[Pollinator] Time Magazine COVER story - A World Without Bees

[Ladadams at aol.com]

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2149141,00.html 
The  Plight of the Honeybee 
Mass  deaths in bee colonies may mean disaster for farmers--and your 
favorite  foods 
By  Bryan Walsh 

Monday,  Aug. 19, 2013 
You can thank the Apis Mellifera, better known  as the Western honeybee, 
for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you'll eat today.  From the almond orchards 
of central California--where each spring billions of  honeybees from across 
the U.S. arrive to pollinate a multibillion-dollar  crop--to the blueberry 
bogs of Maine, the bees are the unsung, unpaid laborers  of the American 
agricultural system, adding more than $15 billion in value to  farming each 
year. In June, a Whole Foods store in Rhode Island, as part of a  campaign to 
highlight the importance of honeybees, temporarily removed from its  produce 
section all the food that depended on pollinators. Of 453 items, 237  
vanished, including apples, lemons and zucchini and other squashes. Honeybees  
"are the glue that holds our agricultural system together," wrote journalist  
Hannah Nordhaus in her 2011 book, The Beekeeper's  Lament. 
And now that glue is failing. Around 2006,  commercial beekeepers began 
noticing something disturbing: their honeybees were  disappearing. Beekeepers 
would open their hives and find them full of honeycomb,  wax, even honey--but 
devoid of actual bees. As reports from worried beekeepers  rolled in, 
scientists coined an appropriately apocalyptic term for the mystery  malady: 
colony-collapse disorder (CCD). Suddenly beekeepers found themselves in  the 
media spotlight, the public captivated by the horror-movie mystery of CCD.  
Seven years later, honeybees are still dying on a scale rarely seen before, and 
 the reasons remain mysterious. One-third of U.S. honeybee colonies died or 
 disappeared during the past winter, a 42% increase over the year before 
and well  above the 10% to 15% losses beekeepers used to experience in normal  
winters. 
Though beekeepers can replenish dead hives  over time, the high rates of 
colony loss are putting intense pressure on the  industry and on agriculture. 
There were just barely enough viable honeybees in  the U.S. to service this 
spring's vital almond pollination in California,  putting a product worth 
nearly $4 billion at risk. Almonds are a big  deal--they're the Golden State's 
most valuable agricultural export, worth more  than twice as much as its 
iconic wine grapes. And almonds, totally dependent on  honeybees, are a 
bellwether of the larger problem. For fruits and vegetables as  diverse as 
cantaloupes, cranberries and cucumbers, pollination can be a farmer's  only chance 
to increase maximum yield. Eliminate the honeybee and agriculture  would be 
permanently diminished. "The take-home message is that we are very  close to 
the edge," says Jeff Pettis, the research leader at the U.S. Department  of 
Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory. "It's a roll of the dice  now." 
That's why scientists like Pettis are working  hard to figure out what's 
bugging the bees. Agricultural pesticides were an  obvious 
suspect--specifically a popular new class of chemicals known as  neonicotinoids, which seem to 
affect bees and other insects even at what should  be safe doses. Other 
researchers focused on bee-killing pests like the  accurately named Varroa 
destructor, a parasitic mite that has ravaged honeybee  colonies since it was 
accidentally introduced into the U.S. in the 1980s. Others  still have looked 
at bacterial and viral diseases. The lack of a clear culprit  only deepened 
the mystery and the fear, heralding what some greens call a  "second silent 
spring," a reference to Rachel Carson's breakthrough 1962 book,  which is 
widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. A quote  that's 
often attributed to Albert Einstein became a slogan: "If the bee  
disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years  to 
live." 
One problem: experts doubt that Einstein ever  said those words, but the 
misattribution is characteristic of the confusion that  surrounds the 
disappearance of the bees, the sense that we're inadvertently  killing a species 
that we've tended and depended on for thousands of years. The  loss of the 
honeybees would leave the planet poorer and hungrier, but what's  really scary 
is the fear that bees may be a sign of what's to come, a symbol  that 
something is deeply wrong with the world around us. "If we don't make some  changes 
soon, we're going to see disaster," says Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in  
Colorado. "The bees are just the beginning." 
Sublethal Effects 
If the honeybee is a victim of natural menaces  like viruses and unnatural 
ones like pesticides, it's worth remembering that the  bee itself is not a 
natural resident of the continent. It was imported to North  America in the 
17th century, and it thrived until recently because it found a  perfect niche 
in a food system that demands crops at ever cheaper prices and in  ever 
greater quantities. That's a man-made, mercantile ecosystem that not only  has 
been good for the bees and beekeepers but also has meant steady business and 
 big revenue for supermarkets and grocery stores. 
