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New Film Seeks Answer to Mystery of Vanishing Bees
"Vanishing of the Bees," which has a limited theatrical release in Britain from next week, follows the fate of a group of U.S. beekeepers hit by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which first struck in 2004 and made U.S. headlines three years later.
Countless bees would suddenly vanish, leaving an empty hive but few bodies, and the phenomenon has variously been linked to mites, disease, genetically modified crops, mobile phones and, in the words of one beekeeper, "PPB," or "piss-poor beekeeping."
While the cause has yet to be established, the film suggests there is a link to pesticides, and particularly those applied to seeds as opposed to sprayed on existing plants.
Other factors could also contribute, it added, including the fact that bees are being transported long distances to pollinate single crops, or monocultures, rather than producing honey.
The dominance of monocultures in U.S. agriculture means crops flower only once a year, and so cannot support indigenous insects. So devastating were the effects of CCD that beekeepers started shipping bees from Australia to meet U.S. demand.
U.S.-based directors George Langworthy and Maryam Henein argue that the problem goes beyond the disappearance of the insects. One third of everything we eat is pollinated by bees and without them farming could be thrown into chaos.
"They are one of our most ancient allies," Henein said in an interview in London. "We actually depend on honey bees to eat. May be out of selfishness it raises a red flag."
Langworthy added: "It's a broader issue about the system of agriculture. People are going to have to rethink it and maybe they don't want to. It really will have to be driven by the general public's call for change."
"FAITH AND CREDIT CARDS"
The film makers said they paid for the 90-minute documentary with a combination of their own money and outside funding.
"We started shooting here and there on the weekends, but once we started to learn about the story we realized it was of vital importance," Langworthy said of the $500,000 picture.
"We just went off on faith and credit cards. We felt this was hugely important and quit our jobs and put our all into it."
Vanishing of the Bees, which celebrates the honeybee and its contribution to our food supply, travels to France, where in 2004 the government restricted the use of Bayer CropScience's Gaucho insecticide on the grounds that it may harm bees.
A spokesman for the company, which features prominently in the movie, contested some of its findings.
"Where these products have been restricted (as in France) they have seen zero improvement," said Julian Little, spokesman for Bayer CropScience, a unit of German drugs and chemicals group Bayer AG.
"It is also true that the healthiest bees are in Australia, where they don't have the varroa mite but they do use a lot of neonicotinoid seed treatments. Neonicotinoids are safe when used properly. Let's not pretend this is an objective documentary."
Langworthy said changes to the way people farm in the United States would have to come from the public.
"I'm very optimistic, because when you look at the situation you could parallel it with global warming, which no one had ever heard of 10 years ago. We're on the cusp of this becoming a mirror of that progress in the system of agriculture."
Vanishing of the Bees opens in selected British theatres on October 9. Henein said she hoped for a U.S. release next spring.
17 Comments so far
Show AllVanishing bee colonies is way more scary than global warming. The potentially devastating effects of global warming takes years to manifest and is very difficult to measure. The effects of the disappearance of bees will be immediate and completely known. No food, no humans.
There are more pollinators than just the 'honey bee', but unfortunately ALL pollinators seem to be in flux. The honey bee gets the publicity because we also harvest the honey and we use them as a commercial commodity, but ground bees, butterflies, bats, and even ants are among the animals that help feed us. Some crops can be wind pollenated, but not many.
Kill off the pollinators and we'll see just how 'labor intensive' agriculture can become, as it will take the human touch using fine brushes and lots of patience....
interesting ,thanks. do you know what percentage honey bees play in the pollination of commercial fruits and vegetables ?
Sorry, don't know the percentages. I'd suspect that for 'commercial' usage, the honeybee would be the work horse of the trade, since most commercial farmers spray non-discriminate pesticides, wiping out the good with the bad, and then importing hives of bees to do the work. These bees are brought in after the initial spraying just at bloom and then transported to other areas to do other crops.
Most home gardeners have a tendency to interplant vegetable crops with flowers and have parimiters of tree fruit. My mountain mint, which blooms til past the first frost usually has fifteen or so varieties of bees and flying insects around it most of the year (York Co., Me.), and I find that vegetables grown within forty or fifty feet of this patch do quite well. (Have to work to keep this variety of mint in check however, since it is "hardy"). A variety of flowers throughout the garden is important to feed the pollinators when the desired crop is not in bloom, plus they provide daily posies to put on the kitchen table.
Just an opinion, but I believe that much of the commercial vegetable crops will move indoors to commercial green houses quite soon. corn and soy, by necessity will remain open grown but are more wind pollinated crops anyway.
They just quit in disgust.
When we're gone, they'll be back.
i do think you are right snoop.................power to the bees.
I've talked with local farmers who keep bees, and they said their bees are doing fine. They're convinced that when bees are dragged from one location to another and fed junk food (high fructose corn syrup) their immune systems collapse. It's that simple.
Like the frogs, they are our canaries in the gold mine.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
We dragged bees around and fed them syrup 45 years ago. I'm sure it wasn't the smartest thing to do, but they found their way around just fine.
Where's "local" for you?
Whether what you say is accurate or not, there was no high fructose corn syrup 45 years ago. High fructose corn syrup makes Karo syrup or sugar water look like health foods.
Joe
Dead Balls On, Joe.
