Warning economic signals from the vanishing bee

Najma Sadeque
09-07-07

Most people - except for beekeepers - stay steer clear of bees, not because they don't like them (they certainly appreciate their honey!) but for fear of being stung. That of course has always been good for the bees. People do not see them as prey and generally leave them alone. But people also take them for granted and don't bother to learn about how indispensable they are to mankind, especially for human-driven agriculture.
The west considers the bee to be the most hardworking and beneficial creature apart from cattle, and that is probably true of the east as well. They are as indispensable to healthy agriculture as the cow is. Now humans may have to jog themselves into greater bee-consciousness. -- Because the bees are disappearing. If they all disappear, humans may not be far behind in vanishing from the face of this earth.
All living creatures have their own peculiar set of viruses that they are vulnerable to -- that's part of the natural scheme of things. So do honeybees. They live and thrive; most die of natural causes such as extreme cold, while a few succumb to disease. But they have never been known to die of hunger or degenerating organs since ancient times.
Bees have evolved over 50 million years, and have been serving the same functions for themselves and man for at least a million. But honeybees have never before fallen prey to an epidemic that wiped out entire populations by the millions, so that they are unable to pollinate the plants they usually do, especially the farmcrops that are so vital to humans.
The problem has been building up for the past decade. What used to happen was that some bees would not return to their hives. This was unusual as, like pigeons, they always return home. Initially bee-keepers thought they might have perished for any of a number of natural reasons but as the number of missing bees soared, they knew there had to be something much more serious.
So far as is known, this has only been occurring in the leading industrial countries - USA, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Australia and the UK where bee-keeping is a thriving small or medium-sized enterprise, often a family business, not just for the honey but for the pollinating services which are rented out to farms on a commercial basis.
This may sound strange to people in our part of the world, but in the west, especially the US, where monoculture (single-crop) farming occurs over blocks of tens or hundreds of square miles with the use of massive amounts of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, the bees and butterflies and earthworms have long since died off en masse, poisoned by the endless dosing of chemicals.
Consequently, those farmers growing crops, including tree crops, that need pollination, call in for the paid services of bee-keepers who maintain several hundred or a thousand-plus beehives for this very purpose. Beekeepers actually haul these hives hundreds of miles in specially fitted out container trucks, to fruit orchards and vegetable farms dependent on insect pollinators. Here the hives, about a thousand bees in each, are placed for the required length of time for the bees to obligingly provide their services.
Now suddenly, the bees have been disappearing in droves, especially in the US where most farmland areas have long been poisoned by agricultural chemicals that have rendered the most food crops to be devoid of any nutrition, and which are sent out as US food aid to 'developing' South countries where people are already suffering malnutrition.
Since 2000, French and Italian beekeepers noticed that one particular pesticides (imidacloprid) was lethal to bees. The bee population in France took a huge dive in the 1990s traced back to the insecticide brand-named Gaucho which has since been banned there. The Italians found that pollen obtained from seeds had been coated with significant levels of imidacloprid. Major alarms began to be set off by American beekeepers a couple of years ago. Already 70 percent of the bees seem to have simply evaporated' from the west coast, and almost as much on the east coast of the US. Individual beekeepers have suffered higher losses - as much as 90 percent. One beekeeper was left with only 9 of his 1200 beehives. In Germany, 25 percent of the bee populations have disappeared. There have been individual cases where they have declined by up to 80 percent.
So serious is the vanishing-bee problem -- and that too because it is happening on a massive scale in the US where they are responsible for $15 billion worth of harvests -- that it has been given a name : "colony collapse disorder" or CCD, because almost the entire colony of bees disappear without a trace, leaving behind only the queen bee and helpless juveniles dependent on being fed. This means that many crops don't get pollinated and therefore will not produce a harvest. So not just the beehive colonies, but also the crops are collapsing.
