Where have all the bees gone?

Right now in the U.S., Yeats would have a great deal of difficulty finding a “bee-loud glade” in which to pursue his poetry. Between 50 and 90 percent of the honeybees in 35 states have died since last fall, due largely to what is being called a “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).

Bees are not just important for poetical inspiration, honey and beeswax. As Yeats points out, in the oblique way poets employ, they are vital for the pollination that produces beans and about a third of all the food consumed in the U.S.

While there are other pollinators, like bumblebees and hummingbirds, the figure generally used is that honeybees are essential in producing about $15 billion worth of food a year.

Even the production of milk starts with pollination of alfalfa, a staple in the diet of dairy cows.

Bees have been dying in bunches for years from mites, fungal infections, bad weather, insecticides directed at pests and herbicides directed at “weeds,” but what makes CCD different is the absence of bodies. The queen is present, laying eggs with just a handful of workers. To put this in context, beekeepers generally start a hive with a queen and 12,000 workers; hives can contain as many as 600,000 workers before they split.

“It was like something had vacuumed the bees out of there,” William Palmer, owner of East Troy Honey, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 12. “The bees were missing.”

There have been several congressional hearings on CCD and some members of Congress have been trying to get the U.S. Department of Agriculture to spend more money to determine what is going on, since a major portion of the food supply is on the verge of being affected. The USDA is only spending $7.5 million, though some severely afflicted states are spending considerable sums.

The National Academy of Science is calling for more basic research because scientists are not even sure about what wild pollinators are significant for which crops.

Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium (maarec.cas.psu.edu) summarizes the possible causes for CCD under active investigation. Radiation from cell phone towers has been ruled out, because the disorder occurs in rural areas where cell phone service is not available. Genetically modified crops are not a major suspected cause, because CCD also happens in areas where they aren’t planted.

According to MAAREC, scientists are examining the following research areas as priorities, but are not excluding other possible causes:

• chemical residue/contamination in the wax, food stores and bees

• known and unknown pathogens in the bees and brood

• parasite load in the bees and brood

• nutritional fitness of the adult bees

• level of stress in adult bees as indicated by stress induced proteins

• lack of genetic diversity and lineage of bees

According to some scientists, the chief culprit is the most commonly used insecticide on the planet: imidacloprid. This potent chemical can be sprayed on plants or coated on seeds, which then release the insecticide as the plants grow. According to a 1999 study by the Environmental Protection Agency, about 6 billion tons of insecticides are used each year.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reported on May 28: “In sublethal doses, however, research has shown that imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids [a class of synthetic pesticides—WW], such as fipronil, can impair honeybees’ memory and learning, as well as their motor activity and navigation. When foraging for food and collecting nectar, honeybees memorize the smells of flowers and create a kind of olfactory map for subsequent trips.”

According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, imidacloprid and fipronil combined for 56 percent of the total amount of insecticides used to combat household pests and termites. (Star-Ledger, May 20) New Jersey is one of the states where CCD has affected blueberry, cranberry and peach production.

U.S. agribusiness, which grows 80 percent of the world’s supply of almonds, uses half of all the commercially available beehives in the whole U.S. (Washington Post, June 1). Big 18-wheel trucks, full of hives, pour into California’s Central Valley in February and then are moved on to service crops all over the country.

Scientists feel that this constant moving might be stressful on the bees, but don’t yet have proof. CCD hit the big beekeepers first but now isn’t limited to their hives. Local producers are also being hit with CCD.

All the causes of this decline that are under investigation are really linked to how capitalism has structured agriculture—how it has stressed and intensely overexploited a single species in deep ignorance of the ecological consequences. Bees have declined rapidly in the past but not to such an extent.

This fairly desperate research effort may succeed. If it doesn’t, agribusiness may be able to import the bees it needs—of course, at a high cost that it will pass on with its profit margin to consumers. But the declines in bees, birds (see Workers World, Jun. 29), frogs and so many other species point to the fragility of life itself under capitalism. To really solve this crisis, we need to remove its root cause, the social system that has engendered capitalist production.

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