Honey bee crisis tied to farming, expert says
Nicholas Read, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, May 19, 2007

It's been called bizarre, mysterious, puzzling, and potentially catastrophic. So much hand-wringing, and all of it over a creature no bigger than the tip of your thumb.

It is, of course, "Colony Collapse Disorder," the convenient and media friendly name given to the confounding and dangerous disappearance of honey bees over much of the Western world, and particularly the U.S. Bees that are as integral to our food system as soil are vanishing like tigers in India. Some estimates suggest that up to 40 per cent of all American bees are gone.

According to the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturalists, the situation here is also worsening. Last winter, 29 per cent of all Canadian honey bees were lost, compared to previous national averages of just 15 per cent. Here in B.C. the figure was 23 per cent.
A honeybee works on a sunflower collecting nectar in Temple, Texas. Honey bees are disappearing across the Western world, especially in the U.S.View Larger Image View Larger Image
A honeybee works on a sunflower collecting nectar in Temple, Texas. Honey bees are disappearing across the Western world, especially in the U.S.
Jerry Larson, AP Photo

The disorder is characterized by the rapid loss of adult bees from hives, leaving behind the brood (larvae and pupae), a small number of young workers and the queen. This remaining adult workforce is insufficient to care for the brood, and so the colony collapses.

Explanations for the crisis range from the plausible -- over-use of pesticides and the infestation of different kinds of fungus and mites -- to the far-fetched -- that cellphone frequencies are somehow interfering with bees' homing instincts.

Especially when the answer, says Simon Fraser University bee expert Mark Winston, is probably as simple -- and as complex -- as farming itself.

What's to blame, Winston says, is what's wrong with Western agriculture everywhere -- a system that relies on chemicals and over-managed monocultures at the same time as it eschews natural systems and biodiversity.

Or in a nutshell, "it's agriculture practices in general that are at fault," Winston says.

Even the bees used to pollinate most crops in the U.S. -- and to an extent in Canada as well -- aren't even native to North America. Honey bees were imported here in the 15th century by European settlers who missed honey on their toast. Never mind that North America was home to tens of thousands of native bees that had been pollinating native plants for centuries.

They were, in the minds of those settlers, the wrong sorts of bees, so the artificial cultivation of honey bees took over and eventually overtook the wholesale pollination of crops everywhere.

And as soon as you become dependent on one species for anything, you become vulnerable.

But it was the intensification of farming in the mid-20th century, says Winston -- when it ceased to be farming at all, and became agribusiness -- that exacerbated and focused the problem.

Antibiotics were given recklessly to beehives to prevent the onset of disease. And that, says Winston, has led to widespread antibiotic resistance.

(The same system applies in other forms of livestock cultivation, from beef to pork to chicken. In fact, more than two-thirds of all the antibiotics produced in North American today are given to livestock.)

Added to that, chemical pesticides were introduced to beehives to control the spread of mites, says Winston, but with that wholesale use came more resistance.
Beekeepers "have bought lock, stock and barrel into this misconception that the more chemicals, the better," Winston says.

But that, he adds, is only part of the story.

Since so many native species have been displaced both by a lack of diversity and honey bees imported from Europe, we now live in a world where bees are trucked like migrant workers from one part of North America to another to pollinate crops as they grow. Thus, explains Winston, the same colony of bees might be in Florida in March, California in April and Maine in May.

What's more, this is how most large-scale beekeepers make their money -- by charging farmers "pollination fees" that earn them four or five times as much money as producing honey does.

But the danger of this system, Winston says, is two-fold. First, because bees are allowed to pollinate only a certain kind of crop at a certain time -- first almonds, then apples, then alfalfa, for example -- they don't get the nutrients they would from eating a more varied diet while they pollinate, and that can make them sick and more vulnerable to parasites and other forms of disease.

"A bee will only live 30 to 40 days, so each generation of bee may only be receiving one kind of major pollen source," Winston says.

Second, all this artificial movement puts stress on individual bees to the point that as many as 10 to 15 per cent of them can die in each forced migration, Winston says.

So stress is likely a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder, as well.

So are pesticides outside the hive, he says. When farmers spray them on their crops, the bees can inadvertently pick up some of those poisons and return them to the hive where they can get into the honeycomb.

And finally, there is climate change. When it gets warmer, bees stay active longer.

The problem with that is the longer they're active, the more sugar they consume -- sugar that should be set aside for winter when there is no pollen for them to gather. So they starve to death.

Add it all up, Winston says, and is it any wonder bee colonies are collapsing? An agricultural system that turns its back on nature and natural systems is bound to harm the very natural processes it depends on.

Instead, he says, farmers need to develop ways to encourage other species of bees to flourish so they can take over some of the pollination responsibilities.

In other words, fewer chemicals and more diversity. Otherwise we really could be on the road to catastrophe.

"We have to begin realizing that diversity is in our self-interest," Winston says. "A monocrop is not the best way to grow food.

"If we look at it sensibly, we'll come to see that we need to change the way we do agriculture in North America."