By Alex Roslin
August 16, 2007
The Georgia Straight
[Also read it here: Bees Vanishing]
What's happening to the bees? The fuzzy little honey-making
critters are dying off like the dinosaurs, and no one knows why. In the U.S.,
according to a congressional report updated in June, up to 36 percent of 2.4
million bee colonies were wiped out last winter. Canadian beekeepers reported
losses of one-third of this country's bees during the winter, including a
23-percent loss in British
Columbia.
Scientists have dubbed this bee Armageddon "colony
collapse disorder", and it's provoking worldwide alarm. CCD doesn't just
mean there'll be less honey or lower chances of getting stung. The bee pandemic
is "the biggest general threat to our food supply", according to the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That's because one of every three bites of food we eat
comes from bee-pollinated plants: peaches, blueberries, strawberries, melons,
citrus fruits, apples, broccoli, squash, cucumbers–you name it. The little
insects are worth $15 billion annually to U.S. farmers
and $1 billion in Canada–$300
million in B.C. alone.
Pulitzer Prize–winning entomologist E.O. Wilson told the
Associated Press last May that the honeybee is nature's "workhorse–and we
took it for granted. We've hung our own future on a thread." If the bee
collapse continues, added Kevin Hackett, head of the USDA's bee and pollination
program, we'll be "stuck with grains and water".
The alarm isn't due just to the sheer number of bees lost.
It's also because the cause is still a mystery almost a year after CCD hit the
headlines. The finger has been pointed at everything from powerful new
pesticides to genetically engineered crops, weather, mites, stress, bad
nutrition, microbes, even cellphones and, you guessed it, aliens. The search
for the culprit is opening a window onto the dark side of how big agribusiness
gets food to our tables.
In Canada,
there's another twist. Most of the Canadian beekeeping industry says the huge
bee die-off here actually had nothing to do with CCD. Instead, it was simply
caused by a harsh winter and an outbreak of Varroa destructor mites, a pesky
little parasite that is the bane of beekeepers.
"CCD is simply not here," said Paul van
Westendorp, the provincial apiculturist at the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and
Lands. Van Westendorp is the man in charge of inspecting beekeeping operations
for disease control. "Up to this point, I can say with confidence that we
have not experienced CCD."
Jean-Marc Le Dorze isn't so sure. His 1,200 hives at Golden
Ears Apiaries in Mission,
did just fine last winter. In fact, his loss was a paltry five to seven
percent–less than half the 15-percent norm. "In the early spring, my bees
were in the greatest condition I've seen them," he said. "Things were
looking very, very good."
The trouble started in mid May, when his bees were
pollinating blueberries in the Fraser Valley.
The bees vanished from 30 hives. No dead bees, just bee eggs and larvae left
behind in hives. "The adults weren't there. Kind of like that CCD
thing–large, broad, sudden, unexplained die-off of adults. That's a telltale
sign of CCD."
This wasn't the catastrophic 80- to 100-percent loss that
some U.S. beekeepers
had seen, but what scared Le Dorze was that he didn't know the cause. It was
enough to convince him not to truck his bees to Alberta for honey
production as he had planned. "I brought them all home."
Asked about Le Dorze's losses, van Westendorp acknowledged
he had heard "anecdotal" reports about "CCD–like" outbreaks
in B.C. He said they had occurred at "less than five" beekeeping
operations. "We leave open the possibility that CCD exists in B.C.,"
he said. "The reason I've refrained from talking about CCD is the causes
are still unknown."
But Le Dorze's losses did seem to come as a surprise to Ed
Nowek. He's a 30-year veteran beekeeper in Vernon and president
of the Canadian Honey Council, representing 400 to 500 beekeepers across the
country. Nowek had just finished telling the Straight that none of the recent
Canadian bee deaths were due to CCD. "We're calling it excessive winter
losses," he said. "We're not really considering it CCD. The symptoms
are different."
When told of Le Dorze's empty hives, Nowek admitted it
sounds like CCD. "It's pretty interesting. It's showing symptoms similar
to the U.S.,
yes, we could say that. I've got to give him a call, then."
