Bees, food, and you

Our energy and environmental situation is fiendishly interconnected, far more than many self-described energy geeks or greenies realize.[1] As I like to say, everything is a function of everything else. You could hardly find a better example of this than the rolling disaster involving honeybees:

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed “Mary Celeste syndrome” due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. “We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies,” said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS’s bee research laboratory.

…

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “The AIA survey doesn’t give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be.”

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. “Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers,” he said, adding that a solution may be years away. “Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms.”

…

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

To be blunt, I think the situation is potentially much worse than the article above suggests. Knock honeybees out of the food production process completely, and we’re looking at not just an impact to animals and a bland human diet, but widespread food shortages for people.

It’s easy to see how we got into this situation. Assuming the leading candidate — one or more pesticides — is the primary trigger for CCD, then it was simply a matter of how large numbers of people interact with limits. We push and push and push against them, until something breaks, and then we scramble to undo it, find other solutions, and generally contain the damage and (everyone say it with me) ensure this doesn’t happen again. Financial crises, massive oil spills and underwater gushers, political scandals, hazardous materials in the workplace, premature drug approvals, pollution in all its various forms, peak oil, climate change — the list stretches as far as does our naivete and refusal to learn painful lessons. I’m constantly amazed by how smart and appropriately cautious and caring individual people can be, when large groups of us act like petulant teenagers who reject anything and everything associated with planning, wisdom, and even enlightened self-interest. In my opinion, this is by far the single most disappointing aspect of adulthood, this refusal of adults to act like adults.

[1] Hence the ridiculous phenomenon of environmentalists proclaiming that “peak oil is a good thing because it will force us to emit less CO2″. That’s nonsense. If pushed hard enough by peak oil, the US (and likely some other countries) will rush to employ coal-to-liquids technology and tar sands reserves, both at substantially higher rates of CO2 emissions than plain old petroleum. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with someone making the “peak is good” argument, only to see it grind to a halt when I mention CTL, which is a new concept to the other person. The number one thing I would like the peakers and the enviros to do is stop assuming that “their” area of concern is fiendishly difficult but the other one (or water or nuclear waste management or public policy or …) is very simple by comparison.