Eye View 

by David Charbonneau

Time to move to Plan Bee

 

February 18, 2010


Sam Comfort loaded his workers into the back of his truck in preparation for the long drive north to Montana.

It was nothing personal, just business. His migrant honeybees were cogs in the lucrative pollination machine. The worker bees were well -rested, having spent the winter in San Francisco gorging on nothing but corn syrup. But the apple blossoms were waiting in Washington as well as the cherry groves in Montana.


Once the work there was finished, Sam and his workers would head back down to California to service the valuable almond crop. Eighty per cent of the world’s almonds come from the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys and the crop is worth twice that of California’s fabled wine industry. The massive spread of 700,000 acres requires the services of bees from 38 states. Wild bees alone can’t do the job.

Food on our tables depends on honeybees. They pollinate 80 per cent of all flowering crops which amounts to one-third of all we that we eat. Without indentured honeybees, we wouldn’t have the variety of food we now enjoy.

That’s why Sam was so worried when he opened up his hives one day to find them gone; as if they were abducted by alien insects. Sam wasn’t alone. The mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) was affecting the world’s bees. There were many suspects: viral, mite and bacterial infections, pesticide poisonings, lack of genetic diversity.

Pollinators, especially bees, are what environmentalist Rachel Carson called a keystone species. Remove the keystone and the whole edifice collapses.

It’s a threat to our food supply. A report by the National Research Council in Washington put it starkly: “Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape of the terrestrial world.”

They’re busy bees. A single species of European honeybee is used all over North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

The globalization of bees has spread protozoa that destroy the bee’s digestive tract. And now wild bees as well, such as bumblebees, are threatened.



 

 Honeybees naturally have a varied diet, so when they are fed nothing but one type of pollen in a thousand acre mono-crop, they become stressed from malnourishment and prone to disease. Some cash crops are especially low in nutrition; blueberries and sunflowers have low -protein pollens. But with nothing but junk food as far as the eye can see, what’s a bee to do? Wildflowers used to provide some variety but they have been removed along with all neighbouring “weeds.”

Another threat is pesticides. One synthetic form of nicotine is soaked up by the plant’s leaves, stems and roots. This pesticide is a deadly neurotoxin to bugs and linked to mass killing of bees. One brand, Imidacloprid, is approved for use on 140 crops in more than 100 countries, a bonanza for the German chemical giant Bayer according to New Internationalist magazine.

Now Sam Comfort has given up his nomadic life and settled down with his bees. His research has found that inbreeding has reduced the genetic diversity of commercial honeybees. In an attempt to breed the best pollinators, bee breeders have removed the genetic variations that could help the strongest bees survive.

Comfort discovered that commercial bees have only 2 per cent of the genes from the original European stock whereas wild honeybees from feral colonies have 30 per cent. No surprise you consider that breeders use only 500 select mothers to produce a million queen bees which are shipped all over the continent. Feral bees are more disease resistant and vigorous. They spend more time foraging and building honey supplies.

Like genetic diversity in any species, the feral bees represent a gene pool from which commercial honeybees could benefit.

The industrialization of our food supply has produced mountains of cheap food with minimal labour but as in the stock market, high returns yield greater risk.

The cost of cheap food has been the loss of bio-diversity and that makes us less resilient. Writer and activist Chip Ward argues that we reduce the resilience of natural systems at our peril: “How futile it is in the long run to impose narrow notions of efficiency on natural systems that are profoundly dynamic and inherently unpredictable.”


We have tried to mould life into an industrial model with disastrous results. It’s time to move on to Plan Bee.


 David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

 

 





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