It is not well-known that huge amounts of agriculture and economic activity depend upon the free services of honeybees. Every year, honeybees in the U.S. pollinate more than 90 different fruits, nuts and other crops. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” an official of the American Beekeeping Federation told The New York Times (February 27, 2007). Now we learn that honeybee colonies in 24 states – and indeed, in Europe, Brazil and around the world – are disappearing. Poof!
Beekeepers consider a 20 percent loss rate in the off-season to be normal. But now the West Coast is reporting bee losses of 30 to 60 percent; parts of Texas are seeing losses of more than 70 percent. It’s not as if the bees are dying of pesticide poisonings or freezings, in which case their bodies would be lying around. It’s that the bees are not returning to their colonies, a highly uncharacteristic behavior. It’s a mystery.
“Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining,” according to a CNN report. “Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.”
Bee experts met in Washington earlier this week to discuss the growing crisis. (A great overview of the situation can be found here.) According to the Congressional Research Service, honey bee colony losses are not uncommon. But current losses seem to differ from past situations in that:
- colony losses are occurring mostly because bees are failing to return to the hive (which is largely uncharacteristic of bee behavior).
- bee colony losses have been rapid.
- colony losses are occurring in large numbers.
- the reason why these losses are occurring remains still largely unknown.
To date, the potential causes of CCD [Colony Collapse Disorder], as reported by the scientists who are researching this phenomenon, include but may not be limited to:
- parasites, mites, and disease loads in the bees and brood;
- known/unknown pathogens;
- poor nutrition among adult bees;
- level of stress in adult bees (e.g., transportation and confinement of bees, or other environmental or biological stressors);
- chemical residue/contamination in the wax, food stores and/or bees;
- lack of genetic diversity and lineage of bees; and
- a combination of several factors.
I consider honeybees to be priceless members of the commons. They are gifts of nature and invaluable parts of a healthy ecosystem. Could it be that we fail to respect them and their intrinsic needs? Economists are always inclined to put a price tag on things, and indeed, have declared bees to be important to $15 billion worth of agriculture. This is supposed to make us really appreciate bees. (“Wow, bees are worth THAT much?!”)
Somehow, I think that part of the bee crisis is our inability to honor bees as intrinsic elements of an organic, indivisible ecosystem. Putting a price tag on them misleads us into thinking that they are a fungible, substitutable resource. They’re not. In our zeal to expand marketable crops, and then to develop mobile populations of bee hives to service them, we may have forgotten that bees have some biological imperatives of their own – imperatives that we are oblivious to. We forget that nature is a source of gifts – and that we need to honor them as gifts, not just as commodities.
Obviously, the solution to Colony Collapse Disorder will require some hard science and serious money. But it may also require that we begin to regard the world’s bees as part of a fragile commons to be honored, not merely as free labor to be exploited for an always-hungry, always-expanding market.