And 45 years ago it wasn't unstable GMO (genetically modified organism) based either. Spikes of Cancer and Leukemia are not likely due to more screening, but chromosome damage which can happen to any organism exposed to GM food.(as their own FDA tests showed at high concentrations fed to mice.) If the crops are poison, what do you think is going on with our food? It's tainted at the MonInsaneto Source.
Big-Corp Self-Policing is for suckers. Solution? Get offshore and only eat weird tropical tree products nobody's ever heard of. My Immune system was in the crapper, but now after getting outta there and avoiding anything in a plastic bag I never get sick anymore. It's really amazing just how bad our food really is. And guess what CrimCorp bought up all the dietary supplement companies? Yep. Big Pharma. Sort of a conflict of interest there maybe, aye? Ya think? If they sell you sugar pills with no absorption uplift capacity and you get sick, now you're going to buy their drugs in the pharmacy right? They clean up at both ends.
WallStreetWhoreScumbags!
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
There was a recent study in India that confirmed that radio frequency radiation from cell towers is destroying the ability of bees to navigate. i imagine this was not included in the film because it wouldn't be polite to the telecom companies that keep most of the devastating information from americans who are being saturated with thousands of times more RF than Europeans have to live with. two websites to check out. the first is the story about the bees and the second is my site regarding the perils of wireless technology
http://www.physorg.com/news170920128.html
http://www.wirelesswatchblog.com
?????
Please Google “Our Forgotten Pollinators”. This was reported on "Democracy Now' by Amy Goodman in December 1997. There is also a book. No one is listening and most people cannot read.
The people in this country are the most undereducated in the world. They have no concept of how life works. They are stunted. They are under the impression that their food comes from the store.
They are told that it is "creation" and not evolution. They are told to practice abstinence, and not educated about sex. When they follow these myths, their lives fail.
I raise chickens. You would be surprised how many people have no idea where eggs come from. They are forever asking me what will you do with all of the “baby” chickens you will get. I have four hens. Hello! I do not have a rooster! Some people do not want my eggs because they think there is a baby chicken in them. Some do not want them because the only GOOD egg comes from the grocery store.
I could go on, but you would pee your pants at some of the nonsense that people “think” they know about living things. To answer one question here…thirteen years ago I heard that one fifth of our food supply is pollinated. What that percentage is today I am not sure. However, what would happen to this country if we suddenly lost 20% of our food supply. What would happen to the rest of the world?
Dogface you are right about how removed we are from the natural world.
Food and flower gardening should be a part of every school's science and social studies curriculum. Possibly egg-laying chickens if practical. It would be remedial for children who never see where food had been before it was displayed in a supermarket.
You gain a great deal of elemental knowledge from farming. You really learn it - you see it, hear it, smell it, feel it, try to change it, record events. The conclusions are not imposed, but developed through a combination of mental and physical activity. It would develop the process of starting with observations and questions and moving on to participation and knowledge. It would help replace the drilling, absorbing from a workbook, memorizing method of teaching in the public schools with the often touted but rarely honored "critical thinking".
But alas, it might rob space from a parking spot, and it is not on the test... so....
Joe
An organic lawn with plenty of clover and other bee-friendly blossoms could be the new fashion. Clover lawns could be sweet smelling sanctuaries for honeybees. A hive box might help too.
If and when we eventually start understanding and respecting the interconnected ways of nature on a large scale, there will be some bee DNA available to re-populate the species.
Joe
Dogface and jclientelle above are correct. Right now I keep two hives, three chickens, and five raised bed vegetable gardens in my yard: 2.27 acres in South Florida. I have to fight bobcats, coons, opossums, rabbits, local government, and worst of all neighbors like Dogface and jclientelle speak of.
My subdivision outlaws gardening; the city outlaws beekeeping, and the county outlaws chickens. I've done all three violations since before they became violations (1973). Certain new neighbors out of fear or hatred periodically call Code Enforcement and the cops show up. I had to remove my five pet peacocks [actually one is a peahen] this past summer because the subdivision president is an attorney and used the power of his position to force me to give them up--due to their mating calls during March and April.
Outlanders from up north ["my" subdivision president is one--although I was here long before his gated community] come here with preconceived misunderstandings very like what Dogface describes. Their notions are promulgated by television and other sources of mass deception. Problem is they have power! It's anti-life, anti-nature, and anti-intellectual. But these people can take away my creatures.
Bees here thirty years ago didn't have tracheal mites, wax moths, small hive beetles, predatory Africanization, and farmers with Bayer poisons. And we beekeepers had some power. We called on Mosquito Control to stop spraying at dawn when the bees were on their ways to their nectar sources. And they did! They instituted night time mosquito killing.
Now even the ants have become a terrible problem for my bees. I do all I can to help them fight hive destroyers. They don't always appreciate my efforts and sometimes sting me and mine, but we are friends from way back and they pollinate my whole area's crops and share their golden honey with me.
They also attune me to seasonal flowerings we call honey flows. I used to never know when what blossomed. Now I'm always on the look out. It adds a wonderful dimension to life to be sensitive to such things. It's much easier to get along with my bees than with my new (ignorant) neighbors. And my hives are thriving.
I am reading this days later just out of curiosity and I can really appreciate the knowledgeable people here. I would say to just make your own oasis in this stinking world. Educate others by your actions.
If enough of us do this…we can only hope. Some of you may want to pray…so I will encourage you to do that. HOWEVER, do not just pray and then sit there expecting Mr. god to do anything. The spirit is within.
Rastaman the Griot: "You got to be a spirit! You can't be no ghost." - from the movie Bulworth.