[Pollinator] Mystery of the Vanishing Bees - Yale Global

[Ladadams at aol.com]

 (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/index.jsp) 





Honey bees contribute much to agriculture and the delicious variety of foods 
we eat. But the social insects are under stress. The reasons could be many: 
Mites that attack bees increasingly become resistant to pesticides; researchers 
have also theorized about modern society’s reliance on cell phones, 
insecticides and genetically modified crops. Policies to protect bees are in order, 
argues Norman Carreck, beekeeper and senior editor of the Journal of Apicultural 
Research. Local and national governments can adopt land-use policies that avoid 
“obsessive tidiness,” according to Carreck. Many policies would require 
little sacrifice: removing trees with rot only as a matter of safety, encouraging 
less frequent grass-cutting, reducing dependence on herbicides, edging fields 
and orchards with pollen- and nectar-rich plants and supporting research that 
leads to a better understanding of the relationship between bees and plants, 
including wild plants. A world without bees would be a less colorful and 
palatable place to live. – YaleGlobal





Mystery of the Vanishing Bees 
Governments must establish policies to protect an insect that contributes so 
much to agriculture and biodiversity


Norman L. Carreck
YaleGlobal, 30 August 2007


    Whodunnit? British beekeeper tends to bees; disappearance of honey bees 
in parts of the world raises questions about how modern life influences the 
environment. Inset: Honey bee collecting pollen    
HENFIELD, UK: A flurry of reports from the US and other parts of the world 
suggest that bee populations are under stress. Taking measures to prevent the 
loss of bees in the US or Europe may not be enough. For a sustainable 
agriculture, to prevent extinction of more local species, the world needs a “save the bee
” policy.  
The alarm is particularly intense in North America, where the term “Colony 
Collapse Disorder” has been coined. The condition is alleged to have wiped out 
one quarter of the 25 million honey bee colonies in the US. Declines in bee 
populations have occurred before, at various times and in various parts of the 
world. Yet this decline has caught the public imagination.  
What’s new is the scale of the reported losses, and their economic importance 
in view of their occurrence in spring, shortly before the season for 
pollinating almonds, a high-value crop entirely dependent on bee pollination.          
   
While most of the major world staple food crops such as wheat, maize and rice 
are in fact wind-pollinated, the majority of the foodstuffs that make eating 
interesting and enjoyable, such as fruits and nuts, require insects for 
pollination – the transfer of pollen from the male to the female parts of a flower –
 to set fruit or seed. Many other crops that we grow as vegetables, eating 
the leaves, shoots or roots, also require insect pollination to set seed in the 
first place, as do many of the forage legumes, such as clovers, which are so 
valuable in animal production.  
Even more important, but virtually impossible to quantify in economic terms, 
is the role of bees in the pollination of wild plants. We know little about 
the pollination requirements of many wild plants, including some of the rarest 
and most threatened.  
There are actually about 25,000 species of bees worldwide, but only a handful 
of those are managed commercially. By far the most important is the western 
honey bee, Apis mellifera, native to Eurasia and Africa, but now found 
worldwide. It’s this honey bee that suffers the well-publicized losses.             
The causes of Colony Collapse Disorder remain unclear, with many theories 
suggested, including insecticides and genetically modified crops. German 
researchers, in a pilot study, found evidence that led them to question whether 
pervasive electromagnetic radiation from mobile telecommunications might disorient 
the bees in their return to the hives. More likely the disorder is caused by a 
combination of factors, especially disease and the stresses of modern 
commercial beekeeping, where colonies are transported thousands of miles on vehicles. 
For example, the same colonies may be moved from pollinating oranges in 
Florida, to apples in Pennsylvania, to blueberries in Maine and then back to 
Massachusetts for cranberry pollination.  
A particular suspect is inadequate control of the parasitic mite Varroa 
destructor, which has caused enormous economic loss worldwide over the last 30 
years. To reproduce, the mite sucks the blood of both adult bees and pupae and, in 
doing so, transmits various bee viruses, normally innocuous, but which can 
lead to the rapid and spectacular death of colonies. Beekeepers in many 
developed countries successfully prevented the mite for a long time by using 
convenient plastic chemical strips.  
Unfortunately, the mite has become resistant to the most widely used 
chemical, and in parts of the US, some mites are now resistant to two different 
chemicals simultaneously, leaving few available options for mite control. The 
alternatives are mostly less effective and time consuming, hence unsuitable for 
commercial beekeeping. As well as harming managed colonies, the mite has almost 
eliminated feral honey bee colonies, once common and providing a background 
pollination service.  
Unfortunately, honey bees are not the only species about which we should be 
concerned. Less publicized research from many parts of the world, including the 
recent comprehensive European Union–funded ALARM Project, based at the 
University of Leeds, conclusively demonstrates that populations of other bee species 
in Britain and the Netherlands have declined in both numbers and distribution 
over the last 50 years, with many local species extinctions occurring.        
     
