Published in The Veggie Monologues (2015)
Meet the celebrities of the insect world. Perhaps you know of them as the makers of honey, the reigning champion of healthy sugar substitutes and secret ingredient to homemade remedies ranging from skin care to sore throats. Perhaps you know of them as pollinators, without whom the agriculture industry would suffer catastrophically. And perhaps you know of them as the species whose survival is not only in great peril, but is also crucial to the continuation of our living standards. Yes, the world has taken notice of the European honey bee, and not at all in a good way.
There are so many buzz words- pardon the pun- surrounding the ever-expanding reach of awareness towards the plight of the honey bee. Colony collapse disorder. Neonicotinoids. GMOs. Varroa mites. Foulbrood. Activists picket, campaigners spread information, media outlets set up intense investigations. Fingers are pointed towards large scale producers of pesticides and herbicides, towards farmers, and towards governments. Hardly a week goes by without headlines screaming “Scientists discover what’s killing bees,” yet the question of what’s driving their decline continues to be pushed without a satisfactory conclusion.
Despite all the newfound recognition, there still remains a massive gap in the public understanding of honey bees. While it seems obvious that chemicals and parasites must be playing a huge part in the alarmingly high mortality rates of commercial honey bee colonies, there is a distinct lack of understanding about why. In order to pick apart this matter, let us start by investigating a word from the previous sentence. Do you see it there? After mortality rates, before honey bee colonies. Yes, that’s the one.
Commercial.
The plight of honey bees as we know it is centered around how we know them- as tools. They make our honey, they pollinate our crops. Their presence is vital to the success of food production here in the United States. Without the mighty European honey bee, large scale monoculture would collapse, leaving flowering crops unable to produce fruit on their own. Surely this means they must also be highly important to the natural ecosystem….. right? Well, let’s take a moment to investigate another word before we continue this dissection. Fourth sentence in the paragraph, fourth word. See it?
European.
Apis mellifera, the European honey bee. An import. Once native to a landmass across the Atlantic Ocean, our fuzzy little workforce was brought to the Americas less than 500 years ago. They have since spread naturally across the landscape, and are considered to be a beneficial species rather than invasive; still, they haven’t earned the rank of primary pollinators in these parts. There are, in fact, several thousand native bee species in the Americas, from the charismatic bumblebees to the beautiful varieties of sweat bees, who get the job done much more efficiently. They have been here for millions of years, after all, and have evolved alongside the native plants who require their services for survival. Don’t relax just yet, however- native bees are suffering just as brutally as the immigrants, and are in dire need of public attention. That’s a story for another day.
As for our foreign flying friends, their talents are sought after by a more familiar species: Homo sapiens. The primary roles played by honey bees in American culture are as commercial pollinators and honey producers; beyond that, they are still exploited for beeswax, pollen, propolis, and even royal jelly, the substance fed to developing queen bees. They live alongside us as delightfully productive little factories, working diligently to harvest and build for their colony so that we may reap the bounties of their toils.
As a commercial commodity, honey bees are highly prized for their diligence in the all-important role of pollination. The United States is a land ruled by monoculture, sporting large-scale single species crops that can dominate a landscape. “Amber waves of grain” and all that. When the flowering season arrives, farmers face a dilemma- natural pollinators are hard to find living within the confines of their carefully tended and chemically treated fields. Without pollination, the crops these farmers took out crippling loans to grow will bear neither fruit nor revenue. Time to call in reinforcements!
Help arrives in the form of several hundred wooden boxes, carefully unloaded from trucks and left to settle until the sounds within drop from an angry buzz to a pleasant hum. These boxes, sometimes stacked several high, each contain wooden frames within which bees build the signature comb that serves as the foundation of their lives… often on plastic foundation with a pre-made blueprint so that they stay organized. Once beekeepers feel that the contents of these boxes can handle release, the bottom entrances are opened up. When disturbed, such as after a truck ride, bees leaving the hive can easily become disoriented and lost; some will attempt to mix with the wrong colony, while others simply never find their way home.
Honey bees, like most social insects (ants, termites, wasps, etc.) utilize “division of labor” to keep things running smoothly. Every worker bee assumes a specific role within the colony; all workers are female, and usually sisters, unless their hive has been forcefully combined with another. After being cooped up for several days in transport, the bees tasked with cleaning the hive will set to dragging out the corpses of former nestmates who didn’t survive the trip. How lovely. Normally, these are removed immediately to prevent the spread of disease. Foragers, the bees who collect nectar and pollen, stream out and conduct what is called an “orientation flight” to learn the lay of the land and update their internal maps. Armed with their trusty maps and the sun as a compass, these hard-working little ladies can venture out to find food almost immediately upon reaching a new location. If they happen upon a profitable flower patch in their meandering journey, their onboard BeePS (sorry not sorry) allows them to fly directly back to the hive with as much booty as they can carry. The ability to quickly adapt and get to work in new surroundings is a large part of what makes honeybees so ideal for rent-a-pollinator services.
After the forager’s laborious task of finding nectar and hauling it back to the colony in her specialized honey crop, bees will repeatedly exchange nectar on their tongues in a process that evaporates water and condenses it into a famous form of liquid gold. Honey is extremely dense, antibacterial, and very high in calories, making it the perfect food for long-term storage. Honeybees will spend an entire flowering season storing up for winter, working consistently to ensure that there will be calories available for the colony to generate heat when they cluster together as defense aginst freezing temperatures. Of course, if we left it all for them, there would be nothing to put on our meusli. To make things fair, most beekeepers will only pull honey before fall, when the bees have their last chance to make rounds and stock up. As an extra measure to keep them going, many hives will be fed with sugar water (often made with the same refined sugar we swap out for honey) during the warm seasons, and sugar patties inside the hive throughout winter.
