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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Biologist Says Promoting Diversity Is Key To 'Keeping The Bees' : The Salt : NPR
  • Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 03:29:14 -0400

Biologist Says Promoting Diversity Is Key To 'Keeping The Bees' : The Salt
: NPR
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/07/09/329994522/biologist-says-promoting-diversity-is-key-to-keeping-the-bees

Every year, more than half of the honeybee hives in the United States are
taken to California to pollinate the state's almond crop.

Biologist Laurence Packer says this illustrates both our dependence on
honeybees to pollinate many plants people rely on for food and the
devastating decline in the domestic honeybee population in recent years.

The loss of honeybees has been attributed to a variety of causes, from to
the stress of being transported from state to state to feed on various
crops in need of pollination.

Packer, who has spent a career studying bees, says he believes humans will
be better off if we rely less on honeybees in managed hives for pollination
and more on some of the 20,000 species of wild bees.

He also says he's passionate about his research.

"Passion is a bit of an understatement; maybe I'm obsessed," Packer
tells *Fresh
Air*'s Dave Davies. "I spend as much time as I can actually looking at bees
under the microscope or out in the field studying them."

Packer's new book, *Keeping the Bees: Why All Bees are at Risk and What We
Can Do to Save Them,* explores bee pollination and celebrates bee diversity
— from stingless bees that feed on tears to others that survive by invading
other bees' nests.
*Interview Highlights*

*On how pollination can affect fruit and vegetable crops *

A nice, economically valuable watermelon that's large and quite round and
not malformed requires a couple of thousand pollen grains to be deposited.
And that might require seven or so different visits of a bee to the flower.

In California, where these studies have been done in the most detail, there
are 40 different species of bees that will perform that service. If not
enough pollen gets onto the watermelon you get a [misshapen] one. And if
you don't get any pollen, you don't get any watermelon at all.

Some crops are entirely dependent upon pollination. Others don't require
pollinators at all, such as cereal grains. Others are pollinated by the
wind, such as grapes. But most of the tastiest products from plants — such
as most fruits and vegetables — these require pollination for the
development for the fruit or the vegetable, or at least for the propagation
of the vegetable plants through seeds.

*On long-term consequences if bees weren't around *

Immediately, in the absence of bees, the affect on natural ecosystems would
be that there'd be much fewer plants setting seed [in] many fewer nuts and
berries. Fewer nuts and berries [means] fewer birds, fewer bears; the whole
ecosystem would be impacted at some level, especially in the long term.

*On how pesticides affect bees*

Most of these chemicals are used as seed coating, and they get into the
plant and into the pollen and the nectar. And it seems that they have an
impact on ... the immune system — making them more [susceptible] to the new
diseases that have been brought around by people carrying bees around all
over the place [for pollination]. But it also makes them less capable of
finding their way home, so it's confusing them.

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/329994431/keeping-the-bees-why-all-bees-are-at-risk-and-what-we-can-do-to-save-them?tab=excerpt#excerpt

Excerpt: Keeping the Bees: Why All Bees are at Risk and What We Can Do to
Save Them

BUZZ FREE: A WORLD WITHOUT BEES

stuck under a truck in the atacama desert, chile

It was three in the afternoon and over 30 degrees C, yet despite the heat
there was not a drop of sweat on my body. The air was so dry that any
perspiration was sucked from my pores before I even felt it. I could see
for miles in all directions, but there was no sign of human habitation. I
hadn't seen a soul for hours. The entire vista was in two colours—the
ground was beige and the sky blue—and even the Andes Mountains, faintly
visible on the horizon, looked blue from this distance. I had been stuck
here in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile for three hours, trying to dig
the back wheels of a half-ton truck out of the sand.

The day had begun well. I had found a tiny trickle of water emerging from
an embankment at the side of a dirt road; there was some vegetation growing
around the moisture, and some bees were visiting the flowers. I collected a
few of them and then drove off towards my next sample site. Two hours of
driving and three hours of digging later, and I had not seen a single
living thing—no other drivers, not an insect, not a plant.

