[Pollinator] Fw: bee article - macleans (Canada's top news magazine)

[Peter Kevan]

Here is the article that just came out in our MacLean's Magazine, Canada's top news magazine and the national equivalent of Time or Newsweek in USA.  Barbara Amiel is one of the top correspondents for MacLean's.  This article is a real coup!  Please circulate to NAPPC.

Many thanks,  Peter




----- Forwarded message from andrew.p.morse at gmail.com -----
     Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 14:32:23 -0500
     From: Andrew Morse <andrew.p.morse at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Andrew Morse <andrew.p.morse at gmail.com>
  Subject: bee article - macleans
       To: Peter Kevan <pkevan at uoguelph.ca>

August 17, 2006

Where have all the bees gone?

A distress call for the fat and furry wonders who soothe our souls

BARBARA AMIEL

This year, the bees didn't return and the butterflies thinned right out.
Summer came. The hydrangeas bloomed, the roses unfurled and all seemed well in our patch of north Toronto, but the garden was curiously still.

The first sign of a troubled summer had come earlier and had nothing to do with bees. "Look," I said to my husband as we bicycled past some hawthorn trees at the end of our street, "little caterpillars moving down the tree trunks onto the pavement. How sweet. Don't ride over them." A few days later the caterpillars were a carpet of thousands undulating down the road. Their empty tents hung eerily from naked tree limbs, dozens of grey shrouds spun in the crotches or along the branches of trees completely shorn of leaves, eaten by an invasion of eastern tent caterpillars. I stood on guard in our small orchard, pump in hand, ready to spray death.

June came and so did the Japanese beetles. Dark vampires sitting motionless, one on top of the other, hard, iridescent green-black shells shining in the heart of the red and yellow roses and sucking life away. Once more pump in hand, before I gave in and the professionals took over.

<http://www.macleans.ca/shared/print.jsp?content=20060814_132048_132048#continue>

Summer is bees. Wild bees with diligent little legs and eyes which probably need spectacles after all that foraging. Bumblebees, fat and furry, levitating against all gravitational odds. Honeybees feasting on nectar. The Group of Seven may have found snow and desolate pines exciting, but most Canadians yearn for summer, a soothing hymn of bees at work. There are notes of clover in their sound and the scent of blue lavender, the flash of butterflies and hummingbirds -- a tone poem evoking fields of long grasses, poppies and cornflowers. Nothing can calm the urban soul more than this, the peace of watching bees methodically visit every floweret in the haze of high summer.

No peace this summer. In early July, we got wasps, clouds of yellow jackets zipping around, and loads of ferocious hornets. Enough variety of beetles arrived to invoke the adage that God must love the beetle best he invented so many. Moths and a few white butterflies flitted by. But no swooping monarchs, no bees.

Bees, it turns out, are in trouble. Their numbers are declining rapidly.
This has scientists worried because bees not only hum and please bee-watchers, inspire musicians like Rimsky-Korsakov and writers from Shakespeare to Cole Porter, but they pollinate most crops and flowers.
Economically, they pack a wallop. Without bees, alfalfa production would crash and without alfalfa, cows would get very grumpy. Bee farmers are renting more hives to pollinate berry crops. Bee crime is up. Last year, the U.S. Western Farm Press reported huge price increases for beehives in California (one million hives needed for California's almond crop alone) and concomitant increases in beehive theft. Beekeepers responded with microchipped hives to deter bee rustlers. "It's one of the toughest crimes to investigate," said Det. Jeff Reed of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department -- possibly from under his protective hat and veil.

Beehive theft affects Europe as well, and that includes the pesky Middle East. A few years ago, Israeli beekeepers accused Palestinians of stealing their hives. Israelis burned tractor tires and carried signs reading "No beehives, no peace." Noel Coward advised Mrs. Worthington not to put her daughter on the stage, but if he were around now, he'd not go far wrong advising her to put her into the apiary business.

