Bees In My Easter Bonnet
by JoyAlbert Einstein once said:
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
The extremely strange weather over the past few weeks (can you say "global warming?") has had me scrambling to get things planted in flats or out in the beds that don't usually get started until late April or early May. The actual last frost date here is May 10, but I've never seen it freeze that late in the 15 years I've been here.
So far, no blackberries are blooming, or it would be "blackberry winter" and much cooler than the 80º+ days we've been seeing, nary a March wind or a thunder-boomer one. But the dogwoods are in full glory, marking the first time E-V-E-R that they bloom concurrent with forsythia and before azaleas. Mom always told me you can fool azaleas, fruit trees, any spring bulb and redbuds. But you can't fool a dogwood - so once they're blooming it is officially white-shoe season. I've never seen it come this early.
We've also been raking several years' accumulation of leaves and clearing deadfall on the edges of the forest, a bit antsy because we haven't had a good forest fire for the last 4 years so we're way overdue. We've transferred tons of leaves to the bottom garden terraces to compost (we're fallowing the bottom this season) and layer as mulch around the fruit trees. Cherries are done blooming, apples are just starting, but the pears were in absolute Full Glory this week. I have one ancient pear so tall it has a whole section of its top backside cut out so it doesn't threaten the incoming electric lines, and a trunk more than three feet in circumference. My absolute favorite spot to take a break in the shade.
As I lay beneath its white-bloom glory earlier this week I marveled at all the busy bees doing their damndest to hit every last blossom as fast as they could, going for the best of the pollen. The big carpenters weighed down by their loads, lumbering off to the cabin where they live in way too many holes in the old chestnut siding, and where our perennial sport of "Bee-Bopping" with tennis rackets just barely keeps them under control. Lots of slightly smaller bumbles, more honeybees than I could possibly count, and a couple of little sweat bee varieties. Bees, bees everywhere! The mighty pear was literally alive with frenzied activity, and none of the little buggers paid the slightest attention to me. Quite a show.
So it has been quite alarming to me over the past month to read incoming reports of what they're calling "The Great Bee Die-Off of 2007." Something really, really bad is happening, and no one's quite sure what it is. They call it Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD], and some are likening it to Bee AIDS. The Congress is holding hearings, and the situation is characterized as "Catastrophic".
The situation is the same in Canada, Central and South America, Britain, South Africa, Europe, Australia and even China. Beekeepers checking on their hives after the winter are finding them empty. There aren't many clues, the untended larvae left behind to die show no infestation or disease. Several researchers suggest that it looks like bee immune systems have just collapsed, making them susceptible to problems they could normally tolerate. Bees are disappearing everywhere and nobody's sure why. Though there is one bizarre symptom that has turned up in the few carcasses found in California, Texas and Florida. But nobody knows what it is…
It's a strange parasite-like condition that readily crosses species boundaries as if they didn't exist at all. Worse for insects and amphibians than mammals, and it's striking humans too. They call it Morgellons Disease and it's nasty. Lots and lots of theories on what it is and where it comes from (some of them bizarre), and there are research groups at various universities and medical research facilities like Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic working hard to get a handle on it. So far, though, no luck.
One of the theories is that it's a result of genetically engineered organisms, probably some radically hybrid nematode/mold/fluke. This isn't really so bizarre a notion, given Genetically engineered crops and organisms can now be developed and rushed straight to market sans testing for toxicity and without consideration of any environmental concerns, ruled long ago by government regulators to be equivalent to all naturally occurring organisms.
I don't claim to know it's GMOs. I don't know if Morgellon fibrils are 'live' parasites or just strange protein formations. I don't know if it's the fibrils killing bees or something innocuous they've no resistance to anymore. But if they're the proverbial Canaries in the Coal Mine to tell us something's gone drastically wrong, it may already be too late.
Just thought I'd offer up a little doomsday scenario this week before Easter to go along with all the reasons offered in various threads for why the general population may not trust zombies in lab coats to 'cure' global warming with not-clever high-tech quick-fixes. They're so convinced of their own godhood that they'd do something suicidally stupid. May already have done it. Oops.
If the bees go, global warming won't matter to anyone. Neither will 'Peak Oil' matter, or wars for oil, or wars against terrorism, or public school science curriculum or clean air and water, or anybody's Dueling Metaphysics. We'll be extinct, and the universe won't miss us one bit.
It's kind of a pitiful Armageddon, more like a whimper than a Grand Last Stand. It's certainly no more than we deserve for our hubris and greed. But I do think I'll kill fewer carpenters this year. They're amazingly dumb and foolishly aggressive, but they don't sting. This abused but still beautiful world should go to someone when we're gone. Might as well be my bees.
March 31st, 2007 at 3:02 pm
This ain't good either…
Comment by stunney — March 31, 2007 @ 3:02 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Humans may have some culpability for the troubles experienced by bees. Some non-bee pollon spreaders have disappeared as civilization spreads. The honey bee has assumed a wider role than nature would have alloted to it. Greater vulnerability to disease is one consequence.