The Atacama Desert is both the driest and the oldest desert in the world.
People claim that there are parts of this desert where rain has never
fallen, although geologists have told me that it must have rained at least
once in the past hundred years over most of this enormous stretch of barren
land. There are indications of past precipitation on the surfaces of the
mine tailings, extrusions from the nitrate mines that dotted the landscape
with human activity a century ago. This is an eerie place to travel, as in
some areas the only signs of past human habitation are the graveyards that
house the dead. The mausoleums shelter the desiccated remains of the mine
managers and their families (the miners themselves were given less
prestigious burials). Apart from some vandalism, the coffins and their
contents are exactly as they were in the early years of the twentieth
century. Where it (almost) never rains, the dead become mummified.

Imagine living in a place where it rains perhaps once every hundred years.
Not surprisingly, detailed weather data are not available for most of this
large, sparsely populated area, but there are meteorological records that
extend back for long periods for several places. The northernmost city in
Chile is Arica; the average rainfall there between 1987 and 2002 was three
millimetres per year. But that average is misleading because over one-third
of the total rainfall in that sixteen-year period fell on a single day. It
rained on a total of just fourteen days in those sixteen years, and in an
earlier period, not a single drop of rain was recorded for fourteen years
in a row. It seemed that the place where I was now stuck was drier than
Arica, and I had only my broken-down truck to keep me company as the hours
passed by.

This was not the first time I had got into a bit of a pickle while doing
fieldwork. For my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto I had studied
geographic variation in bee social behaviour, obtaining samples all the way
from cold temperate Ontario to the subtropical climes of the Florida Keys.
At one point I drove my car into the Okefenokee Swamp at dawn trying to get
to the next sampling site in time.

Since then I have authored or co-authored over one hundred research
articles on bees, most of them since becoming a professor of biology at
York University in Toronto, Canada. Over the past thirty-five years I have
travelled to all continents except Antarctica (where there are no bees)
because of my fascination with these essential and beautiful little
insects. Arid lands are my preferred destinations for the simple reason
that bee diversity is higher in semi-deserts than in any other type of
habitat. The normally dry and sunny weather is appealing to bees, which
don't like to fly when it is raining or cloudy. Although my earliest
research was mostly on bee behaviour, I have become increasingly aware of
the need to promote the conservation of bees. Research performed in my
laboratory demonstrates that bees are at a much higher risk of extinction
than most other organisms. And that's a concern because the world as we
know it would not exist without the pollination activities of bees: not
only would there be few wildflowers, but our food supply would be
substantially reduced. Some almost essen-tial items—such as coffee—would be
at risk (though many would consider coffee absolutely essential). So it is
extremely important to increase our understanding of bees and to spread the
word about these valuable creatures as widely as possible.

Consequently, I now put considerable effort into increasing general
awareness of the significance of bees. I have, for example, written a
pamphlet on the bees of Toronto; taught bee-identification courses in
Ontario, Arizona and Kenya; written identification guides to the bees of
Canada and adapted previously published ones for the needs of the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

It is because of my interest in the conservation of bees that I was in the
middle of the Atacama Desert with no shade but that underneath the truck,
where I had spent quite some time. Fortu- nately, I had a large drum of
water—essential for anyone travelling in this part of the world—and a drum
of gasoline. I knew of other entomologists who had run out of gas and been
stranded in this region for days before anyone else passed by. Without
water and gas, you would not last long. I imagined the headline: "Mummified
Bee Biologist Found in Desert."

Large amounts of water and gas are two things everyone needs in this
beautiful wilderness. But few take a drum of liquid nitro- gen with them as
well. Why would I take liquid nitrogen into the desert? At -196 degrees C,
it was certainly not for cooling beer. The liquid nitrogen was for storing
bees in a way that prevented their proteins from breaking down. Why was I
interested in the proteins of desert bees? Why was I risking life and limb
studying the proteins of insects so inconspicuous that even if you had
thousands of them nesting in your lawn you would probably not know it? The
answers to these questions form part of an extended narrative that
eventually led me to conclude that bees may be the proverbial canaries in
the coal mine of the globe's terrestrial habitats. Not only do I believe
that bees can tell us much about the state of the natural world, but I also
believe they are particularly good at indicating the state of the
environment in areas that have been considerably influenced by human
activity. But in case you think bees are unim-portant, or even perhaps
mostly a nuisance (after all, some of them sting), let's imagine what the
world would be like without them.

