So a few nights ago, there was a showing of Vanishing of the Bees (annoyingly narrated by goody-goody-granola Ellen Page) at the Pink Door, which last spring founded a honeybee colony in its backyard garden. And despite the gratuitous number of bee puns, striped black-and-yellow shirts, and a trapeze artist (confusingly dressed in a wasp-waisted yellow tutu) who kept darting across the screen on her way to the bathroom, I left feeling fucking terrified.
Here’s the deal, in case you haven’t heard: Honeybees, responsible for pollinating one third of the food we put in our mouths, are disappearing. The weirdest part is that no one can find the (tiny, tiny) bodies. The bees literally vanish: All of a sudden, entire bee colonies are just gone, leaving only the queen and a few drones behind in the hive. One apiarist (that’s a beekeeper, numbnuts) recounted how he checked on his hives only to find that all 40,000 of his bees were missing. The event is called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD.
The worst part is that no one really seems to know why it happens.
Scientists suspect the problem may have something to do with systemic pesticides, which are absorbed into crops via irrigation or fertilizer and act as a latent poison. (When hungry bugs decide to nom on the plants, they die.) Bees, shipped from apiaries (those are beehive farms) across the country to pollinate crops, are thought to be absorbing sub-lethal dosages of the pesticides through pollen and then passing on those chemicals to future generations through the honey they feed to their young. Over time, the chemicals could build up and cause a systems failure in bees.
The specifics, however, are vague, and there’s also the possibility that pesticides are only marginally responsible. After protests by beekeepers worried about their plummeting bee populations, France and Germany imposed bans on systemic pesticides for some crops; however, sporadic outbreaks of CCD still occur. Radiation from cell phones, the bee rapture, gene-altering rays beamed down from Russian satellites, and foreign diseases have all been suggested as possible bee-killers; commercial beekeeping practices (shipping bees thousands of miles, feeding them sugar water instead of honey, artificial insemination of queens to select for specific traits) could also play a part.
“There’s no one factor,” entomologist Maryann Frazier of Penn State said in the film. Or, as local beek (short for beekeeper, though I like to think it’s short for “bee geek”) Darren Gordon said in a discussion after the film, “It’s like you smoke, do intravenous drugs, and have unprotected sex—which one is going to kill you? You don’t know. But you will die.”
Scientists in the film, including Michael Pollan of the University of California, worry that CCD is “one of the signs that our food system is unsustainable… it’s destroying the conditions on which it depends.” According to them, the rise of single-crop farms is the root of honeybees’ problems: They only provide bee food two or three weeks out of the year and necessitate the use of pesticides to control decimating infestations. They champion organic farming, beekeeping as a hobby (the film’s most famous quote: “Instead of one person with 60,000 hives, we should have 60,000 people with one hive”), and the end of industrial agriculture as ways to turn the bee crisis around.
So, you know, easy fixes. All of which leaves me feeling even more scared. But should I be(e)? Is this something to get worked up about? The film, after all, was notable not only for its wide variety of accents (rural Floridian to provincial French patois to German-Chicagoan) but also for its sensationalism: hints that pesticides cause autism and birth defects in infants, Da Vinci Code-esque soliloquies linking bees with the sacred feminine, beekeepers in tears as they surveyed their empty hives. Plenty of bee hacks (is that a thing?) in the film were content to make sweeping accusations against America’s culture of monoculture as leading not only to CCD but to the “bee holocaust.” Maybe I’m falling victim to what Bill Maher called “fatigue, where you have global warming, and then you have the bees, and the polar bears are drowning, and the forests are going away, and it’s all too much”—but should I go out and buy a beehive now, or is there a thread of alarmism in the coverage of CCD?
In July of 2007, the New York Times cited Oregon State University professor emeritus of entomology Michael Burgett at as believing that CCD was only the latest in a series of “unremarkable spikes above a common level of mortality of more than 20 percent in recent decades.” He compared CCD to a similar phenomenon in the 1970s called “disappearing bee disease,” which eventually went away. I called up Dr. Burgett to see if he still thought the same thing.
