[Pollinator] Discover Magazine: Buzzkill: Will America's Bees Survive?

[Laurie Adams]

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FROM THE MARCH 2017 ISSUE <http://discovermagazine.com/2017/march>
Buzzkill: Will America's Bees Survive?The science and politics of saving
America’s bees gets messy. And the bees continue to die.
By Steve Volk <http://discovermagazine.com/authors/steve-volk>|Monday,
February 06, 2017
RELATED TAGS: ECOLOGY <http://discovermagazine.com/tags/ecology>,
SUSTAINABILITY <http://discovermagazine.com/tags/sustainability>, POLLUTION
<http://discovermagazine.com/tags/pollution>, ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
<http://discovermagazine.com/tags/environmental-policy>
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Commercial beekeeper Darren Cox stands among some of his hives in a bee
yard in the rich Cache Valley north of Salt Lake City. Bees have been dying
at faster rates than normal, as a host of ailments weaken colonies.
Kim Raff

Despite all the years, and all the troubles, Darren Cox still likes to put
on his bee suit.

A big, block-shaped man in his 50s, Cox sports a bowlish blond haircut and
serious demeanor. But when he slips into his protective gear, his netted
hat in hand, he offers a rare smile. “Time to get out there,” he says.

It’s a summer day in Cache Valley, an agricultural center set among the
mountains of northern Utah. The skyline, composed of peaks popping with
shimmering green, speaks resoundingly of life, vibrant and fertile. Several
years ago, Cox and his wife built a beautiful house here, so high up that
eagles soared within feet of the living room windows. But for Cox, a
commercial beekeeper fighting for his livelihood, these days even his
Valhalla strikes a sour note.

“When we first got here,” Cox tells me, “there was so much wildlife. Fox
and deer. Every bird you can imagine. You don’t see wildlife like you did
anymore. Where’d it all go?”

Cox keeps his “livestock” in so-called bee yards placed throughout the
area. Today he’ll visit them, winding through deep valleys, up tall
mountains and into one of the most perplexing questions in science: What is
killing our honeybees — and can we stop it?

Wild and domestic bees are both in deep trouble. Colony losses among
commercial beekeepers reach 30, 40, even 50 percent or more annually, a
pace that threatens the beekeeping and agricultural industries — and
everyone who eats. Bees pollinate some $30 billion in U.S. crops each year,
including most fruits and leafy greens, playing a critical role in human
health.
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A worker bee gathers nectar from a purple coneflower. Scientists are trying
to figure out which factors — viruses, pesticides or a combination — weaken
bees’ immune systems.
Alex Wild

The trouble started about 10 years ago, when beekeepers around the world
began reporting a mysterious phenomenon: Bees that had been healthy simply
disappeared, leaving no dead bodies for study. The crisis was called colony
collapse disorder (CCD). And as scientific wisdom has it, the CCD crisis is
over. Bees no longer just “disappear.” Instead, they die at far faster
rates than normal as a host of other ailments, such as deformed wing virus
and deadly pathogens, exact a toll.

Cox’s bees don’t produce the same honey yields they did before. Queen bees
struggle to survive even a third of their normal life spans, leaving
beekeepers in a constant battle to replace them. According to Cox and other
beekeepers, classic CCD is back, too.

In the summer of 2015, Cox showed me several hives that bore the standard
signs: healthy brood; good stores of pollen and nectar, or “bee food,” and
little else; a few straggling workers, maybe 10 percent of the population
he had last week; and a big queen, running around her now-empty castle like
a mom, knowing that without her stable of workers she’ll be unable to feed
her babies.

“Our bees are manifesting a bunch of different symptoms,” Cox says as he
kicks a beat-up Ford flatbed truck into gear. “Bees are dying, but what
people are missing is that bees are also weakening.”
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The map below shows the results of an annual survey of beekeepers and their
bee colony losses. The chart tracks winter losses in the U.S. in the past
decade, as well as annual losses since 2010-2011. The Bee Informed
Partnership, a research consortium based at the University of Maryland,
tracks mortality rates, rather than overall population, to get a more
accurate sense of colony turnover year to year. (Click to enlarge)
Alison Mackey/Discover after Bee Informed

As president of American Honey Producers, a trade association for
beekeepers, Cox hears this from numerous members. In honeybee years, we are
many generations on from the inception of the crisis, and bees themselves
seem different, weaker. “They don’t have as much vigor,” says Cox.