Last month's authoritative *Science* magazine reported a major study in Britain and the Netherlands. "Bees have been stung by the biggest losses,"
said *Science*, reporting statistically significant declines in bee diversity. Back in 1999, the São Paulo Declaration on Pollinators warned of an impending world pollination crisis. Canadian entomologist professor Peter Kevan of the University of Guelph formed the Canadian Pollination Initiative. He and York University professor Laurence Packer have research proposals pending with Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

The reasons for the bees' decline include disease and loss of habitat.
Honeybees have always faced domestic violence inside the hive (worker bees mugging the queen if she falters, weaker drones being pushed out of the hive should nectar run short), but these days they also have their own nastily transmitted diseases -- bacterial, viral and parasitic.

Honeybees leave their hives to forage and hang out with wild bees. They infect each other. Bees in the wild have no access to the various medications used to fight infestations. The parasitic varroa mite has decimated honey and wild bees and is developing immunity to the Apistan which fights it.

The bees' love life doesn't help. No homosexuality yet, but promiscuous heterosexuality doesn't guarantee growth. Females must copulate with males of a complementary genetic makeup or else their mating is sterile. In the bee world, there really is a Mr. Right for every female, and since the ratio is not in the girls' favour, it's more accurate to say their world is full of Mr. Wrongs.

As developers and large-scale farmers level brambles and hedgerows, wild flowers decline. The glorious karner blue butterfly that lives on wild lupine has been extirpated in Canada. But wild flowers, especially tubular and trumpet-shaped flowers, depend heavily on butterflies for pollination.
Butterflies are a punctuation mark in nature's beauty but a source of its continuance as well. They can see ultraviolet markings on petals that human eyes cannot see. Provincial governments have outlawed some of their favourite habitats (the milkweed is the only leaf on which the monarch butterfly will lay its eggs and some species of it are listed as a "noxious weed"), but nothing is simpler than the cultivation of plants that attract them, such as legal "tropical" milkweed or the parsley that swallowtails love.

Unlike butterflies with their long tongues, bees want pollen and nectar in their faces and on display. The bee doesn't mind being busy, but she's not interested in burrowing within complicated flowers that hide the goods. *
Aconitum* (including the popular monkshood) is a turnoff. The more exotic floral tastes of Canada's sophisticates, *bromeliad*, for example, won't attract many bees. Nurseries develop exotic hybrids that have no scent and little nectar to discourage bees or wasps. "Vividly appealing," says professor Kevan dryly, "but shallow billboards as far as bees go." Suburban lawns may smell nice when cut, but where's the nectar?

The University of London's Queen Mary college took a group of bumblebees that had never seen flowers and showed them four paintings: Van Gogh's * Sunflowers*, Gauguin's *A Vase of Flowers* and two non-floral works. *
Sunflowers* got the most approach flights and landings and the bumbles favoured the blue of Van Gogh's signature, the colour associated with high-nectar flowers in nature. In the current best-selling novel *Suite Française*, Irène Némirovsky writes of "my friends, the bumblebees, delightful insects . . ." If future generations are to empathize with such references, we will have to plant daisies, foxglove, and bramble roses. This summer, there were few bees in the precisely manicured flower beds of Toronto's Edwards Gardens, but the herbaceous border was a riot of bumblebees.

Urban areas may be among the best places for bees now. They can fly up those high-rises and nest in patio flower boxes. Green roofs are steadily creeping into Canadian life: large buildings with the roof covered with grass and sometimes cultivated gardens like those in Chicago where bees and butterflies thrive. Grass keeps down roof temperatures and helps water runoff. Tokyo law requires all buildings of more than 1,000 sq. m of floor space to have at least 20 per cent green roof to counter the heat.

"No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees," wrote poet Thomas Hood in one of his many depressed moments. If raising your spirits by raising bees seems a risk too far, you might try those other pollinators -- butterflies.
Tarrant and Janice Waye of Hamilton, Ont., took a trip with their three children to the naturium at the Greenway Blooming Centre in Breslau, Ont., and came home with a host plant. Now the Waye home has an improvised caterpillar sanctuary made from an old fish tank and Cooper, 4, Tristan, 6, and Alex, 14, watch caterpillars grow, spin their chrysalises and -- glory of glories -- emerge as the butterflies they take out to the garden.

"We've got swallowtails, admirals, huge monarchs and bees," says Tristan.
And what else? *Annus mirabilis*. No more video games. They, too, are extirpated.

*To comment, email
letters at macleans.ca<letters at macleans.ca?subject=Letter%20to%20the%20editor%20%28story%20in%20the%20online%20edition%29>
*


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