Anyone who was a small child in the '70s remembers the doomsayers who terrified us all with their talk of the "Killer Bees," which were supposedly closing in on us in huge, blot-out-the-sky swarms from the wild jungles of South America. Though these swarms never seemed to make it to the average suburban neighborhood in the States, they did inspire a few horror films. Whatever their cultural effects, however, they never quite achieved the terrifying apocalyptic chaos that the sensationalist media would have had us believe.
Today, in an irony that reminds us of both the hubris and the ignorance of humankind, we have just begun to open our eyes to the fact that bees play a crucial role in keeping our own species alive. It's been widely reported that much of the world is currently undergoing a massive die-off of Apis mellifera, or the Western honeybee, a chief pollinator of the crops that make up the bulk of the human food chain. Neither crops that directly feed people nor staples such as feed corn that sustain the livestock industry can reproduce without the natural process of pollination, and the absence of the process could cause a breakdown of our entire agricultural infrastructure. Or not.
The generic-sounding name scientists have given the phenomenon is "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, which typically involves most of a hive's workers simply flying off and dying. There are all manner of speculations as to the cause of this behavior. Theories run the gamut of modern and centuries-old possibilities: new AIDS-like bee viruses that attack the apian immune system, parasitic infestation by mites (which managed to migrate to the West in the 1980s), cellular phone frequencies that disorient the insects and leave them unable to locate their hives, genetically modified crops, new pesticides, a deadly fungus from the genus Aspergillus that researchers have found in the stomachs of bees taken from collapsed hives, and even "stress" attributed to the fact that in our modern world, hives are routinely trucked thousands of miles to be placed among commercial crops that require pollination. Global climate change has also been cited as a possible factor, albeit indirectly.
While mysterious bee die-offs have been recorded since the 1800s, and annotated in such terms as "May dwindle" and "autumn collapse," this time around it seems as if the reduction in population has been more extreme. Honeybees have lost some 30 to 70 percent of their numbers in Texas, California and other regions, and as much as 80 percent in parts of Europe, including Spain, Germany and Poland. The mystery seems far from being solved without a massive outpouring of dedicated funding and scientific effort.
Some people are panicked at the thought that, as in the case of global warming, humanity has foolishly taken for granted simple things like air, water and food and has become oblivious to the small-seeming elements of our environment that make these essential things viable. Some even suggest that there is a deliberate lack of attention to these disastrous side effects, or, worse yet, that they are being created deliberately. In an April 10 story for Prison Planet, Paul Joseph Watson speculates:
"The elite have publicly stated their desire to significantly reduce world population on numerous occasions. Just yesterday we featured a story about a British Government Ministry of Defence report that postulated on the future use of bio-weapons to thin the human population in under 30 years. Making bees all but extinct would be a swift and plausibly deniable method of enacting global population reduction long dreamed of by the maniacal sociopaths that control the world."
Evil plot or not, the theories in play all have their own levels of probability, accumulated research and at least the beginnings of some consensus on which seem the more likely culprits, though it may be that a combination of factors is to blame.
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VIRUSES AND BACTERIA: No new apian viruses have been identified that could be singly responsible for such mass die-offs as are currently occurring. But bacterial toxins in genetically modified (GM) crops may weaken bees' intestinal linings, according to researchers such as Hans-Heinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany. Damaged intestinal linings make bees more susceptible to viruses, parasites and other bacteria, or to the Aspergillus fungus. It has been observed in collapsed hives that natural scavengers like the wax moth, who usually move in to snack on honey in the abandoned bee homes, will actually stay away, possibly because of their keen sense of toxins in the hive's environment.
GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS: A study originally published by the Ecological Society of America compared bee populations and pollination efficiency in organic, conventional and GM rapeseed crops and found that there was a large variation in "pollination deficit" (the difference between potential and actual pollination) among the three groups. "The fact that bees avoid fields sown with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the consequent reduction in pollination activity is a scientific alarm for agriculture and the environment," it said.
PARASITES: Varroa destructor, a tick-like Asian bee mite (called the "vampire mite" by beekeepers) approximately the size of a bee's eyeball, has been preying on the Asiatic honeybee for thousands of years in Southeast Asia and seems to have found an ideal place to thrive in the Western honeybee populations. The mites' virulent proliferation may have been aided by the intense cultivation of hives in the West and the trucking of hives en masse, far and wide, to accommodate the commercial agricultural industry's pollination needs. The mites also carry viruses and bacteria of their own, which may be the real culprits in the bees' undoing. Whatever the primary danger, if not eradicated or controlled, the mites can wipe out a healthy hive in under a year's time.
CELLULAR PHONE FREQUENCIES AND MAGNETIC FIELDS: Limited studies have been done surrounding the effects of high frequency radiation on bees, including one by physicist Jochen Kuhn that cautiously concluded that the electromagnetic signals did have some effect on the bees' ability to navigate back to their hives, but with "no statistical significance." The signals used in the study were DECT (digital enhanced cordless telecommunications) signals, mainly emitted by cordless non-cellular home phones. Cells typically use GSM (Global System for Mobile, originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) signals, which have not yet been sufficiently studied for their effect on beehives. Though most scientists are skeptical about this theory, Jürgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of Würzburg, admits that it's "worth researching. [It's known that honeybees] react with extreme sensitivity to changes in the earth's magnetic field." It is also widely accepted among geophysicists that the earth may be nearing a phase in which the planet's own magnetic poles weaken and ultimately reverse themselves, so that south becomes north and north becomes south—a process that may affect bees along with scores of migrating species, weather patterns and every trailblazer's old-fashioned compass.
