J. WESLEY JUDD - Honeybees Are Screwed
We’ve been hearing about this since 2007, but it’s as true
now as it was seven years ago: Bees are in trouble. Their numbers have been
falling, fast, and no one is quite sure why. Earlier this year, Josh
Dzieza wrote about the vast ripple effect that the disappearance of
bees is having on agriculture. (An important and, frankly, scary caveat: The
bees aren’t starving and falling from the sky; they truly are disappearing,
vanishing without a trace.)
Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture released its annual survey, conducted in part with the Bee
Informed Partnership and the Apiary Inspectors of America, analyzing the health
of managed honeybee colonies across the country. The results begin with a touch
of good news: While the bee population is still falling, the percent lost this
winter, the season in which the most bees traditionally die, was 23.1 percent,
down from 23.7 percent in 2013-14. The total annual loss, however, rose from
34.2 percent in 2013-14 to 42.1 percent this year. This means that a
disproportionate number of honeybees died during the summer—which is
significant, to say the least.
Twenty-seven-point-four percent of all
managed honey bee colonies disappeared last summer, compared to 19.8 in 2013,
making this past summer the first in history where the percentage of bees
lost was bigger than the subsequent winter. It'd be like seeing more
humans die as a result of the flu in July than January, Dennis van Engelsdorp,
the study’s co-author and professor at the University of Maryland, told CBC News. The survey polled more than 6,100 domestic beekeepers, who,
combined, represent almost 400,000 colonies, which is 15.5 percent of the
country's 2.74 million total.
Ecologically speaking, bees function as stationary plants’
“flying penises,” as entomologist Thomas Seeley told Dzieze. And
economically speaking, they are nearly just as important. As Dzieza wrote: “The
Department of Agriculture estimates that bees add about $15 billion in value to
the crops they pollinate.... Avocados, plums, pears, cantaloupes, cucumbers:
they all get pollinated by a migrant force of honeybees.” Bees are
arguably the most important insect to humans, which makes these findings all
the more worrisome.
Farmers, beekeepers, and ecologists, all aware for nearly a
decade about honeybees’ falling numbers, have tried to engineer their way
around this problem. Pollen substitutes, such as giant farms where bees would
live in between “jobs,” are a much-discussed option, but have yet to yield any
success. In 2003, beekeepers—who nowadays act as a sort of bee delivery
service, showing up to, say, almond farms when the plants are blooming—tried to
feed their bees supplements, with fatal results. Gloria Hoffman, head of the
USDA bee research laboratory, also tried her hand at developing a sustainable
pollen substitute to no avail. Her bees also died. Pollen, it turns out,
contains vital microbes that just can’t be replicated.
In the meantime, beekeepers have dealt with the
unprecedented and unexplained population decline by “splitting” their hives, a
process that involves separating some bees from a healthy colony and
introducing them to a new queen, effectively creating another colony, albeit a
less healthy one.
“We’re not beekeepers anymore, we’re bee doctors,” one
Florida man told Dzieza. “We’re paid to keep making beehives. They pay us to
patch ’em up, send ’em out, patch ’em up, send ’em out.”
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/honeybees-are-dying
