A World Without Bees

Bee on Welsh onion

This week I have been reading ‘A World Without Bees‘ – the newly published book by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum that takes an in-depth look into why honeybees all over the world are disappearing and what that might mean for us. It doesn’t make entertaining reading – the message is too bleak, and at times the text itself it dense, littered with acronyms for bee viruses and scientific names for parasites.

The book is divided into 11 chapters. The first looks at man’s use of honeybees over thousands of years. The second investigates why the honeybee is so important to us, looking beyond honey to its role in pollination. Chapter 3 looks at the effects that selective breeding has on honeybee populations.

Chapters 4 to 9 look at CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder, the phenomenon of bees simply disappearing from their hives with no apparent warning) and some of its possible causes – including pesticides, GM crops, pests and diseases, environmental pollution and climate change and the industrialization of bee-keeping.

Chapters 10 & 11 examine the likelihood that honeybees will become extinct in our lifetime, the consequences that would follow, and what we might do to stop that happening.

Although many characters in the honeybee world (bee-keepers, scientists, farmers, chemical companies and governments) have their own opinion on what is effecting the honeybees, there is little consensus on what may be causing CCD. There’s not even a global consensus that CCD exists. Research is fragmented and under-funded and strongly influenced by politics.

What unfolds in the book is a world that is seriously detrimental to Western honeybees (Apis mellifera). We’ve transported them across the world, exposing them to viruses and parasites they have no resistance against. We’ve inbred them to the point where they just don’t have the genetic diversity to cope with adversity. They don’t have robust mechanisms to deal with toxicity, and so the modern world with its environmental pollution and widespread pesticide use is not a healthy place for them.

In the US, honeybees are trucked across the country to provide pollination services to huge farms of one crop (California’s almond plantations being the largest) after another – spending long days on the road and never having a chance for a holiday. The increased industrialization of agriculture and urbanization means that bees diets are becoming more limited, and they are suffering nutritional stress. And we’re adding GM pollen to their diets.

Climate change is affecting bees too, with different flowering times for plant species and changing weather conditions that affect foraging bees.

What this adds up to is a complex mixture of industrialization, urbanization and globalization effects that bees simply may not be able to cope with. If honeybees die out, vast areas of agricultural land will go unpollinated – and the world will starve.

There are other pollinating insects, including thousands of bee species, but they are all suffering similar stresses from pollution, climate change and habitat loss. And they simply can’t be ‘managed’ as honeybees can (although that, in my mind, is a big plus).

Scientists are investigating many possible solutions (including anti-viral drugs and genetically modified super bees), but it seems as though there is little progress on the one thing that might make a difference – changing the way we grow our food. Adding space for wildlife back into the agricultural landscape has a huge positive effect on biodiversity, the availability of wild pollinators and the health of honeybee populations.

On a personal level, there isn’t that much we can do. You could choose to become a beekeeper (as Mel from Bean Sprouts has done), although your hives would be as much at risk of colony collapse as any other.

Or you can choose to help bees and wildlife generally, by gardening organically, planting a range of flowering plants and cutting down your carbon footprint and being more environmentally friendly.

Beyond that it’s a case of reading books like this one and badgering governments to take large scale action before it is too late. Do you really want to be hand pollinating all of your fruit and vegetable plants in 10 years time?

Posted 15 June 2008, 17:46.   Posted in .

1 Comments for A World Without Bees

  1. I am a beekeeper, so I’m a little closer to the problem,
    and a little more interested in the outcome.

    The book is clearly a misinformed set of half-baked ideas
    that will add no value at all to one’s understanding of the
    problems facing modern apiculture.

    The causes of CCD are simple – exotic invasive pathogens
    that came from overseas along with all the world trade that
    also brought over Tracheal Mites, Varroa Mites, and the
    OTHER diseases and pests of honey bees that have
    appeared since the mid-1980s. Note that CCD is only the
    latest in several decades of serious problems for
    beekeeping and agriculture, and that all of these
    problems cam across the oceans along with rampant
    run-away trade, and lax biosecurity.

    “changing the way we grow our food” will not help the
    honey bee at all. What might help would be a tolerance
    for less “perfect” fruits and veggies at the market, so
    as to reduce the grower’s motivation to spray so much
    poison, which is what really kills bees and other so-called
    “native pollinators”, who really are not adapted to
    work the blossoms of the imported and hybridized food
    plants that are grown in modern agriculture.

    “Adding space for wildlife back into the agricultural
    landscape” is also not going to help the honey bee.
    Given the set of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides
    used by growers, no bee would survive for long in these
    “wild areas” without a suspension of spraying of all
    pesticices, which ain’t gonna happen. The idea is
    a pipe dream, another government boondoggle, where
    corporate factory farm companies and wealthy landowners
    will collect undeserved tax credits for “setting aside” land
    that cannot be farmed anyway.

    Bees and pollinators don’t like poisoned wasteland any
    more than crop plants do, so the “environmentalists”
    who back these efforts merely allow themselves to be
    used in a cynical money grab and tax dodge. (Naive
    fools!)

    So, “Adding space for wildlife back into the agricultural
    landscape” WILL NOT have “a huge positive effect on
    biodiversity, the availability of wild pollinators and the
    health of honeybee populations”. Nothing will live so
    close to so much pesticide use, but then, nothing but
    continued pesticide use will keep the world from starving.
    It is a very complex puzzle, one not solved without
    making some very hard choices about complex and
    incomplete data sets.

    Some factual coverage of the issues and science,
    including the peer-reviewed papers, can be found here:

    http://bee-quick.com/reprints

    These are reprints of the coverage of the magazine
    “Bee Culture”, a monthly for entomologists and
    beekeepers.

    James · Jun 17, 02:50 AM

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