Honey bees have become the canaries
in our mines; their mysterious and massive disappearance reveal the
manifold costs of human misappropriation, exploitation and destruction
of nature. Chip Ward is a former public library administrator and
grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. His book, Canaries on the
Rim: Living Downwind in the West, is an account of his campaigns to
make polluters accountable, and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for
Healing the American Land explores the cutting edge of America's
conservation movement. He writes from Torrey, Utah. The following
passages are taken from his July 2007 essay, "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums
and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience," which appeared in TomDispatch.
One
of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation's current grantees, Spikenard Farm in Illinois, is devoted to
understanding and renewal of natural honey bee communities.
Also: read Elizabeth Kolbert's essay, "Stung," in The New Yorker issue of August 7, 2007. And listen to Kolbert's 8-minute discussion, "Bearish on Bees," by clicking here.
Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and
minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates
redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one
"best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable
over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And
we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than
just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about
how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of
them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber,
minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking
systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.
Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.
In the world today,
efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has
essentially been the story of gaining control over nature.
Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest
fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and
pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal
with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on
wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even
engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more
efficient.
.....
Bees Drop Dead
The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service -- pollination -- to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.
Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways -- birds do it, bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have wrung out what resiliency there was.
Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as well.
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Nobody knows for sure why bee colonies are collapsing. German researchers recently speculated that the rapid growth in cell-phone use might be a cause, that some kind of tipping point had been crossed where bees could no longer navigate and communicate in an electro-magnetic environment saturated with cell-phone signals. This speculation is based upon experiments in which forager bees abandoned hives next to which cell phones had been placed. But bee populations are collapsing across the nation, including in areas with less cell phone ubiquity.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
The suddenness of the collapse is puzzling, but one possibility would be the emergence of some new killer parasite or bee mite -- a development that could result in such a precipitous decline. After all, bee pollination is big business. Bees are transported and mixed today in ways never before possible, giving the tiny parasitic critters that bees carry in their guts all sorts of opportunities to find new hosts. But whatever the specific cause of bee colony collapse, the context of this pollinator catastrophe is an old story.
Once upon a time we had lots of small, local farms. Farmers relied on dispersed bee populations to pollinate their crops, enhanced and encouraged by the work of local beekeepers. When monoculture was but a glint in the agricultural eye, when cows, chickens, pigs, and more than one crop was still part of the farming dynamic, a farmer might also keep a hive or two. Before we replaced meadows and prairies with sprawling subdivisions, there was enough habitat for local bee populations to thrive and meet agricultural demands. Not anymore.
Today, when farms are massive and almost invariably dedicated to single crops, there just aren't enough local bees to do the work required. In addition, the crops we grow need to be pollinated at different times. So, for example, vast crops of almonds in California need to be pollinated in February when there aren't enough local bees around, so the growers import bees to do the job.
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums
In fact, we ship billions of bees from here to there and back again in tractor-trailer trucks to pollinate our food crops. Like so many other aspects of modern agriculture, bee pollination has become a business that matches the scale of our food-production system. So, out with the inefficient, inflexible, insufficient local bees and in with diesel-driven colonies of commercial bees that arrive in sufficient numbers where and when we want them. The top beekeeping corporation in America can put 70,000 hives on the road at one time.
What happens to bees in such circumstances is probably similar to what happens to all creatures living in crowded and overpopulated environments -- illness can spread quickly. A dairy farmer in Vermont told me that, when you have a hundred cows in the milking barn, you can use antibiotics sparingly. But put a thousand cows together and you're applying antibiotics all the time. Whatever happens in one cow's blood stream tends to go through the whole herd quickly -- and the more cows that are crowded together, the more viruses, parasites, and infections are in play.
The same thing happens to chickens and pigs in factory farms, which is why they get antibiotics routinely. Why would bees be an exception to the vulnerability to illness that comes with agriculture conducted on such a massive scale? You can't, however, apply antibiotics to bees the way you can to cows because bees are more likely to trade mites than infections, so new miticides are being developed.
Logically enough, bee vulnerability is increased if the immune responses of the bees are low. A friend of mine drove tractor-trailer trucks filled with bees as a summer job in college. He drove by night when the bees were in their hives and quiet. The goal was to get to his destination before dawn and unload the bees onto the targeted crop before they became busy, uncooperative, and agitated. When the trip was rough, when there were breakdowns or bad weather en route, he said, thousands of bees died. If stress kills bees, it is not unreasonable to assume it lowers immune response.
Bees have to be fed between trips. High fructose corn syrup is hauled to them in tanker trucks, which probably isn't any better for their health than it is for ours. Bees, of course, encounter and incorporate pesticides and herbicides in the fields they pollinate, as well as all the other background pollutants we have put into the environment. Toxic chemicals also lower immune thresholds. Who knows what those genetically modified plants they encounter do to them? Add it all up and you get overcrowded, malnourished, stressed-out, poisoned, possibly cell-phone radiated, disturbed bees. Any -- or all -- of this could contribute to the present colony collapse, or it could be due to some as yet unknown factor or development. When it comes to resiliency, however, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the missing redundancy in the system.
Flower Power
This sort of colony collapse has happened before. The occasional collapse of bee populations has been recorded over the past couple of centuries, though not in the present widespread form. Obviously, bee populations eventually recovered. Is it reasonable then to expect that they will recover again? Yes, but not right away. Habitat destruction -- all those sprawling burbs where bee-flowers once bloomed -- mean less room for bees to recover and fewer colonies of dispersed local bees to replenish diminished populations. Lots of viable habitat is also an important aspect of resilience. In other words, natural pollinators are no longer resilient -- they cannot quickly recover from a disturbance like an epidemic. If we expect to continue to rely on fossil-fueled bees, packed like Third World slum-dwellers onto trucks, then we can expect future die-offs as well, whatever the cause of this one.
If we understood and appreciated the need for resilience, we would not just rebuild commercial bee colonies as we certainly plan to do, but would also find ways to encourage local beekeepers to grow healthy colonies of dispersed bees. That way we wouldn't have all our bees in one basket. (The scientific term for such a precaution is modularity.). We would conserve or restore bee habitat. We would move away from agricultural models that require pollination on a scale that local bees cannot hope to satisfy and on schedules that are out of sync with what bees can do naturally and locally.
We could focus more on what makes bees healthy than on what makes them convenient and profitable. We might even realize that industrializing bees is not as efficient as we imagined. In the long run, such arrangements only make growers vulnerable to bee-colony collapse. And we would not be so quick to replace an ecological service (a process nature provides for free) that is resilient with an artificial version of the same with next to no resilience.