“I stand even more behind that today than in 2007,” Dr. Burgett said. “CCD is largely a media creation… I’ve rarely seen a more biased, one-sided representation of honey bees [than in Vanishing of the Bees].” Zing.
Dr. Burgett went on to say that the media buzz surrounding CCD has led to an increase in the bee population in Washington and Oregon because it leads farmers worried about the disorder to create more colonies (by splitting the ones they have and then adding queens) in case of collapse. He acknowledged that national bee populations have been declining steadily since 1946—with sporadic spikes, as in the 1970s and today—but doesn’t think the decline is anything to be worried about. He sees it as symptomatic of the increasing commercialization of agriculture, and “commercial agriculture requires commercial beekeeping. Instead of every farm owning a beehive, now 1,500 commercial beekeepers own 75% of the hives.”
Not that he’s against holistic beekeeping, as championed in the film: “I wish thousands of people would keep bees. But having every family in the U.S. go out and buy a beehive, plant vegetable gardens in their backyard, like the filmmakers wanted is impractical… Commercial agriculture is not going away.”
Moreover, Burgett’s Pollination Economics Report—to his knowledge the only comprehensive count of honeybee population in the nation—indicated that bees are well-established in the western hemisphere. “We couldn’t cause the extinction of bees even if we wanted.”
That’s all well and good, but here’s the bottom line: The fact that no one knows whether CCD is a crisis or a phase scares me more than anything.
I like the Bee Rapture and Bee Holocaust theories, but I think my favorite is that the bees are being MURDERED, hive by hive. It’s like some Agatha Christie novel for bees: 40,000 Little Indians.
I’ve actually noticed more bees in my flower garden this year than previous years. I live in the middle of the city so I’m not sure where they come from – what’s a bee’s range anyway?
Perhaps all the bees are moving here to Canada for the health care.
and also, this disease only affects european honeybees – other species of bees do not experience CCD. The European honey bee is not native to North America. In fact, no honey bees are native to North America. Another solution to the CCD problem not mentioned in the movie: Use Eastern Honey Bees who do not experience CCD and can be raised in identical fashion to European honey bees. Or use native non-stinging bees for pollination. This whole CCD thing is ridiculous. I think the whole CCD thing has much more to do with industrial farmers being completely unwilling to change absolutely anything in their methods to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
I fail to see the humor in this. Save the jive costumes for Halloween.
Perhaps bees have figured out (or been persuaded?) that they are the only thing that can rid the earth of the real threat to all other living things in a relatively short time- namely humans- and have started a movement to do just that. Not all bee colonies are on board yet, but the ones who have joined the movement, have gone off to convince the others around the world. Can’t blame them a bit–fricken human pests.
ps–I like many individuals but as a whole, humanity kind of sucks.
Nobody can find the bodies? Sounds like a conspiracy to me. Maybe Sgt. Doom can fill us in on the details.
I remember a report in the Times/NPR a year or two ago describing how the CDC and U.S. military bio-warfare research labs figuring out that CCD was the result of a bee hiving being infected with two different diseases simultaneously (a mite and a fugus I believe). The dual infection messed with the drones homing instincts which is why there are no bodies. Did the movie mention this report at all? The article seemed to stress that pesticides had nothing to do with CCD at all.
I should have said “jive hive”.
@6 Yeah. Interesting that no one mentions possible predators, like 1,000 super mutant crows created by the RAND corp.
@3
Actually honey bees (of any kind) pollinate only a very small portion of crops and flowers. The majority is done by the smaller Pollen Bees which are as plentiful as always.
Ms. Long, bees aside, your eye for stuff people on the internet aren’t quite sure whether to freak out about? That’s a sign you’ll be perfect for Slog. Welcome!
If European Honey Bees are not native to this continent, how did we have fruits, flowers and vegetables before they got here?
Ever heard of bumblebees, Catalina? They’re native.
Well then why are we so worried about Honey Bees? Honestly, you people are just wearing me out today. I need a shot of Amaretto.