Jim Doan has been keeping bees since the age  of 5, but the apiary genes in 
his family go back even further. Doan's father  paid his way to college 
with the proceeds of his part-time beekeeping, and in  1973 he left the bond 
business to tend bees full time. Bees are even in the Doan  family's English 
coat of arms. Although Jim went to college with the aim of  becoming an 
agriculture teacher, the pull of the beekeeping business was too  great. 
For a long time, that business was very good.  The family built up its 
operation in the town of Hamlin, in western New York,  making money from honey 
and from pollination contracts with farmers. At the peak  of his business, 
Doan estimates he was responsible for pollinating 1 out of 10  apples grown in 
New York, running nearly 6,000 hives, one of the biggest such  operations 
in the state. He didn't mind the inevitable stings--"you have to be  willing 
to be punished"--and he could endure the early hours. "We made a lot of  
honey, and we made a lot of money," he says. 
All that ended in 2006, the year CCD hit the  mainstream, and Doan's hives 
weren't spared. That winter, when he popped the  covers to check on his 
bees--tipped off by a fellow beekeeper who experienced  one of the first 
documented cases of CCD--Doan found nothing. "There were  hundreds of hives in the 
backyard and no bees in them," he says. In the years  since, he has 
experienced repeated losses, his bees growing sick and dying. To  replace lost 
hives, Doan needs to buy new queens and split his remaining  colonies, which 
reduces honey production and puts more pressure on his few  remaining healthy 
bees. Eventually it all became unsustainable. In 2013, after  decades in the 
business, Doan gave up. He sold the 112 acres (45 hectares) he  owns--land he 
had been saving to sell after his retirement--and plans to sell  his 
beekeeping equipment as well, provided he can find someone to buy it. Doan  is 
still keeping some bees in the meantime, maintaining a revenue stream while  
considering his options. Those options include a job at  Walmart. 
Doan and I walk through his backyard, which is  piled high with bee boxes 
that would resemble filing cabinets, if filing  cabinets hummed and vibrated. 
Doan lends me a protective jacket and a bee veil  that covers my face. He 
walks slowly among the boxes--partly because he's a big  guy and partly 
because bees don't appreciate fast moves--and he spreads smoke in  advance, which 
masks the bees' alarm pheromones and keeps them calm. He opens  each box 
and removes a few frames--the narrowly spaced scaffolds on which the  bees 
build their honeycombs--checking to see how a new population he imported  from 
Florida is doing. Some frames are choked with crawling bees, flowing honey  
and healthy brood cells, each of which contains an infant bee. But other 
frames  seem abandoned, even the wax in the honeycomb crumbling. Doan lays 
these  boxes--known as dead-outs--on their side. 
He used to love checking on his bees. "Now  it's gotten to the point where 
I look at the bees every few weeks, and it scares  me," he says. "Will it be 
a good day, will they be alive, or will I just find a  whole lot of junk? 
It depresses the hell out of  me." 
Doan's not alone in walking away from such  unhappy work. The number of 
commercial beekeepers has dropped by some  three-quarters over the past 15 
years, and while all of them may agree that the  struggle is just not worth it 
anymore, they differ on which of the possible  causes is most to blame. Doan 
has settled on the neonicotinoid pesticides--and  there's a strong case to 
be made against them. 
The chemicals are used on more than 140  different crops as well as in home 
gardens, meaning endless chances of exposure  for any insect that alights 
on the treated plants. Doan shows me studies of  pollen samples taken from 
his hives that indicate the presence of dozens of  chemicals, including the 
neonicotinoids. He has testified before Congress about  the danger the 
chemicals pose and is involved in a lawsuit with other beekeepers  and with green 
groups that calls on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to  suspend a 
pair of pesticides in the neonicotinoid class. "The impacts [from the  
pesticides] are not marginal, and they're not academic," says Peter Jenkins, a  
lawyer for the Center for Food Safety and a lead counsel in the suit. "They 
pose  real threats to the viability of pollinators." 
American farmers have been dousing their  fields with pesticides for 
decades, meaning that honeybees--which can fly as far  as 5 miles (8 km) in search 
of forage--have been exposed to toxins since well  before the dawn of CCD. 
But neonicotinoids, which were introduced in the  mid-1990s and became 
widespread in the years that followed, are different. The  chemicals are known as 
systematics, which means that seeds are soaked in them  before they're 
planted. Traces of the chemicals are eventually passed on to  every part of the 
mature plant--including the pollen and nectar a bee might come  into contact 
with--and can remain for much longer than other pesticides do.  There's 
really no way to prevent bees from being exposed to some level of  
neonicotinoids if the pesticides have been used nearby. "We have growing  evidence that 
neonicotinoids can have dangerous effects, especially in  conjunction with 
other pathogens," says Peter Neumann, head of the Institute of  Bee Health at 
the University of Bern in  Switzerland. 