Comment by Bradford — March 31, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 4:02 pm
stunney - warming will of course challenge some species, and there will be extinctions. But if history's any indication, that's been the situation for a long time… we occasionally 'discover' some new species here or there (since we are the ones who get to decide what's a species), but we don't see them evolving anywhere. Rather, we see them disappearing regularly.
I can remember the ubiquitous red-headed NA woodpecker when I was young. They were everywhere, but now they're gone. Completely. Monarchs are in trouble from Bt crops, nobody knows what GM microbes and nematodes will do now that they're loose, the once-abundant fisheries are all but dead and honeybees are on the very edge. Life may be on the way out, but we can go quietly into that night by telling ourselves it's "the natural way of things."
Bradford:
The problem with honeybees is that we've domesticated them because we've wiped out their normal habitats for farmland. So far it's domesticated bees suffering the die-off, and box-hives are certainly disease/mite havens. Not to mention the fact that the honey is raided for sale too, which means the bees are fed refined sugar-water and corn syrup instead of their natural diet. Those things make humans morbidly obese, so we shouldn't be surprised if bees are made weaker.
But I think it's incredibly short-sighted not to consider the myriad GM cultivars developed in the last decade and a half - including fruit and nut tree grafts - some of them carrying three or four or more foreign genes, each with species barrier-defeating viral segments included. Most GM cultivars express the foreign proteins in every cell of the plant, including flowers and pollen. The Bt microbial toxins (pesticide) engineered into them are NOT toxins normally encountered by non-target insects at any time in their lives, since in the soil the spores are normally encased in diatom-like shells dissolved by the larvae of those target insects, which hatch and develop in the soil, NOT on the plants their adult forms eat.
Humans never ate Bt toxins either. Kinda makes me wonder, watching the mass die-offs of insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds. It'll hit us eventually. If we don't starve to death first.
Meanwhile, they can't have my bees or my wasps or my hummingbirds or my butterflies. In my little hidden cove the dogwoods aren't blighted and I've still got American Chestnut trees. I guard 'em all as if life - theirs and mine - depend on it.
Comment by Joy — March 31, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I gather your cove has an environment that was once prevalent throughout the area. What type of bees and other insects would pollinate your cove?
Comment by Bradford — March 31, 2007 @ 6:20 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Goodness me, I agree with something Bradford wrote!
Hives of honeybees are trucked around the country regularly by the hundreds of thousands. These aren't friendly neighborhood bees kept by the nice old gentleman down the street. No, for crop pollination it's industrial-scale business. Any disease that pops up anywhere is transported everywhere else in very short order. We've set up a perfect system for infecting bees with everything that comes along.
Also, I'm not one to wax nostalgic about honeybees. The honeybee is an introduced species in the Americas. Our hundreds of species of native bees (and flies, and moths) were perfectly capable of keeping up with the pollination before we devastated their habitat and forced them into competition with an artificially boosted monoculture of honeybees.
Comment by Myrmecos — March 31, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Bradford:
There are a variety of pollinators, and these go straight to whatever's blooming (I think it's a race). Including hummingbirds and several varieties of wasp, which stake out 'territory' and pollenate mostly by accident. There are at least a couple of varieties of honeybee distinguishable by size, bumblebees (small colonies of 50 or so) and carpenter bees (solitary). Sweat bees and some kind of bee-like blackfly, plus the moths and butterflies that come in waves.
Native honeybee populations will probably survive whatever's going on, if they don't get exposed to pesticides often enough to weaken. They're tough, but their range is limited. The threat to agriculture comes because of monocultural, chemical intensive farming practices. Farmers used to keep bees in fields and orchards, but that's no longer practical. Now keepers stack hundreds of box-hives onto trucks and haul them state to state following the crops.
Nowdays a single crop can cover thousands of acres, and they're sprayed regularly. Bees also need a steady diet, which they can't get from mile upon mile of monoculture that only blooms for a week a year. They need access to biodiversity. They're useful insects, but insects nonetheless. Insecticides aren't good for them, either mechanically sprayed or in their diet. Pollen is food for developing larvae and queens, and Bt engineered crops express toxins in pollen as well as fruit and seeds (the edible stuff).
Myrmecos:
The monoculture that's the problem is the monoculture of the crops, not the honeybees. No bees could live in single-crop fields or orchards that go for miles in every direction. They'd starve.
Comment by Joy — March 31, 2007 @ 10:32 pm
April 1st, 2007 at 4:52 am
joy,
Hey, I'm a carpenter.