Let's start with the obvious: there would be far fewer flowers. Plants have
sex through the transfer of pollen from the male part of one to the female
part of another. Pollen may be transported on the feathers of a
hummingbird, the hairs on a fly or the tongue of a bat, and lots of it is
transported by the wind (you may have an allergic response when plants are
having sex using aerial currents as their intermediary). But the pollen of
most flowering plant species is transported on the hairs on the body of a
bee.

In the absence of bees, most flowering plants would not persist for very
long. Yes, there would be some flowers left. The elongate red ones that are
pollinated by hummingbirds; the large saguaro cactus flowers that are
pollinated by bats; the white, moth-pollinated orchids that show up so well
in the moonlight; and the dull flowers that give off a scent like rotting
meat to attract pollinating flies—all of these flowering plant species
could survive without bees. But the world would certainly be a less joyful
place for us if the only flowers were on cactuses or smelled unpleasantly
stinky.

In the complexity that is the web of life, we rarely under- stand the
extent to which the continued existence of one species is dependent upon
the presence of another. When it was a mere seedling, did that
bat-pollinated cactus require the shade provided by a bee-pollinated
flowering plant to avoid shriveling up in the dry desert heat? If so, even
the cactus might disappear from the face of the planet if bees were no
longer around. We simply do not know enough about ecological
interdependencies to understand what proportion of the organisms on the
planet rely, directly or indirectly, upon the pollination activities of
bees.

Certainly the loss of all bees would result in catastrophic cascades
through the terrestrial ecosystems of the world. If many of the flowering
plants were to disappear, the other species that rely upon those plants
would also be in trouble. How many squirrels would there be without the
nuts that result from pollination by bees? How many songbirds would there
be without the berries that result from pollination by bees? No squirrels
and no songbirds means no predators that eat the squirrels and songbirds.
So the impact of bees extends throughout the food web—even to us.

We are part of the food chain (usually the end link, because comparatively
few people get eaten). We are also a very large part of the global food
web, appropriating perhaps one-quarter of the entire ecological
productivity of the planet. Not all our use of the world's ecological
productivity is through food. We cut down rain- forests and drain peatlands
to feed our insatiable demand for bio- fuels. We grow cotton for clothing,
harvest wood for construction, and produce coffee to help us get going in
the morning and sedatives to help us get to sleep at night. All these
commodities rely to some extent upon the pollinating activities of bees.

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only
four years of life left." That quotation has been attributed to Einstein,
although scholars can find no evidence that the unkempt sage said anything
of the sort. I think some, perhaps most, of us would survive for longer
than four years without bees, but there's no question that the food supply
would be substantially reduced. Why? What exactly is the impact of bees
upon our food supply?

Consider breakfast. Eggs, maybe a slice of watermelon, toast with butter
and jam, and a cup of coffee with a dash of milk—all are common components
of a North American breakfast. The only item in the list that bees do not
play a direct role in producing is your toast, since wheat is pollinated by
wind.

Eggs come from chickens, and chickens eat seeds, among other things. Many
of the seeds in the diet of a chicken would not be produced in the absence
of pollinating activities of bees. And watermelons are entirely
bee-dependent. Each fruit requires more than a thousand grains of pollen to
be produced. (It's lucky for us that bees are such messy shoppers and leave
behind so much of the food they collect!)

Coffee bushes do not need a pollinator to produce beans because they can
self-pollinate. But when a bee moves pollen from one bush to another, the
yield increase is enormous. Eggs, coffee and most fruits and vegetables
would be a lot more expensive with- out bees because there would be much
less of them.

What about the milk for your coffee and the butter for your toast? The cows
that produce milk get most of their nourishment from grasses, which are
wind-pollinated. But grass does not grow during the long winters at
temperate latitudes, and alfalfa is one of the most important winter forage
foods for cows. Alfalfa requires pollination to produce seed for next
year's crop. A substantial pro- portion of our meat and dairy products
would not be possible without the bees that pollinate alfalfa.

