[Pollinator] text for Toronto Star article

[Kimberly Winter]

Aug. 7, 2005. 01:00 AM

Rescuing the ghosts among us
Bees make our world possible, thanks to their vital role as pollinators.

Now entire species are going extinct and scientists are playing catch-up


PETER CALAMAI
NATIONAL SCIENCE REPORTER

In his retirement, Sherlock Holmes fussed over them. Poet William Butler 
Yeats yearned for a island glade alive with their buzz. The powerful Medici 
family, rulers of Florence, adopted their form as its golden emblem.

Throughout recorded time, bees have been humanity's universal symbol of 
industry and a constant reminder that we depend on pollinating insects for 
much of what we eat and is beautiful to the eye.

And also for things not as obvious as wildflowers or honey, such as 
pollinating the berries that sustain songbirds, the grains that feed beef 
cattle and the flax that goes into paper money.

"When you explain the importance of bees and the pollinators to people, it's 
like you were telling them that ghosts lived among us, an unseen army of 
workers on which we're very reliant," says Laurie Adams, executive director 
of the Washington, D.C.-based North American Pollinator Protection Campaign.

Many scientists are increasingly concerned that bees may really be turning 
into ghosts; that extinction may be stalking not only commercial hive bees 
but also thousands of species of wild bees that ensure that flowers bloom 
and crops ripen.

Some troubling signs:

More than 400 species of wild bees in western Europe are listed as 
threatened in the national Red Lists compiled for the International Union 
for the Conservation of Nature.

Many species of bumblebees have declined sharply in recent years, and field 
naturalists have found no evidence of several species in locales they once 
frequented.

The number of commercially managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. has plunged 
from almost 6 million in the 1940s to below 2 million in 1996.

Two once common species of bumblebees, one from the east coast of North 
America and one from the west, are missing and presumed gone.

There's no shortage of likely culprits either. Habitat loss, misuse of 
agricultural chemicals, infestations by parasitic mites, a glitch in 
reproduction genetics and the introduction of aggressive foreign species 
have all been blamed.

As well, there is no solid starting point from which to measure the rate of 
decline of bee populations.

"It's much easier to show where something is present than where it is 
absent," says Simon Potts, a leading bee biologist based at Britain's 
Reading University.

Especially for bees. No one knows with any certainty how many different 
kinds of bees call Earth home. The best guess is between 25,000 and 30,000 
species, of which roughly 1,000 are found in Canada.

Then there's the problem of where to look. Many species are solitary, 
meaning the bees live individually rather than in communal nests or hives. 
If the pollen is more plentiful in another field, they'll buzz off.

Finally, there's the biggest challenge: What is that bee buzzing angrily in 
my net? Not only is there no comprehensive printed guide to bee 
identification, there aren't many experts who can identify all the species 
in any one country, much less around the world.

"There are probably only one or two people who could actually ID all the bee 
species in Canada," says Amro Zayed, a bee researcher in the biology 
department at York University. "If we had extinctions in the past, we 
wouldn't have noticed them."

Just weeks ago, Zayed published research that significantly upped the ante 
in the bee survival debate. The PhD student and his supervisor, York 
professor Laurence Packer, used computer simulations to calculate that 
species of solitary bees are 10 times less able than other insects to 
rebound from a random population crash.

The reasons are complex, most of them stemming from the peculiar genetic 
mechanism that determines the sex of newborn bees, wasps and ants.

In small populations, this mechanism can sometimes turn female bees into 
sterile males, greatly increasing their risk of extinction.


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`If we had extinctions in the past, we wouldn't have noticed them'

Amro Zayed

Bee researcher, York University

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This high proportion of dud males isn't a threat to apian survival as long 
as there is a large enough gene pool, says Zayed.

"Above a thousand individuals you're usually safe, so long as that's the 
breeding population," he says.

But many species of solitary bees live in isolated small populations, each 
bee in its own burrow together forming a bee "city." If the city's 
population is below a thousand, say the York researchers, the bees face 
longer odds at recovering from any sort of natural population setback, such 
as a killer cold snap.

"It's a surprise to me that the extinction risk is so high," says Packer, 
who began studying bees in the mid-1970s and uses "bugsrus" as his email 
name.

More such surprises are probable, now that the health of bees (and other 
insect pollinators, like butterflies) is getting increased scientific 
attention in Europe and North America.

As part of a five-year, $18-million diversity project funded by the European 
Community, Simon Potts and scores of other researchers are attempting a 
limited nose count of bees and other pollinating insects. Starting last 
year, bee-counters have been fanning out to collecting spots, armed in some 
cases with historical records from the Victorian era.

"In 18 to 24 months, we will have a lot of confidence in saying whether 
decline in bee numbers is a real widespread problem or not," Potts says.

A similar bee census remains a distant dream in North America, although 
there is some movement after years of stagnation. The U.S. National Academy 
of Sciences recently appointed a panel of 14 experts to analyze all 
published studies about pollinators. By the end of 2006, the panel is 
supposed to declare whether there is a decline in bees and other 
pollinators, the probable causes, the likely impact and potential remedies.

University of Guelph professor Peter Kevan, an entomologist, is the only 
Canadian on the panel and a world-recognized bee researcher. He points out 
that this country has already experienced some serious bee scares.

In the 1970s, for instance, sloppy aerial pesticide spraying against spruce 
budworm in New Brunswick devastated the native honey bees that naturally 
pollinated the province's blueberry crop.

"For several years there weren't enough blueberries to be worth harvesting 
in central New Brunswick, and since then the growers have to pay to have 
hives brought out to their fields," Kevan says.

A serious decline in bees and other pollinators can have serious 
ramifications because the effects cascade through an ecosystem. The 
disappearance of suitable bee habitat in Central America, for instance, has 
been fingered as the likely reason that some trees there are no longer 
reproducing sexually by setting seed but instead hive off clones.

"I don't think we want to find out if that will happen here by conducting 
the experiment by mistake," Kevan says.

Nor need we, says pollinator campaign Laurie Adams.

A woman with the energy of an entire beehive, Adams rhymes off a dozen 
measures possible right now to enhance the survival chances of bees and 
other pollen-spreading creatures, including preserving some "scruffy" 
patches of land in subdivisions and "environmentally protected" swaths on 
golf courses.

Just as important is changing the view that bees are something you either 
swat or run away from because of the sting, says Adams.

"We need to talk about the things that make bees charismatic — how they care 
for their children, how some communicate with a dance, how they navigate 
with their own GPS and how some even sleep inside flowers at night," she 
says.

And bees usually have more important things on their tiny but powerful minds 
than stinging people.

Not one sting was reported during the four months last summer when a quarter 
million people visited a bee garden the group erected below Capitol Hill in 
Washington D.C.

Though Adams acknowledges that she was stung by a bee recently.

"It was hard for me not to say, Look, don't you know what I'm doing here 
week after week for you guys?"
Additional articles by Peter Calamai