PESTICIDES: Pesticide formulation is always a balancing act, trying to allow enough time for adequate testing while racing against nature's own clock; crop-devouring insects have been known to mutate and form immunities to pesticides in as little as two years' time, and indirect effects on species other than humans and the livestock we cultivate for food sources are often not observed until long after the pesticides have been in use. Though many pesticides that are deadly to honeybees are generally used as sparingly as possible, some non-deadly ones are being pointed to as possible sources of odd, debilitating effects on the beneficial insects. Entomologist Dianne Cox-Foster of Penn State University agrees that compounds found in newer pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have been shown to affect the bees' memories and/or internal guidance systems, may be affecting their immune systems as well.
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE: Though it's become fashionable to blame everything from cancer rates to tidal waves on global warming, complex systems of plant and animal life are more difficult to associate with the phenomenon. Clearly, changing seasons and their effects on crops, plant life and other things lower on the food chain have had and continue to have an impact on things further up, and some scientists believe that the bee die-offs may be at least partially accelerated by climatic factors. Much like the general wellbeing of frogs and salamanders, the state of the bee population may be a significant indicator of the health of our entire global ecosystem, a canary in our coal mine if you will.
OVERCULTIVATION: All other external influences aside, some scientists believe that the answer to CCD lies simply in the fact that the business of beekeeping itself has been intensified to the point of doing damage to its own cause. Professor Tautz points to evidence that raising bees in densely populated colonies narrows their genetic pool, which has been proven to weaken the wellbeing of almost every species. In some developing countries where bees are not nearly as cultivated as in Europe and the United States, the populations seem to have remained much more stable, with few or no instances of CCD.
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For whatever reason, the Northeast has not been noticeably affected by CCD in comparison with areas like the Southwest, where the problem seems to be running rampant. Still, local apiaries are keeping a watchful eye on their bee populations and recent reports from farms in Pennsylvania point to the likelihood of the problem moving our way. Dan Conlon is the owner-operator of the Warm Colors Apiary in Deerfield, an 80-acre slice of land just west of exit 24 on Interstate 91. Warm Colors maintains 80 bee colonies (about 4 million bees) on the premises and another 400 or so at various other sites around the state. The main apiary is used primarily for rearing queens, which Conlon sells to other beekeepers throughout the country along with beekeeping supplies, while the peripheral hives are mostly used for honey production.
Conlon, whose grasp of all things apian is impressive—including the latest studies by CCD task forces at major universities and the U.S.D.A. labs—agrees that the honeybee die-off is most likely a combination of many, almost exclusively human-induced stressors that include all the factors mentioned above, though he is particularly suspicious of GM crops and artificially-based pesticides.
"It's shortsighted to dabble in things as fundamental as genetics," he says. "Far more research should have been done before such tampering was allowed to proliferate as widely as it has."
He notes in particular "Bt-corn," whose bred-in natural pesticide seems likely to affect bees' nervous systems and/or immune responses, and soy flour, which many beekeepers once fed to their bees but which now, in its GM incarnation, crystallizes in their digestive tracts and clogs their systems. He also recalls rates of bee sterility having skyrocketed after widespread use of a phosphate-based pesticide that was formulated in an attempt to control the mite blight of the '80s.
Though the influx of Asian mites was a serious blow to beekeeping everywhere, the apiarist points out that this season he's probably lost more bees to bears than anything else, perhaps due to an increase in Western Mass' bear population. Warm Colors' main colonies are surrounded by an electric fence to keep out the large, smart mammals, but even so, they sometimes find ways to reach over the barrier to retrieve their favorite snack. And it's not just the honey they're after—the creatures tend to consume entire hives, protein-filled bees and all—and the multiple stings they might receive inside their mouths and digestive tracts don't seem to faze them too much.
"It's probably similar to us eating spicy Mexican food,"grins the beekeeper, who admits he likes bears despite his necessarily adversarial relationship with them.
Conlon also says that since the invasion of the Asian mites, many beekeepers were put out of business by the loss of their hives, and not enough new keepers have replaced them. This has left the bee population about half the size of what it was in the '80s and narrowed its gene pool as well. "We used to keep strong genetic stock by letting the queens breed with wild bees, but these, for all intents and purposes, no longer exist in the Northeast," he says. Still, he has high hopes for the ultimate survival of the amazing little creatures.
"Honeybees have existed in some similar form as they do today for 220 million years, according to the most recent fossil evidence—they're quite capable of adapting," he says. (For the record, that's about 218 million years older than even the oldest ancestor of humans.)
In fact, it seems that for the independently-minded entrepreneur, beekeeping offers opportunities. Because of the vast growth of monoculture crops like almonds and blueberries, both of which depend exclusively on honeybees to pollinate hundreds or thousands of acres, the price of acquiring hives to put on that land has doubled.
"Blueberry growers in Maine used to pay $45 a hive to beekeepers," Conlon says. "Now they're paying more like $90 a hive, and they still can't get enough bees to cover their acreage."
Conlon keeps a watchful eye on all apian trends and would like to see many of the controllable causes of bee stress either legislated out of existence or at least ostracized from the beekeeping community. He notes that though Bayer's Check-Mite (the brand-name for the newer organophosphate-based mite pesticide coumaphos) is legal to use in Massachusetts, not one beekeeper in the state that he knows of will use it because of the side effects it can produce, both on bees and possibly on humans who eat their honey.
Whatever the causes of CCD, the gravity of the possible scenarios it poses is yet another urgent reminder of the complexity of nature and the delicate balance it maintains, even on levels that are often too small for us to notice. Perhaps if we can free our minds long enough to revisit the shared reality in which we coexist with everything in and around us, we can learn something about the consequences that altering that balance can hold for humanity, and indeed all life on earth.