Last we turn to jam. Most jams come from berry crops, such as strawberries,
raspberries and blueberries. These plants generally grow berries only after
having been pollinated by bees.

Am I suggesting that we would all starve in an almost colour- less and
stinky world if it weren't for bees? No, that would be an exaggeration.
Many of the world's staple crops are wind-pollinated, including various
cereals, rice and corn. Others crops are pollinated by insects that are not
bees; chocolate, for instance, is produced from cacao, which is pollinated
by midges, and figs result from pollination by tiny wasps. I like chocolate
and I like figs, but I wouldn't like to have to rely upon them for most of
my non- starchy nutrition.

You may be thinking that we need not worry about any of this because our
industrialized agriculture has an industrialized pollinator to take care of
all our pollination needs: the western domesticated honey bee. But recent
developments suggest that we cannot be so confident in this one major
pollinator; hardly a week goes by without the media mentioning the problems
faced by these bees and their keepers.

Concern about pollination and pollinators became so intense that the
National Research Council (NRC) in the United States commissioned a report
on the status of North American pollinators. The report, published in 2007,
included a graph showing the change in the number of managed honey bee
hives in the United States from 1945 to 2005. It's a scary graph. Apart
from a few wobbles here and there, it shows a more or less continuous
decline in the number of hives. If this downward trend continues unabated,
there will be no honey bee colonies in the U.S. by somewhere between the
years 2040 and 2060. Of course, this is somewhat absurd: the principle of
supply and demand suggests that as the number of hives decreases, each one
will become more valuable, and so the rewards for keeping them should
increase. (But the report was written before the latest calamity to impact
honey bees and their keepers, the mysterious colony collapse disorder,
struck.) Still, I suspect that things might be worse than even the
depressing scenario outlined in the NRC report suggests, as our need for
pollination is increasing. A recent survey of food produc-

tion since 1961 shows that the number of pollinator-dependentfoods has
quadrupled in less than fifty years. The same study noted that this
increase far outstripped the rate of growth of the world's domesticated
honey bee hives, suggesting that either wild honey bees (escaped, feral
colonies) or other pollinators have been helping us without our being aware
of it. This growing demand for pollinator-dependent crops could cause a
crisis in pollination.

The increased need for pollinators is particularly acute in almond
orchards. Almonds are a needy crop in terms of pollination, and every year
over half of the honey bee hives in the entire United States are taken to
California to pollinate this one crop. In 2005 there weren't enough hives
available, so some bees were imported from Australia. The area of land
covered by the crop is expected to increase by 50 percent over 2005 levels
in the next few years, so the pollination needs of the almond industry will
only grow. This single crop will soon require more than two mil- lion honey
bee hives each spring. That's over 70 percent of all the managed honey bee
colonies in the United States. Having most of the domesticated honey bee
colonies in the U.S. gathered together in just one state for the
pollination of just one crop sounds like a recipe for disaster.

The question of why American beekeepers are in such trouble is complex
because so many factors have impacted the industry. It's depressing to
consider the many issues that have emerged in the past thirty years. First
there were the problems with African- ized bees—originally called killer
bees (that epithet was dropped because it was considered too scary). The
Africanized-bee prob- lem in North America had its genesis in the escape of
a particular form of honey bee native to Africa. This strain was both
aggres- sive and hard-working. Warwick Kerr, a Brazilian bee biologist,
wished to crossbreed these bees with the domesticated variety that had been
taken to South America hundreds of years earlier. The Brazilian bees were
considered fairly peaceful but not very productive. Kerr hoped to transform
the somewhat lazy Brazilian insects into harder-working bees through the
introduction of genes from the African strain. He hoped that peaceful would
beat out aggressive and that hard-working would beat out lazy in the
genetic lottery of interbreeding. But in 1957, some Africanized bees
escaped in southeast Brazil, a long way away from the almond growers of
California. Living pests are not like pollutants, however, which can be
turned off at source; once introduced, they reproduce and can increase
unaided in both number and geographic range. Further- more, these increases
are usually almost impossible to stop. The escaped African strain gradually
took over most of South America, then Central America, then Mexico, and by
the late 1980s, it was on the verge of invading the United States.