Comment by Douglas — April 1, 2007 @ 4:52 am
April 1st, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Douglas:
Yeah, but you're not eating my house. §;o)
Comment by Joy — April 1, 2007 @ 12:15 pm
April 1st, 2007 at 9:24 pm
As I ponder the plight of the domesticated honeybee, I must disreguard the general argument from breeding. My grandfather was a beekeeper. Domesticated bees have been around for a coon's age. They have suffered local woes here and there, but nothing with this international flare.
There has got to be a cause to this calamity. There has got to be a single cause. I am quite happy to consider the GM hypotheis, it makes sense on its face, and GM does not have the respect/fear that it deserves. Whatever the cause, that cause must be intercontinental, because the phenomenon is intercontinental.
Some have said, "hey, there's lots of other polinators." Well, maybe, but maybe other polinators are suffering the same fate as the honeybee. Maybe the other polinators are just as incapable of handling the poison that is killing the bees. I see this problem as a significant consern that requires extensive investigative work to figure out. (In truth, I am hoping that GM is found to be to blame for it, because it will dislodge the food-production community from its complasancy before mass human death is the result.)
Comment by bFast — April 1, 2007 @ 9:24 pm
April 4th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
O.K. dont get me wrong, I believe that the big bee die off is of great concern- and if that is what it takes to open the eyes of the polticians and the concerned scientist to act before it is to late-fantastic.
What I find a little humorous is the fact that I have watched 4 generations of my family deterorate from this strange organism and the scientist at Mayo and UofM shrugged their shoulders at us and would not even take the time to actually look and listen. Meanwhile, my family is on the road to extinction. Modern day Leapors.
One thing I have learned is that there are so many theories out there and they will go nowhere. Unless you have the funding for the research or the CDC would actually acknowledge there is something going on you might as well chase your tail in circles
Comment by BAM — April 4, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
April 5th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I understand that bumblebees are even better pollenators, and they haven't been part of the die off. I suspect we'll just increase bumblebee domestication until we find out what's killing their cousins.
Darn. Armageddon has been averted once again.
Where will my next dose of doom and gloom come from?
Comment by chunkdz — April 5, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
April 5th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
BAM:
Hi, BAM. Are you talking about Morgellon's? If so, can you tell us when it started, where you live (region), and what your exposure might be (rural agricultural area or town/city)? One site said most cases have shown up in the growing regions of California, Texas and Florida. Which are also the states that rely most strongly on trucked-in bees for pollination.
I'm not sure what to think, other than that the ridiculous policy of pretending there's no such thing is foolish in the extreme. Not sure who to believe either, since a lot of the information seems to be tied up in various strange conspiracy theories. But people are reporting this condition and bees are dying. That much we do know.
chunkdz:
Sorry, chunk. Most species of wild bumblebees are on the endangered species list. They are actually more efficient pollinators than honeybees, but don't hive in great numbers like honeybees do (live in small colonies and are aggressively territorial. They're more cold tolerant, but colonies do not overwinter (they all die after a single season, a new queen takes over in spring). They're also more limited in range, and are very sensitive to habitat disruption.
So while you could conceivably place bumblebee colonies here and there around and through an orchard or field, you'd have to allow lots of wildflowers in between the rows (so permanent colonies have food throughout the season) and you couldn't spray the orchard or field with poisons. That's not how agribiz works.
Comment by Joy — April 5, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
April 5th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Hi Joy,
Out here in Cali we get about half of the entire domesticated bee population in the country every february for the almond growers. I recently took a drive through and you can see hives placed strategically every acre or so. They say it's the biggest pollination project on the planet.
Last year the almond growers had a record year (up 22% from the previous) and prospects are good for the coming year with good snowpacks in the Sierras. Almonds are a billion dollar + crop for us, and it continues to grow even though hive rentals have more than doubled in recent years, and farmers have to reserve bees well in advance.
This is not to minimize the seriousness of the problem. I'm just saying that it's not doom and gloom time yet. We've known about the bee decline for years, and nothing sends scientists, ecologists, and politicians into action more than money. A billion dollars a year will motivate a lot of people to find a solution. The fate of world agriculture even more so.
Even with fewer honeybees there are alternative methods of pollination, and if it comes down to it I imagine we could pollinate the darn things ourselves. So while I'm willing to agree with you when you say
I'm not quite ready to join you in a chorus of
Comment by chunkdz — April 5, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
April 5th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
However, this could change my mind. Time to start stockpiling MRE's again!
Comment by chunkdz — April 5, 2007 @ 6:06 pm
April 5th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Not to worry, chunk. In addition to our great work liberating the people of Iraq (world's most ancient wheat breeders/growers), Monsanto, Cargill, Dow and some clever gene splicers in public universities are on the job enforcing chemical dependent monoculture on Iraqi farmers by law. They've gotta get somebody to grow their GM wheat, and nobody in North America or Europe wants to try it.
Apparently, Order 81 also intends to change the Mesopotamian diet to include a lot of pasta…
[edited to include the correct link]
Comment by Joy — April 5, 2007 @ 6:40 pm