In fact, Nowek's little guys also did the disappearing
trick. His 12 million bees living in 200 hives at the Planet Bee honey farm had
a busy season last year. Their first pollination contract was in April. Nowek
trucked them to cherry and apple orchards in the Okanagan Valley,
where he set them loose to move pollen from flower to flower so the crops could
grow.
Next up were blueberries in May, followed by raspberries
and cranberries in the Fraser Valley until
July, then back to the Okanagan for honey production until August. Farmers need
one to four hives to pollinate each acre, depending on the type of crop, so Nowek's
tiny workers were good for 100 to 200 acres of apple trees or 50 acres of
blueberry bushes.
By late summer, Nowek started seeing problems. His bees
were vanishing and leaving behind empty hives. Normally, when bees die from an
infestation or disease, they do so in or near their hives and leave behind lots
of dead bodies. This time, there were none. There wasn't even any brood in the
hives to form the next generation of bee babies.
"It was unusual," he said over the phone from his
honey-products store in Vernon.
"The bees were just gone."
Then came fall and winter, and Nowek lost still more bees
to the usual seasonal attrition that comes with the colder weather. By last
spring, he had only about one million bees left in 50 or 60 hives. A typical
winter loss should have cost him just 15 percent of his hives. His loss was 70
to 75 percent since the summer.
But was it CCD? No, said Nowek. He thinks the main cause
was Varroa mites, which built up earlier than expected last summer and were
already decimating his hives before Nowek could apply chemical treatments to
kill the pests. To make matters worse, a hot July fried the flowers that bees
go to for pollen, which they need for protein.
DAVID HACKENBERG HAS little doubt why his bees disappeared.
He's the Pennsylvania beekeeper who
went public about CCD last November. He said he started the fall with more than
seven million bees in 2,950 hives. One day in late November, 400 hives were
suddenly empty. Like Le Dorze, Hackenberg didn't find any bodies, just brood in
the hives. By January, 70 percent of his hives had been emptied.
"I called everybody," he said on the phone from
his office at Hackenberg Apiaries in Lewisburg. "Something really weird is
going on here. Bees don't go off and leave their young. But they did. We're
talking about a mass exodus."
Hackenberg, 59, started beekeeping in high school and has
worked with bees his entire adult life. He doesn't hesitate when asked what
caused his bees to vanish: pesticides, particularly a new class of powerful
chemicals called neonicotinoids (or neonics), which are an artificial form of
nicotine.
"My theory–and I'm just a dumb beekeeper–is something
has broken down their immune system," he said. "The only thing that's
new is the increased usage of neonicotinoids. Three years ago, you started
really seeing it. Now, it's everywhere. It's the pesticide of choice in this
country–and yours too. You can't get away from the stuff."
Hackenberg is now refusing to put his bees on farms where
neonics are used. Back in Mission,
Le Dorze said he doesn't know if neonics caused his bee losses. He does say,
however, that the pesticide is usually sprayed on blueberries, the crop his
bees were pollinating when they vanished.
This link is fuelling controversy because neonics have
become widespread, mostly through their frequent use in treating genetically
engineered seeds. If neonics were to blame for CCD, it would make bees the
first known species to become a casualty of the biotechnology era.
Last March, the Sierra Club called on the U.S. government
to fund emergency research into the neonic connection and, if GM crops are
found to be responsible for CCD, to ban the plants. "You look at what's
new exposure, and this is the new exposure," said Laurel Hopwood, the
group's GM campaigner, from her home office in Cleveland, Ohio.
"This is big. We're talking about the food
supply."
Hackenberg's claims appear to coincide with the findings of
the world's largest-ever field trial of GM crops, done for the British
government in 2003. The three-year study, which involved 4,000 visits to fields
and the counting of 1.5 million insects and birds, found that powerful
chemicals used in conjunction with GM crops were highly harmful to bees,
butterflies, and birds. Fields of biotech canola and sugar beets had dramatically
fewer bees than conventional farms.