Ironically, neonicotinoids are actually safer  for farmworkers because they 
can be applied more precisely than older classes of  pesticides, which 
disperse into the air. Bees, however, seem uniquely sensitive  to the chemicals. 
Studies have shown that neonicotinoids attack their nervous  system, 
interfering with their flying and navigation abilities without killing  them 
immediately. "The scientific literature is exploding now with work on  sublethal 
impacts on bees," says James Frazier, an entomologist at Penn State  
University. The delayed but cumulative effects of repeated exposure might  explain 
why colonies keep dying off year after year despite beekeepers' best  
efforts. It's as if the bees were being poisoned very  slowly. 
It's undeniably attractive to blame the  honeybee crisis on neonicotinoids. 
The widespread adoption of these pesticides  roughly corresponds to the 
spike in colony loss, and neonicotinoids are, after  all, meant to kill 
insects. Chemicals are ubiquitous--a recent study found that  honeybee pollen was 
contaminated, on average, with nine different pesticides and  fungicides. 
Best of all, if the problem is neonicotinoids, the solution is  simple: ban 
them. That's what the European Commission decided to do this year,  putting a 
two-year restriction on the use of some neonicotinoids. But while the  EPA is 
planning to review neonicotinoids, a European-style ban is unlikely--in  
part because the evidence is still unclear. Beekeepers in Australia have been  
largely spared from CCD even though neonicotinoids are used there, while 
France  has continued to suffer bee losses despite restricting the use of the 
pesticides  since 1999. Pesticide makers argue that actual levels of 
neonicotinoid exposure  in the field are too low to be the main culprit in colony 
loss. "We've dealt  with insecticides for a long time," says Randy Oliver, a 
beekeeper who has done  independent research on CCD. "I'm not thoroughly 
convinced this is a major  issue." 
Hostile Terrain 
Even if pesticides are a big part of the  bee-death mystery, there are 
other suspects. Beekeepers have always had to  protect their charges from 
dangers such as the American foulbrood--a bacterial  disease that kills developing 
bees--and the small hive beetle, a pest that can  infiltrate and 
contaminate colonies. Bloodiest of all is the multidecade war  against the Varroa 
destructor, a microscopic mite that burrows into the brood  cells that host baby 
bees. The mites are equipped with a sharp, two-pronged  tongue that can 
pierce a bee's exoskeleton and suck its hemolymph--the fluid  that serves as 
blood in bees. And since the Varroa can also spread a number of  other 
diseases--they're the bee equivalent of a dirty hypodermic needle--an  uncontrolled 
mite infestation can quickly lead to a dying  hive. 
The Varroa first surfaced in the U.S. in  1987--likely from infected bees 
imported from South America--and it has killed  billions of bees since. 
Countermeasures used by beekeepers, including chemical  miticides, have proved 
only partly effective. "When the Varroa mite made its  way in, it changed what 
we had to do," says Jerry Hayes, who heads Monsanto's  commercial bee work. 
"It's not easy to try to kill a little bug on a big  bug." 
Other researchers have pointed a finger at  fungal infections like the 
parasite Nosema ceranae, possibly in league with a  pathogen like the 
invertebrate iridescent virus. But again, the evidence isn't  conclusive: some 
CCD-afflicted hives show evidence of fungi or mites or viruses,  and others don't. 
Some beekeepers are skeptical that there's an underlying  problem at all, 
preferring to blame CCD on what they call PPB--piss-poor  beekeeping, a 
failure of beekeepers to stay on top of colony health. But while  not every major 
beekeeper has suffered catastrophic loss, colony failures have  been 
widespread for long enough that it seems perverse to blame the human  victims. 
"I've been keeping bees for decades," says Doan. "It's not like I  suddenly 
forgot how to do it in 2006." 
There's also the simple fact that beekeepers  live in a country that is 
becoming inhospitable to honeybees. To survive, bees  need forage, which means 
flowers and wild spaces. Our industrialized  agricultural system has 
conspired against that, transforming the countryside  into vast stretches of crop 
monocultures--factory fields of corn or soybeans  that are little more than a 
desert for honeybees starved of pollen and nectar.  Under the Conservation 
Reserve Program (CRP), the government rents land from  farmers and sets it 
aside, taking it out of production to conserve soil and  preserve wildlife. 
But as prices of commodity crops like corn and soybeans have  skyrocketed, 
farmers have found that they can make much more money planting on  even 
marginal land than they can from the CRP rentals. This year, just 25.3  million 
acres (10.2 million hectares) will be held in the CRP, down by one-third  from 
the peak in 2007 and the smallest area in reserve since  1988. 