Fuck bees. I wanna talk about fucking yellow jackets. One of those fuckers nailed me on the neck the other night when I was innocently taking out the trash. How come their colonies don’t seem to have collapsed?!
You do understand that Michael Pollan is a journalism professor, not a scientist?
Didn’t they finally solve this bee mystery last year? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/scienc…
Catalina, because honey bees produce, um, honey . . . which is kinda cool stuff.
TVDinner: Yellowjackets are chosen by God. They will inherit the Earth.
Oh, I have collapsed quite a few Yellow Jacket colonies, thank you very much. I accidentally cut into a nest of them in an old shrub when we first bought our house and got bit like twenty times.
I let them think they had won. For a time. Revenge, as we all know from some old Star Trek Movie or something, is a dish that is best served cold.
That night, it was the nuclear option. Doomsday. Apocolypto. Poison. Pressure sprayer, Then stomped on the remains of the nest and the next day dug up the shrub it was in and threw it in to the truck, then on to the transfer station.
Yellow jackets are dreadful people.
As a hobbyist beekeeper, the pesticide theory is the only plausible explanation of CCD to me. Usually, when a colony dies, you’ll find a hive full of corpses, but a hive lost to CCD has only a very few dead bees, and is mostly empty. This indicates that the foragers aren’t even making it home. There are some pesticides used in this country that have been banned in other countries for causing nervous system disruption in insects. Bees navigate by memory, remember, and CCD would be explained entirely by the use of such chemicals.
@14: Honeybees pollinate many crops that American bees don’t. Remember, a lot of what we grow was brought over from the Old World, just like honeybees.
I have, only during the last few years, been noticing dead bees on my driveway. I am seeing the tiny, tiny corpses (and telling my dog not to eat them). Given the broad expanses of hard surfaces maybe it’s just that I’m seeing them there and if more ground was covered with vegetation, I’d miss them.
I still like the explanation provided in one season of “Doctor Who.” In going through odd events, Donna mentions the bees vanishing and the Doctor realizes they’ve left the Earth to return to their native planet.
Donna: You’re saying that bees are aliens.
The Doctor: Don’t be so daft. Not all of them.
Whose job is it to count all of the bees?
I live on Magnolia, and there are bees EVERYWHERE. Bumblebees, honeybees, just buzzing around as industriously as you could expect. There is a mystery I hope a more knowledgeable Slogger could clear up for me regarding the habits of honeybees, however.
There is a hedge near my house that is full of honeybees all day long, yet it has no blossoms or flowers of any kind. I have observed the bees licking the undersides of the leaves, which are oval with a point, about 2 inches in length, and are glossy on top. What type of plant is this hedge, and what makes it so attractive to bees, even though there are no flowers on it?
Mason bees and leafcutter bees are also natives that cannot experience CCD because they don’t form colonies. They’re better pollinators too.
Alien abduction. Clearly. How did you all miss that?
Oh…
In other bee news, apparently Mason Bees are native to North America. They tend to be solitary (individualist?) bees, who nest in small holes, not hives. They are no good for honey. You can easily build Mason Bee habitations (or just buy them). They will pollinate your (non-native) tomatoes in gardens, but are no good for industrial agriculture since they aren’t easy to manipulate in large groups, and tend to riot when treated unjustly.
Wasps (yellowjackets and the like) are great for predating upon cabbage moth larvae, the kind that chew up your kale and broccoli, FYI. So their status as “pest” is debatable.
@17 had the right article
http://tinyurl.com/3bg5xqg
The cause of the CCD has been pretty clearly linked to a combination fungus and virus infection of the same colony. The virus the bees can kick on their own. The fungus, they can kick on their own. But the combination of the two in the same hive/colony wipes it out.
@28 and 17
That article and its headline are a masterpiece of rhetorical certainty implying the cause of CCD has been discovered. Read it and find out that the discovery, and the article’s certainty, apply only to the mechanism of one possible cause for the disease. Certainty sells news.