For Cox and other beekeepers, the long, reasoned march of science looks
more like a slow hair-pull, in which a difficult scientific problem is
rendered almost impossible to resolve by the toxic influences of politics
and money.


*Enlightenment and Paradox*
In the early years of the bee crisis, beekeepers looked to science as their
savior. “We believed that government, the media and, most importantly,
scientists were focused,” says Cox. “If a solution to this problem existed,
we figured it would be found and acted on.”

Ten years on, however, beekeepers have grown frustrated because the field
seems stuck in the fact-gathering stage.

The reasons for overall bee declines are broadly understood: diminished bee
habitat; the Varroa destructor, a nasty parasitic mite; viruses and
pathogens; and agricultural chemicals, including pesticides, fungicides and
insect growth regulators (IGRs). But the problem of declining bee health
might actually be getting worse, largely because the factor of agricultural
chemicals lies at the nexus of science, finance and politics. Much of the
controversy, and concern, has centered around a particular class of
neonicotinoid pesticides (neonic for short), which yield billions in
revenue for chemical-makers.

The resulting conflict is best framed, reports E.G. Vallianatos, a
scientist retired from the Environmental Protection Agency, by what he
calls the “Rachel Carson paradox.” Carson’s 1962 book, *Silent Spring*,
documented the pernicious effects of agricultural chemicals and served as a
rallying point for the modern environmental movement. But more than 50
years later, Vallianatos expresses disappointment. “Everyone acts like the
book was responsible for a new dawn,” says Vallianatos. “But did anyone
actually read it?”
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Bees born with deformed wing virus emerge with crumpled, misshapen wings
and die within days. The virus is one of several closely associated with
Varroa infestations.
Bee Informed Partnership

Carson’s argument was fundamental: Because pests and weeds quickly develop
resistance, chemical pesticides create a kind of arms race. We apply
increasingly toxic concoctions in greater amounts, and bugs and weeds
evolve and rally.

Time has proven her right. Today we pump roughly 2.5 times more chemical
pesticides, fungicides and herbicides into the environment than we did
when *Silent
Spring* was published. But the number of regulatory labs has decreased,
leaving more chemical inputs in the environment and far fewer scientists to
study them.

The standard rebuttal is that modern pesticides are better targeted toward
pests. But this doesn’t capture the plight of the bee, or government
regulators. One of the most important papers in the field of bee declines,
co-authored by then-USDA scientist Jeffrey Pettis in 2010, drew comb and
wax samples from beehives in 23 U.S. states, finding an average of six
different pesticides in each and as many as 39.

Numerous scientists I interviewed — from entomologist John Tooker at Penn
State University, to Galen Dively and prominent entomologist Dennis
vanEngelsdorp at the University of Maryland, to Pettis and others — said
the number of chemicals in our environment is so vast that assessing all of
their possible interactions is virtually impossible.

“Just think back to your chemistry classes,” Susan Kegley, a chemist and
CEO of the environmental consulting firm Pesticide Research Institute, told
me. “You combine three chemicals and nothing happens, but if you introduce
them in a different order, you get a big reaction. So as a scientist
working on this problem of bee declines, you have to choose which
pesticides, how much and the order of introduction. Then you have to
acknowledge everything you might be missing if you’d changed even one of
these variables, however slightly.”

Scientists are doing what science does best: isolating specific
interactions of chemical and bee in the lab while understanding they might
miss important synergies among other variables. Thus far, the scrutiny has
settled on one particular class of pesticide, yielding significant results.
But in a development that shows just how politics creep into science, the
data hasn’t ruled the day. The result has been gridlock.

*A Complicated Picture*

The confidence beekeepers once felt that the crisis would be resolved
peaked in 2009 at Apimondia, the largest international gathering of
beekeepers.

Two of the world’s most respected entomologists — Pettis, then research
leader at the USDA’s Beltsville Bee Laboratory, and vanEngelsdorp, then at
Penn State — there revealed the early results of an experiment they’d just
completed.

