Is It Time to Redefine the Crisis Vocabulary?

What Is Really Going on with Bees? or Is It Time to Redefine the Crisis Vocabulary? 8

In November 2006, a beekeeper by the name of David Hackenberg was having a problem with his bees. Hundreds of his hives went from thriving colonies to empty beehives over the course of a few weeks. Disturbed by his own bee troubles and bolstered by the surreptitious rumblings of other beekeepers who were experiencing similar problems, Dave went to the bee researchers at Penn State University for help. It wasn’t long before Dave Hackenberg was considered the poster child for a frightening problem threatening honeybees—soon to be named Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. In 2008 he received the American Beekeeper Federation’s President’s Award for highlighting this problem, and he has testified before the US Congress and prominent international groups concerning pesticides and bees.

That was a decade ago. Where are we with this “bee problem” today?

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) CCD was originally thought to be a single problem—a disease or disorder—with a single cause. Research money was devoted to studying the phenomenon, and trying to narrow down the field of possibilities to ferret out that one cause. Collapsing hives were studied in search of a common marker, one key indicator that would be found in all hives said to have

CCD. The search was on for a single solution to a single problem, in the face of a national panic over losing the honeybee altogether. That’s the way our science has generally worked, at least in the past. One problem should have one cause. It simplifies the science when things work that way, and makes it easier to do research. If you can identify that one cause, then you can resolve that one problem. Voilà!

But it wasn’t long before the beekeeping research community realized that there was no single cause of CCD. That in fact, it was more than a little naïve to view beekeeping and its attendant issues in such simplistic terms. More than one prominent researcher has put it this way: CCD is caused by a combination of things, and that is frightening, because the number of possible combinations is infinite, and unknowable.

Since 2006, CCD has become more of an umbrella term than the name of a specific condition, and it is covering a lot of ground. It represents an attempt to recognize all the known influences, the stressors and the many diverse factors affecting honeybees today—and to group them all under a common name.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the problems with bees as Nature Deficit Disorder, a phrase Richard Louv coined in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods. When describing the effects that our disconnectedness from nature is having on honeybees, it seems an appropriate moniker.

So just what are those things that are weighing so heavily in combination on the tiny honeybee? Here are seven things, like as not an incomplete list, but that will serve as a starting place:

Varroa Mites This pest arrived in the US in the mid-1980s and now troubles beekeepers everywhere. Our first response to the realization that this mite had jumped species from an Asian bee—an insect fairly well equipped to deal with it—to the European honeybee, which was not, was chemical warfare, in the hope of eradicating the now ubiquitous varroa destructor.

Enter the first of two highly toxic and fat-soluble miticides: coumaphos. Beekeepers took a zero-tolerance stance toward this parasite and went after it with guns a-blazing—placing plastic strips containing this toxic chemical directly into the brood nest of the beehive.

When the mites developed resistance to coumaphos, the industry responded with a second chemical, the synthetic pyrethroid fluvalinate. It wasn’t long before varroa developed a resistance to this toxic treatment as well.

Few studies had been done on the long-term effects on the honeybee from these chemicals individually...and now there was a cocktail of chemicals in the hive, and worse, they were also in the wax.

Contaminated Wax Foundation Once the problems with mites began, and toxic chemicals were deployed inside beehives in an attempt to eliminate the mites, another important scientific truth made itself apparent. Beeswax is lipophilic. Lipophilic, in layman’s terms, means fat-loving, or absorbing fats.

What does this mean to bees? It means that the beeswax comb that they create inside their hive—both the brood combs, where they raise their young, and the honey combs, where they store their winter food supply of honey—have all been absorbing the toxic fat-soluble chemicals that beekeepers have been using in their hives for decades, in an unsuccessful attempt to control varroa mites.

Since the treating of bees and their hives for varroa mites began in the mid-1980s, combs that have been contaminated by these toxic chemicals have eventually been culled from the hive, rendered and remade into fresh wax foundation sheets.

But unfortunately, these chemicals are persistent pesticides. They are not eliminated when the wax is melted down to make new foundation. They do not evaporate or dissipate even when heated to the liquid state. The end result has been that the world’s supply of beeswax foundation is now polluted with poisonous chemicals in readily detectable amounts. Even when brand-new, wax foundation is contaminated.