Again, reasons for these declines are complex, but changes in land use and 
the intensification of agriculture appear to be the main causes. Different 
species of bee nest in a variety of places, ranging from hollow trees to holes in 
the ground, and suitable sites for nesting have become scarcer as a result of 
intensive agriculture and increased urbanization. An example of this is the 
obsessive desire by many local authorities to destroy any tree showing any 
evidence of rot, for safety reasons, which has greatly reduced the choice of sites 
available to cavity-nesting bees. Obsessive tidiness involving the frequent 
cutting of grass and the removal of uncultivated areas also reduces suitable 
homes for ground-nesting bee species.  
As food, all bees require both nectar for energy and pollen for protein, both 
provided by flowers. The widespread use of herbicides reduces the 
availability of flowering weeds in both arable crops and in grassland. Removal of 
hedgerows and other areas of semi-natural vegetation reduces the availability of 
flowering herbs, shrubs and trees. Some widely grown crops such as oilseed rape 
(canola), sunflowers and beans may provide short-lived bursts of food and can 
provide honey surpluses, but may also be sprayed with insecticides. 
Well-documented losses of bees caused directly by spraying have occurred in many countries 
over the years, although developed countries have reduced the problems, with 
less harmful chemicals and improved application techniques.  
Despite this, monocultures of crops cannot supply the continuity of food 
supply throughout the season, essential for bees to successfully complete their 
life cycles.  
Clearly, scientific research has a major role in reversing the decline in 
bees. The precise causes of Colony Collapse Disorder need to be established as a 
matter of urgency, but in the longer term, our understanding of many diseases 
of honey bees remains imperfect, and our understanding of the diseases of 
other bees is largely nonexistent.  
Our understanding of relationships between wildflowers and bees is also poor, 
yet the implications of this lack of knowledge can be serious. One can, for 
example, envisage a situation where the only successful pollinator for a 
particular rare perennial wildflower species is a similarly rare bee species. If the 
bee disappears, the plant may carry on living for years, but without setting 
any seed, before anybody notices. If the rare bee has become extinct, it may 
then be too late to save the flower.             
Although species extinctions are irreversible, land-use changes can to some 
extent be reversed. What is necessary is to set aside areas for wildlife, 
including bees, and provide food sources for them. Recent changes in agricultural 
support in Europe, through reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, 
potentially allow for the provision of many such measures, including the planting of 
mixtures of pollen- and nectar-rich mixtures around the edges of fields, as well 
as tree planting and the provision of hedges. Organic farming also promotes 
the reintroduction of legumes such as clovers into grassland.  
Such measures to help bees inevitably have financial implications. 
Governments around the world must allocate resources, and not simply to support an 
ailing beekeeping industry. Bees not only make enormous contributions to national 
economies through the pollination of crops, but also have a vital role in 
supporting the biodiversity and viability of natural ecosystems. To provide 
suitable habitat and food for bees on a sufficient scale, many people worldwide must 
make small changes, which in turn requires considerable research, education 
and coordination on the part of governments.  
Norman Carreck is a freelance entomologist who has been keeping bees since 
1980 and has been involved in bee research for nearly 20 years. He is senior 
editor of the Journal of Apicultural Research.

Rights:
© 2007 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

































































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.

Our future flies on the wings of pollinators.



************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at 
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/pollinator/attachments/20070831/bdf12292/attachment-0001.html