In a conversation included in the documentary *The Strange Disappearance of
the Bees*, both scientists appeared visibly excited. They had looked into
the danger that a widely used class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, might
pose to bees.
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Dozens of dead worker bees lie headfirst in a hive. High mortality rates
still affect bee colonies around the U.S.
Alex Wild
“We’re finding that virus levels are much higher in CCD bees,”
vanEngelsdorp says in the film, “but since we are not finding a consistent
virus or a consistent pathogen, that implies that something else is
happening underneath it. Something is breaking down their immune system, or
somehow challenging them so that they are more susceptible to disease.”

The pair fed neonics to bees, then exposed that group and a neonic-free
control group to *Nosema*, a common gut pathogen in the honeybee. The bees
fed neonics proved more susceptible to *Nosema*. And the effect was
consistent even when bees received neonics in amounts too small to be
detected in their system. “The only reason we knew the bees had exposure
[to neonicotinoid pesticides],” says vanEngelsdorp, “is because we exposed
them.”

Beekeepers rejoiced. “They really sounded like they found something big,”
says Dave Hackenberg, a central Pennsylvania beekeeper. “They were like,
‘This is it.’ ”

“We really felt confident,” says Bret Adee, co-owner of Adee Honey Farms in
South Dakota. “These were the guys everyone would listen to, and now we
were going to get something done.”

But nothing happened.

44 percent of colonies were lost in 2015-2016.

A confirming study surfaced quickly; a French team of scientists actually
beat vanEngelsdorp and Pettis into print. But neonics remained in wide use.
The deluge beekeepers expected — of scientists, nailing down the problem,
of regulatory agencies, rushing to act — never materialized. And today, the
neonic lies right at the heart of that Rachel Carson paradox.

Neonics are what’s known as a systemic insecticide, meaning they spread
throughout the tissue, pollen and nectar of the treated plant. Companies,
including Bayer and Syngenta, create varying formulas of neonics, which can
be applied to seeds or growing crops. The neonic entered broad use in the
U.S. in the late 1990s and quickly became ubiquitous, used on millions of
acres of corn, cotton, soybeans, canola and more, accounting for about $2.5
billion in sales.

Jay Vroom, CEO and spokesman at CropLife America, a trade partnership of
seed and pesticide manufacturers, says studies measuring the effect of
neonics on bees in field conditions “consistently demonstrate no negative
effects.”

Scientists say the picture is complicated. Regulatory agencies devote most
of their energy to answering two questions: How much of a given chemical is
required to kill a non-target insect outright, and how likely is it that
beneficial species will encounter a dose that big? Sublethal effects are
treated as less urgent, yet neonics subject bees to a variety of sublethal
effects with long-term, fatal consequences.

Neonics have been demonstrated to impair the honeybee’s foraging
capabilities, memory and navigation systems, undermining their ability to
survive and aid their hive. In one study, led by French scientist Mickaël
Henry, researchers tagged honeybees with GPS trackers and released them.
Some bees received a dose of neonic equal to real-world exposures while the
controls received no neonics. The bees fed pesticide proved two to three
times more likely to die without returning to the hive and sharing their
food.

Such deaths can add up. Honeybee colonies can total tens of thousands of
bees, enough to withstand natural cyclical losses. But foraging bees last
only a few weeks at best. Early deaths force premature worker bees out to
forage, leading to a weaker colony of weaker bees.
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The parasitic Varroa mite feeds off of both adult honeybees and developing
larvae. Originally native to Asia, Varroa mites were accidentally
introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s. They travel from hive to hive attached
to adult hosts.
Alex Wild

Worse, as Pettis and vanEngelsdorp demonstrated, exposure to neonics also
appears to compromise the bee’s immune system. A recent scientific
literature review conducted by researchers in the U.K., Japan, France and
Italy concluded that exposure to systemic insecticides, including neonics,
renders bees more susceptible to numerous diseases. Further, exposure
increases the mortality rate from illnesses that honeybee colonies usually
shrug off.

This causal link has eluded researchers because the factors occur
concurrently, according to the report. Diseases and parasites comprise the
immediate cause of bee declines. Pesticides are a key underlying factor.
The January 2016 paper, published in *Environment International*,
identifies two popular neonics, clothianidin and imidacloprid, as
disturbing immune signaling in the bee, promoting the replication of
illnesses like deformed wing virus (DWV). This finding is key, the authors
write, because DWV is commonly found in collapsed colonies. Immune
suppression also escalates over time, perhaps eluding typical insecticide
field studies.