Cell Size of Prefabricated Foundation When beekeepers got the notion that they could save the bees a lot of work by using sheets of foundation, they went about it with a will, pressing out preprinted sheets of wax to give bees a head start. The size of the brood cells made by the worker bees informs the Figure 8.1. Foundation determines the size, and thus, the queen which type of bee is to be gender of the bee. Credit: Christy Hemenway. raised in what cell and whether or not to fertilize the egg she is about to lay. A fertilized egg develops into a worker bee; an unfertilized egg becomes a drone. A change in the size of the cells that make up brood comb affects not only the size of the bee, but also the gender or caste of the bee. Making the hexagons embossed on sheets of foundation an appropriate size for worker brood encouraged the raising of more worker bees, at the same time, it effectively prevented the colony from raising drone bees. This probably seemed like an ingenious idea at the time; after all, with more worker bees, there should be more honey available to harvest. The long-term effects of thwarting the bees’ ability to raise the male of their species were slow to reveal themselves. This practice has limited the genetic diversity of the honeybee population in ways we are still discovering today. Another important factor related to the use of foundation pertains to the size of the brood cells that all young bees—both workers and drones—develop within. The larger the brood cell, the larger the bee; the larger the bee, the longer its gestation cycle. When the life cycle of the honeybee is superimposed over the life cycle of the varroa mite, it becomes obvious that anything that extends the larval stage or the pupal stage of the honeybee’s life cycle increases the success rate of the varroa mite, which breeds inside those same cells, along with the baby bees.

Homeowner Use of Chemical Pesticides and Herbicides One area where chemical use has increased substantially is around the average suburban American house. The EPA permits more than 200 different pesticides for lawn care alone, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service reports that “homeowners use up to 10 times more chemical pesticides per acre on their lawns than farmers use on crops.” This is not good news for the bees! Nearly 80 million pounds of pesticides are used on US lawns every year. That’s not good news for birds either—as lawn care pesticides are among the most common causes of bird death.

Monoculture Agriculture The industrial scale of American agriculture has played a large part in disrupting the balance and diversity of our food system. By its very nature, a huge monoculture farm, growing acre upon acre of a single crop, invites pests that thrive on that crop to move right in. At the same time, it forces out the pests that would otherwise be found there, and would work to maintain a natural balance, helping to mitigate the success of the original pests.

Because the natural predators of the invading pests have been eliminated, our very efficient industrial farmer now decides that the only course of action is to apply even more pesticides intended to control the original pest.

Pesticides, however, are dumb. They cannot tell the good bugs from the bad; so with this practice, every insect, beneficial or undesirable, important or insignificant, boll weevil or honeybee, is affected.

Migratory Pollination When we adopted farming methods that were inspired by the early-1970s governmental directive to “Get big or get out!” the building blocks of large-scale American agriculture became the monoculture farmer. We wanted more “efficiency of scale,” and we got it by first reducing the diversity of what we grew and then by growing enormous quantities of it, all in one place.

This misguided attempt to improve upon nature’s processes destroyed the balance essential to small-scale diverse farming. It created an environment that works against the natural process of growing good food, and actually destroys the paradigm it was supposed to improve.

When we began growing food in this way, we ignored the basic needs of the pollinators that the plants required in order to produce their crop. In a monoculture environment, honeybees cannot survive naturally year round, because there is no forage for them once the bloom of the mono crop ends.

Monoculture creates the need to “bring the bees to the trees.” We have begun to treat bee colonies as if they were just another piece of farming equipment. We burn huge amounts of fossil fuel to move hives to fields where they are needed, and then to move them out again. Meanwhile, the effects on the bees from being trapped inside their hives and moved long distances are still not well understood.

Destruction of Natural Bee Forage and Habitat The urban destruction of natural fields, forests, and green areas limits the growth and health of the honeybee population by virtue of the simple fact that they have fewer places to live and less healthy, nutritious forage to consume.

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to enumerating the damage that modern agriculture, toxic chemicals and urban sprawl have inflicted on the honeybee. Joni Mitchell described it succinctly in her song “Big Yellow Taxi”—“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”