These aggressive bees are more time-consuming to manage than the other
commonly used honey bee strains, and that can make a marginally profitable
industry economically inviable. Consequently, the United States Department
of Agriculture spent vast amounts of money trying to come up with ways of
preventing the arrival of Africanized bees in the U.S. The invasion was
stalled for a while because habitats at various points along the narrow
Central American isthmus were unsuitable for the advancing occupation. But
the inevitable eventually occurred, and the first Africanized bees in the
U.S. were detected in Texas in 1990. They are now in almost every state
along the southern margin of the U.S., as well as Nevada, Oklahoma and
Arkansas; they reached Florida in 2002. They do not get in the news much
these days; their economic impact was originally worse than their sting,
and beekeepers have since had worse problems to overcome.

While the North American honey bee industry was anticipating the arrival of
aggressive bees, nasty bee parasites—specifically, tracheal and varroa
mites, both accompanied by a bunch of diseases— appeared. Tracheal mites
are tiny parasites that live in the breathing tubes of bees (imagine having
cockroaches crawling around inside your lungs). The debilitating effects of
these mites on honey bee colonies were first noticed on the Isle of Wight,
off the coast of southern England; the mites spread from there to the rest
of the British Isles and then to other parts of the world. They reached
North America in 1984. Tracheal mites are difficult to detect because they
live inside the bees. In fact, beekeepers often don't know that these pests
are in their hives until the infestation is so severe that the colony
becomes considerably weakened. Once inside a colony, the mites will stay
until eradicated. Recent methods for control of the mites involve putting
sugar with vegetable oil or shortening into the hive. Greasing the bees in
this manner makes it difficult for the mites to transfer from one host to
another. This interesting approach at pest control doesn't involve the use
of unpleasant chemicals.

There are two species of varroa mites, only one of which, appropriately
named the destructive varroa, is causing large-scale problems for the honey
bee. These large parasites can be found on the surface of adult bees or on
pupae and larvae, where they suck the bodily fluids of their hosts. For us,
they would be like a mosquito the size of a small dog attached
semi-permanently between our shoulder blades, where we can't reach it.
Originating on a different honey bee species in Southeast Asia, where they
were first noticed in 1904, these natural enemies of domesticated bees were
detected in North America in 1987. They can have a debilitating effect on
colonies, and it seems that the almost complete disap- pearance of wild (as
opposed to managed) honey bees in much of the New World can be attributed
to them. The hives can be treated with formic acid, a chemical related to
vinegar, to get rid of these parasites, but for obvious reasons its use is
not recommended during honey production.

The other enemies of our industrial-scale agricultural pollinator include
small hive beetles, wax moths (which eat the brood comb), at least two
bacterial diseases, two fungal diseases and no fewer than eight viral
diseases—one of which has been implicated in the latest round of
catastrophes to affect honey bees and the people who keep them: colony
collapse disorder, or CCD.

The main symptom of CCD is the mass disappearance of bees during the
winter. Beekeepers inspecting their hives in spring find them almost
entirely empty. CCD caused the loss of over 40 per- cent of the colonies in
the U.S. during the winter of 2006–07, with some beekeepers losing more
than 80 percent of their hives. Losses continue, with 36 percent of hives
dying out over the winter of 2008–09. CCD has been blamed on everything
from pesticide use to the bees being disoriented by signals from cell-
phone towers; a recent headline read "Mobile Phones Are Killing
Bees—Mankind Will Be Extinct in Four Years!" I favour this hypothesis for
the simple reason that I do not like cellphones. But when pressed I will
admit that cellphone towers were around for a long time before CCD was
first detected, so the facts don't fit the hypothesis. Most recently,
another bee disease, Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), has been blamed
for CCD. Its causative role has been demonstrated experimentally, but there
are multiple strains of the disease and some seem to have little effect
upon bees.

