Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

http://www.alternet.org/story/65289/
What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?
By Gina Covina, Terrain
Posted on October 16, 2007

On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row  
of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down  
Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler  
amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees  
foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a  
third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that  
afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I  
can," one customer remarks.

The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now  
labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for  
a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like  
our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal  
truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover,  
blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with  
happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to  
the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to  
plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees  
feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults  
live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the  
throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the  
hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee  
wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect  
syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean  
and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all  
this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide  
stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few  
bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in  
large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee  
with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all  
of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the  
rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when  
beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very  
different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing  
causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of  
our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a  
pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural  
collapse disorder.

It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling  
honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost  
Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for  
beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff  
regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination  
services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination  
starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves,  
then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey.  
Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees  
over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief  
flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are  
a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest.  
Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's  
hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home  
where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their  
numbers.

Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each  
involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop.  
Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of  
honeybees. Growers can't get crop insurance coverage unless they have  
at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some  
growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over  
800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As  
beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute worst  
-- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of  
bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this  
wasted landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to  
sustain bees before or after the almond bloom.

Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over  
the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially  
operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While  
the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait  
in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a  
mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along  
with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson  
among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more  
expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When  
bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to  
pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a  
pretty whacked-out agricultural system."

Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten  
percent -- follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes  
them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to  
Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves,  
reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of  
artificial feeding. "Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times  
a year," he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and  
blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their  
pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers  
won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get beehives in  
place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee  
pollination.

It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could  
rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local  
honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan  
Wilson's area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of  
fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides,  
and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the  
reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target  
crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown this way.  
That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.

Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal  
mine," a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote  
attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the  
Internet: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man  
would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more  
pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Einstein  
never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says  
everything.

Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been  
in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects  
small enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species  
to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global  
transportation. First tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites  
in the '90s -- even before last winter, the world's honeybee  
population had declined by half in 30 years.

UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites  
arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's  
colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25  
percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with  
some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver  
says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this  
winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad  
for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his  
colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially  
better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite  
control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding --  
in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower  
pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many  
fulltime beekeepers.

The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified  
cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal  
mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan  
Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and  
peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers  
started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until  
the mid-'90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver  
says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant  
varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical  
treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer,  
have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest  
Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor-  
and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not  
eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites).  
According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we  
continue to use chemical treatments."

Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a  
heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by  
chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of  
the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus,  
nosema, that's tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already  
weakened hives. Then there's the stress of long-distance truck  
travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive  
beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed  
another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle,  
but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.

Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based  
on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way  
home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation.  
This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the  
study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce  
reliable results.

No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the  
study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate  
primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their  
first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips  
in a box to a release point.

Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most  
consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence  
more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma.  
It's the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee  
malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any  
more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007),  
and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist  
on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we're  
talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which  
contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies  
have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or  
brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to  
"significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives  
already weakened by varroa mites.

We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in  
fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's  
best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more  
aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning  
planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and  
goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when  
bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when  
bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of  
the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to  
their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture -- nothing  
but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're  
exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and  
one more influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather  
can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value  
for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions  
than we can comprehend.

Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered  
a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up  
with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the  
kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen,  
"the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid  
feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy  
grail" of bee research. The USDA's proprietary formula, if they come  
up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial  
producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along  
for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida  
to California in time for the almond bloom.

How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of  
beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of  
their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened  
without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from  
Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending  
100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of  
about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened  
box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the  
package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen  
resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding  
the colony.

The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees  
(Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off  
Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could  
wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in  
almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony,  
which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the  
first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond  
pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey  
crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next year's  
almond season.

To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing  
with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms  
like "organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to  
elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native  
insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where  
farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated  
land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop  
pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that  
yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest  
remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30  
percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination.

Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead  
areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars  
of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big  
picture that's harder to shift, from the extractive industrial  
petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have  
upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change -- do  
we want to continue to eat?

------------

The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is  
published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California.  
(510-548-2235). The material is to be circulated for educational  
purposes only, and is not to be reprinted in any publication, or  
distributed for commercial purposes, including copying for sale,  
without the permission of the editor of Terrain.