The other aspect to this mystery is that no dead bodies of the bees are to be found, either in the hive or in the neighbouring areas where they fly out. That is not all. Usually, abandoned hives are raided or taken over by other bee colonies. But this has never happened in these cases even though the hives may be loaded with honey. Obviously there has to be a reason for that. There must be something in the hives or in the honey that repel other bees. Something very poisonous.
Yet the bee problem has largely been ignored by officialdom as well as the agro-chemical multinational corporations, which is hardly surprising,
However university and other independent researchers, especially in Germany, have been on the job. Pesticide use has for long been destroying or weakening honeybee colonies by the thousands in the US, but never on such a wide scale, and beekeepers always had enough bees left to rebuild their populations. Now they suspect the new generation of agro-chemicals that are far more lethal. But how do they work ?
It was noticed that honeybee numbers began to dive whenever and wherever GM (genetically-modified) crops were introduced. The corporations make herbicides geared to specific crops and while these may not always kill, they can do damage to the bodies and internal organs and functions of the bee. Now it is suspected that these particular chemicals impair the memory of the bees so that they are no longer able to navigate and are unable to find their way back to their hives. In other words, they are simply lost. Specific pesticides that affect bee behaviour in this manner have already been identified by German researchers.
On examining some surviving bees that were left in the hives, scientists found the bees suffering from five or six infections simultaneously as well as being infested with fungi. While it is normal for a bee to suffer an occasional illness, it is unheard of them being afflicted with an entire gamut of diseases all at the same time. This indicated that the bees' immune system may have collapsed.
Even though they only signal us with a buzz, bees are extremely intelligent creatures. Like people who have eaten, exercised, worked, played and rested in a balanced manner, they become wiser with age. -- The researchers have been watching them at it for a long time. Bees use sight rather than smell while flying to locate and zoom into their object of interest. That way they are like helicopter pilots. Such intelligence is not so much due to genetic factors, but the quality of their food - free from chemicals -- and the healthy warmth of their hives during the time they hatch and develop.
Through the course of their lives, they do many different jobs. They don't just take care of the young and clean and build the hive and guard it and the queen. By vibrating their chests at the rate of 200 twitches a second, they maintain a steady temperature within the hive during cold winters. In summer they bring in droplets of water to fan and cool the inner air.
The role of collecting the finest pollen from outside comes in the last stage of their career. This is the most difficult and strenuous job of all, often even dangerous, which is why they do not start until they have matured and finely honed their various skills. When calculating the combined miles that the minority of collector bees from a single large hive flew during their lifetime, it was found to be equal to the distance between the earth and the moon.
As with humans living in close quarters in heat and humidity, there is always a risk of infection. Therefore bees have evolved such that their immune systems work at optimum capacity as long as they remain mostly in their hives. By the time they become elderly collector bees, their immune system does not work as well, although it is not a great worry as long as they enjoy a healthy outdoor environment.
If at all a worker bee caught a viral infection, the worst that would happen was for it to become disoriented and lost and die flying around. But it never threatened the numbers or survival of the rest of the hive. Independent scientists are now pointing a finger not only at agro-chemicals but also GM crops such as maize, canola, cotton, soybean, sunflower and rapeseed because these GM seeds are coated with specialized pesticides (known as neonicotinoid) that are now found to be highly toxic to honey bees.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are nerve poisons. Highly diluted, they are used to control fleas on dogs and cats and don't do much damage to mammals, birds and fish. But it's a different issue with bees and butterflies and other insects. And in larger concentrations or prolonged use can be harmful to all living things.
Who are the ultimate culprits? All the chemical and GM seed monoculture corporations are, but mainly Monsanto for their GM seeds and accompanying pesticides and Bayer for their chemical pesticides. Also the governments and politicians who, after initially blocking their spread as a result of research and advice identifying their poisonous destructiveness, were influenced or bribed by these companies and their governments for 'free trade' reasons. That includes governments of both the North and South. Since the Pakistan government has approved the introduction of GM crops even if it has deferred it for a short while, it is necessary to block it altogether before we meet the same fate as the west. And we are not as rich as they to be able to buy our recovery.