A worker bee only lives for up to a few weeks, but a queen can live for two years if she’s lucky enough to reign over a healthy colony. While a worker in a commercial operation may live her entire life in one field, a queen can potentially do more traveling than most people. From the almond crops of California to the citrus groves of Florida, the call for their services can rack up some serious mileage. During this time, the colony is exposed to many different climates, chemicals, and contact with other hives, not to mention the stress of regularly being packed up and transported several hundred miles at a time. The close quarters kept between hives make it very easy for numbers to mix and health risks to be transferred, an issue which is negotiated by antibiotics and chemical treatments.
Each year, increasing numbers of honey bee colonies are reported lost by beekeepers worldwide. The firsthand reports vary greatly in their reasoning; many beekeepers cite winter starvation and devastation by parasites or viruses, but great numbers tell chilling tales of the mysterious phenomenon that has come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder. In the textbook case of CCD, an entire colony of honeybees will just… disappear. For a beekeeper whose entire livelihood revolves around the health of these little insects, and even a hobbyist, it can be devastating to open up a formerly healthy hive and find only rotting remains.
In the wild, honeybees will overwinter by clustering together for heat until spring arrives. Healthy survivors get busy once the flowers are in bloom, and will produce swarms as soon as they are able. A reproductive swarm is a colony’s version of babymakin’ (think of the colony as a “superorganism” rather than a bunch of organisms living together), where a chunk of workers leave to establish a new hive with the old queen while a fresh one takes over in her place. Some beekeepers will destroy swarm preparations to keep their hives from splitting, but many can’t even make it that far. With the rise of CCD and overwintering success rates dropping by the year, spring can bring a frantic struggle to replace lost colonies by ordering from other apiculturists and breeding operations. In some areas, waiting lists will fill up months in advance, and desperate beekeepers will drive hours to bargain with distributors holding shipments of “package bees.”
A package will generally contain about 3lbs of honeybees, a tin of sugar water for the journey, and a queen in a tiny box allowing just enough space for her to be fed and cleaned by her attendants. The bees are obtained by splitting an existing colony and introducing the package to a new queen-in-a-box, whose presence they will gradually accept as they get used to her pheromones. In a natural cycle, a new queen is raised by feeding a special substance called royal jelly to a regular worker larvae. Once the new queen hatches (often, several will hatch at a time and fight to the death over their rights to the throne), she will go on a mating flight, getting her kicks with as many dudes as possible before returning to spend the rest of her life laying eggs in darkness. The queens ordered through companies are often the product of a queen-rearing operation, where the royal mothers are raised in a lab and artificially inseminated to ensure beekeepers that she will produce more of the same breed that they paid for. With the rising demand for replacement colonies, these operations are under intense pressure to produce more from less, and the genetic diversity of the flagship breeds are rapidly being driven to dangerously low levels. As the gene pool dwindles, resistance to rising threats plunges right down with it, leaving the population vulnerable to further decline.
So what is causing the disappearance of honeybees? Sadly, we can’t answer that here today- but we can stimulate discussion on some potential factors that seem to get pushed under the rug in most general forums. These have already been addressed in this article, alongside examples of how a bee would be in a natural environment. This piece was not intended to “uncover truth” or generate bias, but simply to stray from the usual mindset and generate useful thinking. These durable little creatures are excellent at taking anything that’s thrown at them… however, beneath the barrage of stressors that we have created simply by requiring their services, their hold appears to be weakening. The life of the commercial honey bee is a very challenging one indeed, presenting a variety of obstacles that their natural ancestors would certainly not have faced in combination, if at all.
So…. how can you help?
Well, first off, let’s go over what not to do. The most important takeaway message you can get from this article is: do not point fingers. After reading this, you may be inclined to think of beekeepers and farmers as greedy slave drivers- nooo no no no. These are often the people who are fighting hardest to make life better for bees, and not just because their livelihoods depend on it. It takes a certain kind of crazy passionate love to take a stroll in a field buzzing with millions of little insects prepared to go kamikaze if you make any sudden movements near their family. The terrible practices come from pressure to deliver results, often to their dismay- as with any industry, the people on the ground are not drivers, but the responders. Similarly, mind your mouth around farmers, and careful what petitions you sign; it’s easy enough to criticize pesticide use and monoculture from the aisles of a grocery store, but the strings that pull and shape the industry make it very. Very. Difficult to stock those produce sections without them. Some would say impossible, but again, that’s a discussion for another day.
Pages and pages could be spent on this subject, but for now here are a few quick easy things you CAN do to help our fuzzy little friends:
First off, you’ve heard it before and we’ll say it again: Buy local! Local honey may be more expensive, but it is worth every penny for the better taste and nutrition content. Those cheap honey bears at the store are likely to be filled with honey made by bees who were fed a diet of refined sugar. Of course, supporting small operations often means supporting a more healthy way of beekeeping. Honey keeps for a long time- hundreds, even thousands of years in some cases- so there’s no excuse if you can only make it to a farmer’s market a few times a year. It’s entirely worth the trip if you get an opportunity to talk with beekeepers about their own experiences!
Next, use your consumer voting power for bee-friendly food. Almonds, delicious as they are, are one of the biggest drivers in the pollination business. The almond crops of California are extremely lucrative, generating more cash flow and more environmental problems as time goes on. For a fellow almond fiend, this news may be heartbreaking, but that does not make it any less true. If you really care, try to limit your exotic intake, and buy from small farms whenever possible. This applies to anything requiring pollination, but don’t let that limit you! Help those farmers, support small-scale mixed agriculture, and ask questions before passing up local produce that doesn’t sport an organic label; sometimes, those are even more organic than the ones that can afford the licensing.
There you have it. The rest is up to you. Bee a conscious consumer… and try not to go overboard on puns.
