Before I knew we had a serious situation on our hands, I was secretly happy there were no more bees.
As a child, I had fallen victim to their barbed stingers—and they to my bare foot—more times than I can remember. Charging toward a sprinkler or a plastic pool, I was oblivious to the bees pollinating the white clover flower, Trifolium repens, on my grandma’s backyard lawn. My shoeless foot would land right-smack!-on one of their bee abdomens, resulting in a painful sting and a trip upstairs, so grandma could pull out the stinger and dab the wound with baking soda. She never told me their fate was much worse than mine.
Now there are just a few bees on my backyard lawn, but it is not because I killed them all as a child. Across the country, bees have been mysteriously vanishing, leaving their hives in search of pollen and nectar and not returning. Apiarists noted the disappearances in late 2006; and since then, more than a quarter of America’s commercial beehive colonies have been lost.
Like any good scientific investigation, theories for the honeybee disappearance abound, ranging from the rational to absurd. Pathogens, pesticides, immune suppression, global warming, cell phones, genetically modified crops, and bee rapture (unscientific, yes, but a theory nonetheless) are some of the ideas that have been presented. Whatever the cause, one thing is for sure: we need bees, and not just for honey.
“Close to one hundred crop species in the United States rely to some degree on pollination services provided by this one species—collectively, these crops make up approximately one-third of the U.S. diet,” said May Berenbaum, Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois, in a statement before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture.
Some of nature’s most delicious and nutritious foods rely on bees for pollination. Apples, almonds, squash, asparagus, strawberries, melons, avocados, peaches, and cherries are a small sampling of the crops that need bees to transport pollen from the male stamen to the female pistol. In return for helping with the process, bees get nutrient-rich pollen and nectar.
Although nature has many other pollinators, including native bees, birds, bats, and wind, honeybees, which were brought to America from Europe, are the most important managed species. Without them, salad and fruit bowls would be empty and Californian grown almonds non-existent.
Though Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the name scientists have given the recent disappearance, has generated a lot of attention, America’s relationship with nature’s six-legged pollinators has been on precarious footing for quite some time. Both native and commercial honeybee populations have been declining for decades; the most dramatic drop occurred in the 1990s, when the accidental introduction of two parasitic mites wiped out thousands of managed colonies. Even before CCD was identified, the National Academy of Sciences predicted that managed honeybees could cease to exist by 2035, given their current rate of decline.
Still, CCD seems to be something unique. Bees are not returning to their hives to die, as they normally do. Colonies are deserted within weeks, leaving few corpses left for autopsy. Though destructive diseases have resulted in localized population losses, CCD is widespread. It has affected over one-third of U.S. beekeepers and Europe, Brazil, Canada, and China, among other places, have reported widespread losses.
Although culprits, like the single-celled, spore producing parasite Nosema ceranae have been isolated from dead bees, it may not be as simple as a one disease, one disorder problem. In colonies suffering from CCD, individual bees are found with an extremely high number of stress-related disease organisms. Just as stress can tax our immune systems and make us more susceptible to disease, it can also takes its toll on bees, who are packed into artificial living spaces, carted across the nation to fulfill pollination demands, fed a diet of corn syrup, and exposed to pesticides. The bees, it seems, are sick and tired of modern living.