Another view is that CCD should be called MSD, or multiple stress disorder.
Stresses on honey bees have increased for many reasons—not least because of
the numerous treatments for the numerous ailments that now afflict them
(being repeatedly doused with vegetable fat and vinegar would certainly
make me feel less vigorous). A range of novel pesticides are now in
widespread use in North America, despite having sparked lawsuits against
pesticide companies by European beekeepers. Transnational transportation
may also have had an effect. During their journey from crop to crop and
state to state, the poor bees are exposed to multiple pesticides and other
environmental contaminants, as well as the stress of travel. The bees are
also given a series of different monoculture crops to feed on when they're
being moved like this. How healthy would we be if in March we ate nothing
but almonds, in April nothing but apples and in May nothing but
blueberries? This is what we force many honey bees to do (albeit on the
pollen rather than the fruit).

With this seemingly continual onslaught, we should have sympathy for our
beekeepers. Not only have they had to cope with these nasty parasites and
diseases, but they have also had to deal with very low prices for their
product because the North American market has been flooded with cheap honey
from overseas. (While being "flooded" with honey might sound nice, the
quality of many imports is poor and they often have high concentrations of
pesti- cide residues.) As a result, North American beekeepers now make most
of their income from renting out hives for crop pollination rather than
from selling honey.

Whatever the cause or causes of CCD, it is yet another indication that
relying on just one organism to provide almost all our pollination needs is
an unwise strategy. Just as we protect our finances by not putting all our
funds into a single stock, we should hedge our pollination bets by not
relying so heavily upon the activities of a single species.

There is another reason why concentrating our pollination efforts upon this
one species is not a good idea. Please don't tell any beekeepers I said
this, but honey bees are not always good pollinators. Your hypothetical
breakfast is a case in point: honey bees are poor pollinators of alfalfa
and some berries (blueberries, for example), and although they do a good
job with watermelon, wild bees sometimes do the work well enough that honey
bees aren't needed. Alfalfa flowers have a special mechanism that must be
"tripped" by pollinators, and honey bees are not very good at getting this
mechanism to work. Blueberries keep their pollen hidden inside minute
anthers similar to salt shakers, and honey bees don't know how to shake the
pollen out. Both of these crops are far better pollinated by wild bees than
by honey bees. But as we shall see, all may not be well for these other bee
species either.

It is these other bees that most interest me. There are over

19,500 described species; they are beautiful but largely ignored, and
without their unseen activities, the world would be a far poorer place,
aesthetically, ecologically, economically and nutritionally. It is not only
the pollinating role of these unsung heroines (and it is the females that
do almost all of the pollination) that makes them important. Wild bees are
particularly sensitive indicators of the state of the environment. They are
especially good at reflecting the state of environments that have been
heavily modified by us; indeed, I believe they are better monitors of this
than any other creatures on earth.

Environmentalists often point to declines in the numbers of birds and
mammals as indicators of our negative impact upon the planet. Spotted owls
tell us that we have reduced the Pacific coast rainforest to fragments that
are too small; polar bears are beginning to tell us that we have caused too
much arctic ice to melt; the giant panda can tell us that too much wild
bamboo habitat has been turned into farmland. But large charismatic
vertebrates like owls and bears (polar or panda) are the tiny tip of the
iceberg when it comes to biological diversity. There are more species of
bees than there are of birds and reptiles combined; there are approximately
as many species of bees as there are of birds, mammals and amphibians put
together; there are more species of bees and wasps combined than there are
of plants. There is power in numbers. We can better estimate changes in
ecological conditions with insects than we can with the more popular birds
and mammals simply because there are so many more species to give us the
information we need.

Most of the land cover of planet earth is already dominated by human
activity through agriculture, silviculture and urbanization. We need to be
able to discriminate between diverse, ecologically healthy habitats and the
more severely stressed areas when both have already been considerably
modified by our activities. This book is largely an attempt to outline why
I believe wild bees are such superb organisms to use for these comparisons.
We will have to take some diversions along the road, but fortunately, these
diversions usually provide me with excuses to talk about bees, and I hope
you will enjoy reading about them almost as much as I have enjoyed finding
out about them.

*Excerpt from *Keeping the Bees* by Laurence Packer © 2010. Published by
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.*



  • [permaculture] Biologist Says Promoting Diversity Is Key To 'Keeping The Bees' : The Salt : NPR, Lawrence London, 07/10/2014

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