Bee Catastrophism

The cover story, written by Bryan Walsh, warned of the loss of the pollinators essential to the agricultural production of “1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you’ll eat today” – from almonds to zucchini.

Walsh did point out that Albert Einstein probably did not actually say: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years to live.” But he did quote a researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture: “The take home message is that we are very close to the edge” and “It’s all a roll of the dice now.” And a beekeeper from Colorado: “If we don’t make some changes soon, we’re going to see disaster. The bees are just the beginning.”

In Walsh’s own prose: “[W]e’re inadvertently killing a species that we’ve tended and depended on for thousands of years. The loss of honeybees would leave the planet poorer and hungrier, but what’s really scary is the fear the bees may be a sign of what’s to come, a symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around us.”

Around 2006, as Walsh reported, “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 mysterious malady: colony collapse disorder (CCD}.”

By 2013, according to TIME, honeybees were still dying at scale. One-third of U.S. honeybee colonies had died the previous winter – “a 42% increase over the year before and well above the 10% to 15% losses beekeepers used to experience in normal winters.”

CCD eludes single-cause explanation.  A new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, certainly contribute. Neonicotinoids (also used by veterinarians in flea and tick control) are generally considered safer for farmworkers because they can be applied more precisely on crops than older classes of pesticides. But it was discovered that neonicotinoids have an unintended collateral effect of afflicting the nervous system of non-pest pollinators, including bees, interfering with their flying and navigating abilities without killing them immediately.

Beekeepers have long had to cope with American Foulbrood, a bacterial infection of bee larvae for which there is no cure. When foulbrood is found, a good beekeeper destroys the hive.

The varroa destructor, a mite, is the most serious pest of honeybee colonies. They originally infected Asian honeybees and found their way into European honeybees and eventually around the world. They evidently reached the United States in 1987. As an example of their destructiveness, the varroa destructor was first detected in North Carolina in 1990. Since then, according to the state agricultural extension, the mite has wiped out feral (“wild”) honeybee hives and the number of managed hives in the state has dropped over 40% since the infestation.

Whatever its source or sources, CCD of honeybee colonies is real and, to keep it in check, requires constant vigilance of beekeepers.

Byran Walsh is now an editorial director at Vox. In 2023, under the byline of Benji Jones, Vox published “Honey Bees Are Not in Peril.  These Bees Are.”  It turns out, even when CCD was at its peak, there remained more than two million managed and healthy-enough honeybee hives in the United States.  Moreover, as Vox reported, despite pesticides, bacteria, mites, and loss of natural habitat, honey bee colonies worldwide have actually increased in number by 80% since the 1960’s.

The Vox article quoted Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a non-profit dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates (“bugs”) in their natural habitat: “There is likely more honeybees on the planet now than there has ever been in history.”

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 1993 there were 2.88 million managed honeybee colonies in the United States.  In 2006 there were 2.29 million. In 2023, there were 2.51 million.

It’s not that all is well with bees. Our honeybee is not native to North America. It was brought here by European colonists in the 1600’s. In the United States, there is an estimated 4,000 native species of bees, ranging from bumblebees to bees the size of a gnat. You may be surprised to learn (I was) that none of the native species make honey, most do not live in hives, and most do not have a queen.

Native bees are afflicted by pesticides, bacteria, parasites too. They are losing natural habitat. Think Illinois which, in the march of human progress, has removed nearly all of its tall-grass prairie. Not only that, the honeybee is a much more efficient forager of flower nectar than native bees. Wherever flowering trees and plants are limited, native species are disadvantaged in competition with honeybees.

Native bees are important in agricultural production as well – especially in home gardens. Tomatoes, eggplants and peppers require “buzz pollination” – something honeybees don’t do. Commercial tomato farmers in the field shake the plant flowers mechanically to amplify production. In commercial tomato greenhouses, colonies of bumblebees are often used.

So, bees are in peril – but not commercially kept honeybees. For the abundant and varied foodstuffs, including honey, we can purchase in a store, we owe a debt to beekeepers. From the Xerces Society, I have learned that those of us blessed to have a home we can landscape with flowers and gardens can help preserve essential habitat for invertebrates, including bees. It’s important to being good stewards of the earth. But on the list of imminent existential threats, we can check off the honeybee.