“We’re talking about synergistic effects,” says Pettis. “Everyone wants an
easy answer, a sole culprit, but neonics don’t seem to be the single
driver. What they are is a significant factor.”

This powerful data has generated conflict, however, both inside and outside
the halls of science.


*Whack-a-Mole*
“We call it the ‘whack-a-mole’ theory of bee science,” says Hackenberg, the
commercial beekeeper in central Pennsylvania. “People who stick their head
too far above ground on the subject of pesticides get whacked.”

This kind of talk smacks of conspiracy. However, the alignment of
self-interests leaves plotting and planning unnecessary. Big agricultural
companies pay many millions annually in political donations and lobbying.
The politicians receiving all of this attention and money determine the
dwindling budgets at agencies like the EPA and USDA.

Bees pollinate some $30 billion in U.S. crops each year.

In late 2014, EPA scientists released a study showing that neonic seed
treatments produce no significant increase in crop yield. The reason is
simple, even predictable: Each year, soil-based pests, targeted by seed
treatments, only pop up in about 10 percent of America’s cropland. But
instead of dialing back pesticide use, scientists at USDA publicly rejected
the EPA’s findings.

In recent years, allegations of scientific suppression have grown louder.
In fall 2015, Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist in the USDA’s Agricultural
Research office who is now the director of the nonprofit research Ecdysis
Foundation, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his supervisors
levied a pair of bogus suspensions on him to prevent his publicizing the
dangers of chemical pesticides. Attorneys for a group called Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an alliance of science
professionals that represented Lundgren in court, alleged that an
additional nine USDA scientists also sought help.

Those scientists remain anonymous, fearing career reprisals, but the
allegations are serious: watered-down findings, retracted studies,
indefinite delays in receiving agency approvals to publish controversial
papers. Four of those scientists were working on issues related to
pollinator declines, says Jeff Ruch, PEER’s executive director.

Chavonda Jacobs-Young, USDA-Agricultural Research Service administrator,
denies any such problem, saying that “scientific integrity and rigorous
science are of the utmost importance to us.”

The USDA inspector general, however, announced in early 2016 that she’d
received a “significant volume” of scientific censorship complaints, enough
to trigger an investigation.
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Entomologist Jeffrey Pettis, who has since retired from the USDA, was
demoted two months after testifying before Congress about neonicotinoids
and their effect on bee health.
Stephen Ausmus/USDA-ARS

Pettis himself may have been a victim. In summer 2014, he was demoted, just
two months after he testified before Congress. “I was asked by the [ag]
committee to restrict my testimony to the Varroa mite,” says Pettis. But
under questioning, he declared that neonics raise the danger for bees to “a
new level.”

While no one at the USDA ever mentioned his testimony as the main reason
for his demotion, Pettis says, he heard rumblings that he had angered
people downtown.

The controversy over bee declines has driven Pettis and vanEngelsdorp —
Batman and Robin, once poised to save the bees — to separate scientific
corners.

Pettis even retired early from his post at USDA-ARS, in large part because
he says he felt “muzzled” by government policies that prohibit him from
saying anything that might even be “construed” as reflecting on policy.
“Chemicals,” he says, “need to be used when indicated by signs or risk of
pest infestation, as opposed to prophylactically.”

I interviewed vanEngelsdorp, who sounded a different note in 2015, in his
office at the University of Maryland, where he runs the Bee Informed
Partnership, a consortium that includes government, industry and beekeeping
constituents. He says the Varroa mites are a big problem, and typified
pesticides as a lesser concern.

“As a scientist,” vanEngelsdorp says, “I am motivated by the data.”

Queen bees today barely survive a third of their normal life spans.