Lonely Spring 
For all the enemies that are massing against  honeybees, a bee-pocalypse 
isn't quite upon us yet. Even with the high rates of  annual loss, the number 
of managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. has stayed  stable over the past 15 
years, at about 2.5 million. That's still significantly  down from the 5.8 
million colonies that were kept in 1946, but that shift had  more to do with 
competition from cheap imported honey and the general rural  depopulation 
of the U.S. over the past half-century. (The number of farms in the  U.S. 
fell from a peak of 6.8 million in 1935 to just 2.2 million today, even as  
food production has ballooned.) Honeybees have a remarkable ability to  
regenerate, and year after year the beekeepers who remain have been able to  regrow 
their stocks after a bad loss. But the burden on beekeepers is becoming  
unbearable. Since 2006 an estimated 10 million beehives have been lost, at a  
cost of some $2 billion. "We can replace the bees, but we can't replace  
beekeepers with 40 years of experience," says Tim Tucker, the vice president of 
 the American Beekeeping Federation. 
As valuable as honeybees are, the food system  wouldn't collapse without 
them. The backbone of the world's diet--grains like  corn, wheat and rice--is 
self-pollinating. But our dinner plates would be far  less colorful, not to 
mention far less nutritious, without blueberries,  cherries, watermelons, 
lettuce and the scores of other plants that would be  challenging to raise 
commercially without honeybee pollination. There could be  replacements. In 
southwest China, where wild bees have all but died out thanks  to massive 
pesticide use, farmers laboriously hand-pollinate pear and apple  trees with 
brushes. Scientists at Harvard are experimenting with tiny robobees  that might 
one day be able to pollinate autonomously. But right now, neither  solution 
is technically or economically feasible. The government could do its  part 
by placing tighter regulations on the use of all pesticides, especially  
during planting season. There needs to be more support for the CRP too to break  
up the crop monocultures that are suffocating honeybees. One way we can all 
help  is by planting bee-friendly flowers in backyard gardens and keeping 
them free of  pesticides. The country, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a research 
scientist at the  University of Maryland who has studied CCD since it first 
emerged, is suffering  from a "nature deficit disorder"--and the bees are 
paying the  price. 
But the reality is that barring a major change  in the way the U.S. grows 
food, the pressure on honeybees won't subside. There  are more than 1,200 
pesticides currently registered for use in the U.S.; nobody  pretends that 
number will be coming down by a lot. Instead, the honeybee and its  various 
pests are more likely to be changed to fit into the existing  agricultural 
system. Monsanto is working on an  RNA-interference technology that can kill the 
Varroa mite by disrupting the way  its genes are expressed. The result would 
be a species-specific self-destruct  mechanism--a much better alternative 
than the toxic and often ineffective  miticides beekeepers have been forced 
to use. Meanwhile, researchers at  Washington State University are developing 
what will probably be the world's  smallest sperm bank--a bee-genome 
repository that will be used to crossbreed a  more resilient honeybee from the 28 
recognized subspecies of the insect around  the world. 
Already, commercial beekeepers have adjusted  to the threats facing their 
charges by spending more to provide supplemental  feed to their colonies. 
Supplemental feed raises costs, and some scientists  worry that replacing honey 
with sugar or corn syrup can leave bees less capable  of fighting off 
infections. But beekeepers living adrift in a nutritional  wasteland have little 
choice. The beekeeping business may well begin to resemble  the industrial 
farming industry it works with: fewer beekeepers running larger  operations 
that produce enough revenue to pay for the equipment and technologies  needed 
to stay ahead of an increasingly hostile environment. "Bees may end up  
managed like cattle, pigs and chicken, where we put them in confinement and  
bring the food to them," says Oliver, the beekeeper and independent 
researcher.  "You could do feedlot beekeeping." 
That's something no one in the beekeeping  world wants to see. But it may 
be the only way to keep honeybees going. And as  long as there are almonds, 
apples, apricots and scores of other fruits and  vegetables that need 
pollinating--and farmers willing to pay for the  service--beekeepers will find a 
way. 
So if the honeybee survives, it likely won't  resemble what we've known for 
centuries. But it could be worse. For all the  recent attention on the 
commercial honeybee, wild bees are in far worse shape.  In June, after a 
landscaping company sprayed insecticide on trees, 50,000 wild  bumblebees in Oregon 
were killed--the largest such mass poisoning on record.  Unlike the 
honeybee, the bumblebee has no human caretakers. Globally, up to  100,000 animal 
species die off each year--nearly every one of them without  fanfare or 
notice. This is what happens when one species--that would be  us--becomes so 
widespread and so dominant that it crowds out almost everything  else. It won't 
be a second silent spring that dawns; we'll still have the buzz  of the 
feedlot honeybee in our ears. But humans and our handful of preferred  species 
may find that all of our seasons have become lonelier  ones. 
# # # 

Laurie Davies  Adams
Executive Director
Pollinator Partnership
423 Washington St.  5th Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94111
T: 415.362.1137
F: 415.362.0176

Follow up on _Twitter_ (http://twitter.com/#!/Pollinators)  and _Facebook_ 
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