Hang in There, Little Bees

Whoa. A report just came out that said the rate of bee Colony Collapse Disorder (AKA beehive collapse, AKA bee deaths) increased by 36% last year. More than 20% of hives have been dying off every year in recent years, and the death rate in 2007 was around 30%. In healthy, sustainable environments and bee populations, the number of hives that die are evenly replaced with new ones, resulting in a 0% net loss or gain in hives. Bees are our main pollinators. Without them, we don't have food.


That's very, very scary news for the agriculture industry and the ecosystem in general. China's already resorting to pollinating their crops by hand (!) because their bees have all disappeared in certain regions, and it seems we're getting dangerously close to that point too. Unfortunately, the AP article about this report is no longer available online.

Jennie (my roomie) and I are both taking a beekeeping course right now, and our instructor said that while no one knows for sure what is killing the bees, they do have some pretty solid hunches:

1. Unsustainable apiculture (bee farming) practices that result in dirty, bacteria-ridden hives. Bees naturally leave hives and start new ones periodically, but the apiculture industry reuses bee wax indefinitely. The wax eventually turns black and the bees are forced to live in an unsanitary environment.

2. Cell phone transmissions. It's been proven that cell phone transmissions mess with bees' navigation systems and possibly even their ability to process information. It's sort of like having a 100 decibel tinnitus that gets worse every year.

3. Pesitcides, environmental toxins, and genetically modified foods (GMOs). All this nasty stuff is out there everywhere these days, and bees eat it in concentrated amounts right off the flowers. Their bodies are a lot smaller and more susceptible to this gunk than ours are. They just can't handle that much poison.

4. Climate change. While bees do live in a wide range of climates, specific strains of bees evolved to adapt to specific locales. Slightly longer summers, slightly hotter summers, slightly drier or wetter regional weather due to rapid (evolutionarily speaking) changes in climate, more intense storms due to changes to macro-weather patterns (such as el nino, la nina, increased evaporation and convection, jet streams shifting poleward, et cetera)... all this stuff affects insects a lot more than it does, say, highly adaptable, long-lifespan mega-fauna (such as humans and deer), so the detrimental effects (aka deaths) are seen more readily and more quickly in insects.

5. Loss of habitat and food supply. Not sure if you've noticed, but a lot more of the world has been paved over and developed into suburbs in recent decades. Less truly wild areas, fewer fields, smaller forests, and so on means fewer places for bees to make their home and less flowering plants for them to dine on.

6. A combination of some or all of the above factors.

Again, why is this important to us, besides yet another species dying off like the dodo? Well, it's because bees are a keystone species, possible the most important keystone species of them all. What's a keystone species? It's a plant or animal that has a disproportionately large roll in the creation and balance of an ecosystem.

For example, beavers are a keystone species because they shape forests and create damns, which thins the forest (mitigating the risk of fires) and creates habitat for numerous other forest-dwelling species. The existences of many, many of these other species depend on beavers to do their job.

Well, bees are even more important than beavers, because without bees, many plants do not get pollinated, which means the plants don't reproduce, and more importantly to us, they don't produce food. Some plants are pollinated by other insects and birds, but many aren't. In fact, flowers and bees evolved together tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of years ago in symbiosis. Without bees, there are no flowers. Flowering plants make up a sizable percentage of our food-producing flora. In other words, if the bees all die off, the world will see food shortages and habitat destruction like it's never known. We'll at least not since that big meteor struck the Gulf of Mexico and killed off the dinosaurs a few million years ago. Even the ice ages didn't do this much damage to Mother Nature.

As George Carlin said in one of his stand up routines (I'm paraphrasing): "Earth is gonna be just fine. Give it a enough time, and earth will heal itself no problem. It's the humans who are screwed." He probably used a nastier expletive, but you get the point.

Now, most of you already know that I'm pretty liberal, especially when it comes to environmental issues. But most of you also know I'm no alarmest. I won't say the sky is falling unless I see chunks of it on the way down. As I'm sure Jennie and my family would attest, it's hard for me to listen to anyone until I've seen the data myself. And this is data I've been watching for a long time.

So, are we really screwed? I don't know. I hope not, but we've certainly got to figure out this specific problem, and fast, before the bees are all gone. And how do we figure it out? No idea, but addressing some of the issues listed above would be a good start. Doing what we can to slow urban sprawl, buying organic, buying a hybrid or taking public transportation, even raising a hive in your backyard (which is easier than you might think, and totally do-able in urban environments too). A quick Google search or a walk through your local bookstore will likely provide a hundred more ideas in minutes.

The important things to keep in mind are:
A. that everyone needs to be made aware that the disappearance of bees is happening at an alarming rate,
B. that people must understand that this is a major problem for the sustainability and continuance of the human species, despite how innocuous it may initially sound and despite the lack of media attention it receives, and
C. that we each take action now, even if that action is as simple as passing on this blog post to someone you know.

It's clear that certain aspects of the way we have lived our lives and designed our societies are unsustainable, and not just unsustainable for some nebulous, distant future either. These are endemic problems with planetary consequences of biblical proportions that we're facing right now, and if we don't make immediate changes within our individual lives and also to the way we create our cities and societies, we may not even have a distant or a near future to worry about.