He recently published a pair of papers that deepen the debate. In the first
one, published online last April in *Apidologie*, he surveyed beekeepers
and samples over five years from 41 states. He found that the Varroa mite
is more prevalent than suspected, even when beekeepers follow good
practices, and a significant vector for disease. And in a September study
in *Nature Scientific Reports*, he found that exposure to multiple
chemicals in a colony correlates with high rates of colony deaths. The
evidence, gathered from 91 bee colonies owned by three commercial
beekeepers, showed just trace amounts of neonics but did find that
fungicides are more prevalent than thought and closely correlate with bee
deaths. The finding seemed to slightly push vanEngelsdorp, who commented in
a news release at the time that we need to “make sure we only use the
products we need, when we need them.”

Former commercial beekeeper David Mendes, who serves with vanEngelsdorp on
the Bee Informed Stakeholder Advisory Board, praises his ethics and rigor
but says the politics are important. “I think Dennis would need the
evidence to be beyond incontrovertible before he could take any stand on
pesticides,” says Mendes. “That’s an even higher standard than science
usually requires.”

Darren Cox’s personal enlightenment about the ways in which science can be
subverted reached full bloom when the USDA mounted a series of workshops on
the stressors affecting bee health. The agency invited him to two meetings
covering mites, viruses and bee nutrition. Agency representatives assured
him for months, he says, that a pesticides roundtable would follow. Then,
he says, “They told us, ‘There isn’t going to be any meeting on
pesticides.’ ”

Cox readily acknowledges that his bees are “afflicted by a variety of
stressors.” But talking about this decision, his frustration shows. “The
USDA’s own website, on the science of bee health, lists four stressors,
including pesticides,” he says. “But that’s the one thing they wouldn’t
hold a meeting about. Now, why is that?”


*“The Honey Hum”*
On the last day of my trip to Utah, at a peak time of day for bee foraging,
Cox took me to a bee yard wedged tightly between a farm and a major road.
Arrayed before us were at least three prime bee-attractors: milkweed,
safflower and thistle, in full bloom.

I expected Cox to open the top box on one of the “bee stacks,” to check on
their health. But instead he walked right through the bee yard to the
surrounding field.

“You hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?” I responded.

“Exactly,” he said. “The sky should be filled with bees, and you should
hear them. We call it ‘the honey hum.’ ”

The sky was empty, and the only noise was the sound of the wind.

His bees, many tens of thousands of them, crawled and hovered listlessly
around their hives. Neonics are not so prevalent by Cox’s bee yards, but
other chemicals are, including Lorsban, which attacks the nervous system.
Further, as a commercial pollinator, Cox comes into contact with all the
chemicals, including neonics, used in the areas he visits, and those
chemicals can wind up in his bees.

Immediately after witnessing this dismal scene, Cox took me to a bee yard
where he keeps another trove of bees, up in the mountains, away from any
development or farms. There, the sound was unmistakable — a warm buzz.

The prospect of weaker bees, which fail to forage even in abundant habitat,
is not a product of beekeepers’ imaginations. Scientists like Pettis,
Lundgren and vanEngelsdorp seem to agree on this: Bees are less vigorous
than before.

Of course, they are also dying.

Over the winter, 2015-2016, fellow beekeepers called Cox and reported
record losses. Hackenberg lost 90 percent of his stock, saying they
“disappeared” just like they did during colony collapse. Cox is suffering,
too. He recently had to make up the loss of 30 percent of his hives.

The bad year, however, might actually turn out to be a good thing.

The price per hive for crop pollination continues to increase. Soon the
plight of the honeybee might force such massive cost increases that angry
citizens will demand change. In April 2016, a group of Bayer shareholders
publicly demanded that corporation executives “turn away” from neonics
because they are linked to bee declines. In addition, Cox and his fellow
beekeepers have become increasingly political, writing letters of protest
about Pettis’ demotion, contributing significant funding to a new, private
lab for Lundgren — the whistleblower who has now left the USDA — and
looking for ways to provoke action.

Toward the end of a day spent checking on his suffering bees, Cox pointed
his truck up a steep mountainside in the Cache Valley and expressed his
newfound sense of place in this scientific debate. “Whatever feeling we
once had — that this was all going to go smoothly or in some typical,
orderly process, and science was just going to figure this out and we’d get
back to business — is long gone,” he says. “This is a fight.”
Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director

Pollinator Partnership

423 Washington Street, 5th Floor

San Francisco, CA 94111

e:  lda at pollinator.org

w:  www.pollinator.org

p:  415.362.1137

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