As well, a U.S. study
in 2003 found that chemical use on GM crops had shot up 32 percent per acre in
the previous eight years, while it had fallen on conventional farms by 30
percent.
The link between CCD and neonics is one of the questions
intriguing Chris Mullin, an insect toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University.
He's a member of the CCD Working Group, a team of academic and government
scientists leading research into the bee apocalypse. The group expects to
release its long-awaited report in October and is zeroing in on two causes for
CCD; pesticides and a new unnamed virus, Mullin said. "We've detected
within the food of honeybees a lot of pesticides, including
neonicotinoids," he said.
It's still too early to tell what specific role the neonics
play in causing CCD, but Mullin said studies have shown neonics degrade the
immune systems of bees, making them more susceptible to disease. The working
group singled out neonics, he said, because CCD made its appearance shortly
after the new chemical became widespread in genetically engineered crops in
2000 and 2001. "That's why we looked at those groups of chemicals
first," he said.
Here in B.C., Paul van Westendorp is dubious. "Mullin
may be 100 percent correct, but I should caution that I have seen highly
speculative articles [about CCD]. I will wait until I have more substantial
information," he said.
Instead, he blames CCD on the explosion of so-called
migratory beekeeping. The practice has become a linchpin of corporate
agriculture and involves trucking bees thousands of kilometres to pollinate up
to 20 crops each year. "Honeybees have not evolved over millions of years
to spend their lives on the backs of flatbed trailers," he said.
The heavy workload isn't just stressing the hell out of
bees. It also doesn't give them adequate nutrition. That's because in the era
of big agribusiness, each pollination site is a vast monoculture: just one type
of crop, not the broad variety of plants that bees feast on naturally.
"It's the same thing as if you eat only bananas,"
van Westendorp said. "You will not only be sick of bananas, but you will
have a few nutrition problems."
As the bee workload has soared, U.S. bee
colony numbers have collapsed from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million last
year, before CCD hit. "Like in any livestock production system, if you're
stressing the animal, it will not only malfunction, it will become vulnerable
to disease," van Westendorp said.
Canada is
slightly better positioned to resist CCD, he said, because migratory beekeepers
move bees shorter distances and fewer times per season.
Douglas McRory, the provincial government apiculturist in Ontario,
agrees that U.S. practices
are likely to blame for CCD. "They put those colonies on trucks and move
them around the whole frigging country. The poor things don't know where they
are half the time," he said. "Their beekeepers are doing stuff that
has come back to haunt them that our guys don't do up here."
McRory also blames chemicals–not those used by farmers, but
rather those used by beekeepers themselves. U.S. beekeepers
indiscriminately use pesticides to control mites and other infestations, he
said, and some are suspected of brewing their own chemicals to save costs. The
misuse of chemicals has fostered drug resistance among some pests, he said.
"They've loaded up their beehives with so many
chemicals down there–some registered, some not. They've got those bees
resistant to everything known to man."
BACK IN PENNSYLVANIA, Hackenberg is frustrated by the
Canadian response. "The provincial folks [in Canada]
have got their heads buried in the sand," he retorted. He admitted that
trucking bees around the country puts stress on the little critters: "No
doubt about it; we've been beating these things around." But he said he's
done it for 40 years, while CCD has only just appeared. As for the chemicals
used by beekeepers, he answered: "We have beekeepers using the same mix of
chemicals for years, long before this thing happened. We also have beekeepers
who got CCD and didn't use any chemicals," he said.
"Something is going haywire."
The truth may be all of the above, according to Mark
Winston, an SFU entomologist who has done extensive research on bees.
"We're probably looking at multiple factors that came together in the past
season in a perfect storm," he said on the phone from his Vancouver office.
The culprit, he said, is likely the combination of
stressors from the rise of big corporate agriculture–chemicals, monoculture,
and trucking bees around all season–which has made bees sitting ducks for
diseases and infestations. "I don't know if a new virus would be popping
up if bees weren't already stressed," he said. "It raises a
fundamental question about mass agriculture. We've managed things to such an
extent that it is biting back at us."
