Something terrible is happening to bees. Hundreds of millions of them are either vanishing or dropping dead. Beekeepers are tearing their hives out in frustration.
Look how cute these things are?!
Fingers are pointing at a number of contributing factors. Relatively new pesticides designed to impregnate the seeds of crops before they have grown could be a potential problem. Climate change has been isolated as a likely cause (though to be fair climate change could plausibly be blamed for a raucous sex scandal in the tabloids these days). The nasty Varroa mite, although present since the end of World War II, is now getting the blame for laying waste to hoardes of bees like some kind of insectoid Goebbels.
Growing trends for shipping bees long distances at irregular times of the year have also attracted a fair share of criticism. Depending on whose opinion you value, one or all of these aspects of modern bee life is leading to Colony Collapse Disorder, or Honey Bee Depopulation Syndrome. Apart from having a cataclysmic name, the situation is that bees, seemingly randomly, are vanishing from once healthy hives. The bees that remain in the hives are found dead or dying, victims of an unknown malady.
Hives are disappearing and Bees are dying at an alraming rate
There have been sharp bee losses across the world for the last half decade, with catastrophic losses reported in North America moving into hundreds of millions of bees. A recent study in Italy found that the mortality rate for bees was nearly 50%.
So what? you may think. Understandably so. Bees are little bastards with stingers. They enjoy hovering in your face until you bat at the them, at which point they dodge out of the way like Neo in the Matrix only to resume their hovering motion around your ear, carrying with them a big bag of fear about something to do with how they are going to crawl inside you and buzz around and eat your brain. Nevertheless, the bee is crucial not just to the ecosystem of the planet, but also to its bottom line.
It could affect everything
This is how nature used to work. Before mass agriculture became de rigeur, reducing plantlife to far-reaching swathes of identical crops, a number of insects were responsible for pollinating plants. As farming became more efficient and reduced the once varied landscape to a monotone green, so the farmers began to encourage the populations of bees to carry pollen from one flower to another. This is a fantastic arrangement - as long as bees stick around. As bees became more and more successful, and better integrated with the farming lifecycle, other species started to die out, until eventually bees are now responsible for a third of all pollination in America, with similar figures elsewhere. Around such a contentious issue one thing is clear: we need bees.
Rudimentary foodstuffs like apples, pears, cucumbers and strawberries are dependent on farming and bees to keep ticking over at the rate now required for the mass market. Bees are not the most efficient pollinators but the agricultural industries we depend on for our everyday living have been built around them. Given a chance, nature would reassert itself and other pollinators would return to areas now dominated by bees, but they would not be able to pollinate on the scale required in modern farming.
Back in the old days, it was easier for them
Bees are an integral part of the food chain. There have been big bee losses since 2002 in the UK, with an extraordinary 33% of all bees killed in 2008. Magnified to the level of industry this is a brutal blow to the potential productivity and turnover of goods.
The National Bee Unit in York, UK (yes, there is such a place) (honest) is conducting in-depth research to attempt to isolate the biggest problems with bee populations. Everything from the size of hives to the bees’ famous ‘waggle dance’, indicating the distance and direction to the nearest flower source, has been blamed for the sudden deaths. France is taking steps to reduce the amounts and types of pesticides freely sprayed on to its crops - great for the crops, bad for maintenance costs. Not everywhere is fairing so badly; Australia’s air-tight quarantine and immigration laws have allowed it to keep a stranglehold on the Verroa problem.
Australia, it’s the last outpost of the healthy bee
Such is Australia’s prosperous outlook it is now shipping bees to other countries for profit. Again, this is not a long-term solution. Even running at full tilt, it is a drop in the ocean compared to America’s massive figures.
Back in the UK, urban gardeners are reportedly pulling in consistent figures which many of them attribute to the lack of pesticides. Beekeepers moved in on Westminster late last year, handing a petition to the Downing Street doorman.
If all the bees in the world were to keel over tomorrow, a situation that doesn’t look entirely unlikely at this stage, it would take nature far longer to recover than our agriculture would demand. New technologies for artificial pollination would need to be introduced while the bees were pensioned off. Food shortages would immediately become an issue, as the available artificial technologies are nowhere near as efficent as the bees. There is no doubt that the industry would continue to function, albeit using a slower model of production. This would result in the hiking of prices for basics like fruit and veg, including anything that might be higher up the food chain.
All this is going to get a lot more expensive
Until the fundamental issue is isolated, it will be next to impossible to prevent the continued dying out of bee populations around the world. Most experts are of the consensus that it is a number of contributing factors as detailed above which have led to the current situation. If this is the case, you should start getting used to sudden and frustrating rises in the price of basic ingredients. Or you could try learning the waggle dance.
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