[Pollinator] Bee Blog: Monotech: What agribusiness has done to the honeybee

[Ladadams at aol.com]

Monotech: What agribusiness has done to the honeybee
Monday, August 13 2007 @ 02:07 PM PDT
Contributed by: _arch_stanton_ 
(http://www.infoshop.org/inews/users.php?mode=profile&uid=620) 
Views: 157    (http://www.infoshop.org/inews/index.php?topic=70) The clamor 
of alarm bells set off by colony collapse disorder this past winter should have 
been ringing some time ago. Given that the rise in harrowing natural 
catastrophes and ecological upheaval – and the looming escalation in both their 
frequency and ferocity – are (finally) bringing an uphill battle against climate 
change to the fore, a wave of inexplicable carnage probably shouldn’t come as 
such a shock.

Monotech: What agribusiness has done to the honeybee

>From Adbusters #73, Aug-Sep 2007

The clamor of alarm bells set off by colony collapse disorder this past 
winter should have been ringing some time ago. Given that the rise in harrowing 
natural catastrophes and ecological upheaval – and the looming escalation in both 
their frequency and ferocity – are (finally) bringing an uphill battle 
against climate change to the fore, a wave of inexplicable carnage probably shouldn’
t come as such a shock.

After all, honeybees are hardly the developed world’s first species to suffer 
a quick, curious demise in their number. The Achilles heel of modernity is 
that we rarely look before we leap – and we rarely stop leaping until we’ve 
landed ourselves in some degree of magnificent chaos, usually at another species’ 
expense.

“We’re the ultimate cause in that we’ve changed the planet to suit our 
needs. We’re running it to suit our needs and not to the benefit of all the 
organisms around us,” explained Jeffery Pettic, leader of the USDA’s honeybee 
research lab, during a salon.com expert’s round table when asked if he thought 
people were the ultimate cause of CCD. “Honeybees aren’t totally domesticated, but 
we have tried to domesticate them. We’ve tried to make bees more gentle and 
make more honey. In enhancing certain traits, we make the bees more susceptible 
to other things.”

That list of other potential things has become quite bewildering: The 
encroachment of urbanization, toxicity from pesticides and genetically modified 
crops, tracheal and Varroa mite infestations, Nosema ceranae and other fungi, 
African honeybee genes, bacteria from small hive beetles, poor nutrition from 
fructose-spiked corn syrup, stress from unprecedented migration, immune 
deficiencies and – as widely misreported – cell phone radiation. Moreover, as another 
eminent honeybee researcher, Eric Mussen, noted in that same online round table, 
“you’re going to find that in most cases, there is not going to be one 
factor that did them in; it’s going to be a combination. This is the perfect storm 
for honeybees.”

Herein lies the crux of the quandary: our impulse to determine a causal 
relationship between CCD and something other than our own voraciousness. Perhaps 
the most disturbing symptom of CCD is its rapid tenacity, but this trait has 
largely skewed discussion, especially in the conventional media. Lost in the 
kerfuffle are telltale aspects of the issue such as that offered by two 
Pennsylvania-based researchers, whose recent paper traces colony collapses “that are 
reminiscent of the present situation” as far back as 1869.

While close to a third of the US’s 2.4 million colonies have been lost this 
past winter, about three quarters of those losses are attributable to 
previously established threats. Far more disconcerting is the fact that the number of 
managed US honeybee colonies has been gradually cut in half since the early ’
70s – or that the North American diet has come to rely so inherently on a 
pollinator that isn’t even native to the continent.

“The commercial beekeeping industry is just a cog in the big industrial wheel,
” says Sharon Labchuk, leader of the provincial Green Party in Prince Edward 
Island, Canada, and a small-scale organic beekeeper. “The industrial 
agriculture model has destroyed pollinating insects through its chemicals and through 
its clear cutting of forests and plowing under the prairies. It’s destroyed 
habitat for not only insects, but for everything else that would normally live in 
those kinds of ecosystems. We’ve destroyed the natural world within the area 
that we’ve killed, and we’ve also destroyed the vicinity through chemical use.
”

Labchuk also points to a little known peculiarity that bodes ill for the 
health of the honeybee: the super-sized wax foundations used in commercial 
beekeeping operations. Whereas the combs created by natural worker brood are about 
4.6 mm in diameter, manufacturers have increased the size of wax foundations – 
beginning about a century ago, according to Labchuk – to 5.4 mm wide in an 
effort to create larger honeybees and, in turn, more honey (and, tellingly, more 
money). Given the way honeybees use their combs to reproduce, the 
Frankenstein-esque result has been a species that is half as large again as is natural, and 
an increased vulnerability to mite infestations due to the extra space in the 
combs themselves.

“You’ve got bees that were made to be bigger the same way we’ve made cows, 
pigs and chickens bigger, because bigger is better in the industrial model,” 
quips Labchuk. “We produce everything using an industrial model which is 
insatiable, which is one in which economic growth is the mantra and in which economic 
growth is seen as a good thing.”

As an indicator of how potentially overbearing that mantra can be, take the 
almond farming industry in California’s Central Valley, which supplies 80 
percent of the world’s almond crop. The state’s almond acreage has grown by 40 
percent in the last two decades, and is projected to grow by another 30 percent 
by 2010. More than a million hives are required for pollination in February and 
March of every year, and that number is expected to surge to a point where 
the entire commercial honeybee population will be needed to do the same job 
within the next five years. It’s also worth noting that once the almond crop has 
been dealt with, those same bees embark on a migrate-and-pollinate mission that 
reaches most of the continental US – all told, the USDA estimates that 
pollination has improved crop yields and quality to the tune of $20 billion annually.

“Honeybees are in effect six-legged livestock that both manufacture 
agricultural commodities – honey and wax – and, more importantly, contribute 
agricultural services – pollination. Close to 100 crop species in the US rely to some 
degree on pollination services provided by this one species – collectively, 
these crops make up approximately 1/3 of the US diet, including the majority of 
high-value crops that contribute to healthy diets,” Dr. May Berenbaum – one of 
the authors of a National Academy of Sciences report from last October about 
the declining state of North America’s pollinators – told the US Congress in 
late March. “It is difficult to think of any other multi-billion-dollar 
agricultural enterprise that is so casually monitored.”

Beyond shoddy surveillance, the big issue here is the free market’s 
complicity in not recognizing or respecting the complexity of our natural ecosystems. 
That we’ve elevated the honeybee to a keystone role in our food chain may yet 
become the ultimate irony when the world’s greediest consumers begin to truly 
understand the prospect of colony collapse.

A surprising number of news reports (elite media among them) about CCD 
relayed a quote attributed to Albert Einstein about the fact that humans would die 
out in four years if bees were to disappear – an attribution that bears 
absolutely no evidence. Perhaps, given the potentially greater implications of colony 
collapse disorder, the verifiable words of Harvard biologist and author E.O. 
Wilson are a bit closer to the mark: “So important are insects and other land 
dwelling arthropods, that if all were to disappear, humanity could not last 
more than a few months.”


_http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/Monotech_What_agribusiness_has_done_to_t
he_honeybee_ 
(http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/Monotech_What_agribusiness_has_done_to_the_honeybee.html) 
 
Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Coevolution Institute
423 Washington St. 5th
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 362 1137
LDA at coevolution.org
_http://www.coevolution.org/_ (http://www.coevolution.org/) 
_http://www.pollinator.org/_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 
_http://www.nappc.org/_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

Join the Pollinator Partnership to save the bees, bats, butterflies and more! 
See _http://www.pollinator.org/_ (http://www.pollinator.org/)  for more 
information.

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