pass through the yard I can count 50-100 bees. Mostly bumblebees, but an occasional honeybee. The suburban lawn is a wasteland. It is time to reclaim it as crucial habitat.
When will Monsanto start producing nanotech robot bees to replaced the real ones killed by GM and Roundup?
No - we don't need tighter pesticide controls. Let's implant chips in the bees and study their habits.
"In his lectures on Bees in 1923, Rudolf Steiner predicted the dire state of the honeybee today. He said that, within fifty to eighty years, we would see the consequences of mechanizing the forces that had previously operated organically in the beehive. Such practices include breeding queen bees artificially."
read more at www.skylarkbooks.co.uk/shop/media/bees.htm
The honeybee is not native to the US. Bees are treated like slaves with little regard for their needs. If larger animals such as horses or dogs were treated like this, everyone would be up in arms. The fact that the honeybee is so small shouldn't make a difference. They have an intelligence and a very complex and social life.
Hi ~JetSet and Economy~. Thank for the respnse. Oh, what is Truth Dig?
The south west has been experiencing an official drought condition for about the last eight or so years. What is considered "normal" rainfall here since that began is about 8 inches a year, which we have approached most of those years at our local and this year we have gotten near 10 iches just this July and August, but hardly any in Dec thru Feburary.
All during those years and up until the last two years, the bird numbers were normal, as were the types or variety of specie. Two years ago a "dramatic" decrease of specie and numbers began and that continued last year and this year. We are now experincing Crason's silent spring.___ And Summer. We also do not have the night songs of any frogs which are normal during our summer monsoon season. Nada, none.
The dove population was still fair, about half of normal but with with only two speie of dove for the past two years.
Then suddenly, our days ago we found a dead dove on our rear bird watcher deck and since then we have only seen three dove instead oftwenty or more, those three were the larger specie "White Winged dove", and none of the morning dove which have always stayed here year round. We also suddenly lost the Mexican Jays which are territorial and we have a family of eight to ten year round that dropped to four then to two this year and now none.
We have not seen a thrasher or any mocking birds, rufus sided tohees, horned larks, etc, for two years and now we have abouit six hummers and four years ago we were crawling with them, 60 to 70 at a time. Every year for the past three years, their numbers have dropped by half or more each year.
But it was last year when the butterflies and other types of inscets just about vanished over night. We always had several type of bees here and of course the honey bees were Africanized so one had to be cautious when hiking. We also had lot of hornets and wasps, now none at all. The oaks and mesquite were always all loaded with blossems every year. NO bees humming in them fo rtwo years and there are no nuts or mesquite beans. Well, there are a few mesquite beans on some trees. And one day we saw some bumble bees pollinating a mesquite tree aandone day a few honey bees pollinated our peach trees.
The only thing we are personally aware in our immediate local that may be linked to the enviroment, other than global warming and climeate change is:
Several miles from us, the military and police and border patrol began using a rifle range for practice, which had been primarily only civilian use. The military came in with heavy equipment two years ago and upgraded it. We are down wind from that range. Hate to be a pest about DU, but I wonder about possible DU ammo? Sometmes it sounds like it may be 50 cal rifles being fired. They are olny there occasionally and sometime they do night firing. Not a lot, but we can hear them if the wind is right, even though we are seperated by a low mountain range. I understnad the smaller cal DU ammo has been phased out; but who can believe anything the government says? Except McCain, Pelosi and Obama.
We have a garden/orchard and we always have native plants and flowers plus tomatoes and eggplant, and we've never had any problems until LAST year.
We live at the boundries of many thousands of acres of government land, which is filled with millions of oaks of different varieties, hundreds of square miles of land. Never in recorded history have the oaks not been loaded with nuts. They were a staple food for the American Indian tribes. No nuts last year or this year. No bees, and the trees blossoms are never pollinted by commercial honey bees here.
We have not seen any butterflies, hornets, wasps, lady bugs, praying mantis, very few moths, etc, even house flies numbers are very low. It isn't only the honey bees which have suddenly disappeared. It's also birds which have left and no one sprays gardens with pesticides anywhere near here either.
EconomyJetSetter - While the possible causes for CCD are not yet completely understood, our movement of this insect around the globe certainly makes disease(s) a likely culprit. Our relationship with honey bees extends back at least to the time of the pharaohs, and like many of our domesticated animals and plants, we have selected populations that provide us with more of what we need, and which largely depend on us to survive. We have lots of big environmental problems to solve, but from my vantage, these are not "catastrophes that are intersecting". This is just the gradual overuse of limited resources that keeps building. The current "green" movement is largely a very good thing, but it would be incredibly more effective if more folks were informed of the facts rather than the rhetoric. Hyperbole causes the informed to tune out.