Bee on Welsh onion

This week I have been reading A World Without Bees – the newly published book by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum that takes an in-depth look into why honeybees all over the world are disappearing and what that might mean for us. It doesn’t make entertaining reading – the message is too bleak, and at times the text itself it dense, littered with acronyms for bee viruses and scientific names for parasites.

The book is divided into 11 chapters. The first looks at man’s use of honeybees over thousands of years. The second investigates why the honeybee is so important to us, looking beyond honey to its role in pollination. Chapter 3 looks at the effects that selective breeding has on honeybee populations.

Chapters 4 to 9 look at CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder, the phenomenon of bees simply disappearing from their hives with no apparent warning) and some of its possible causes – including pesticides, GM crops, pests and diseases, environmental pollution and climate change and the industrialization of bee-keeping.

Chapters 10 & 11 examine the likelihood that honeybees will become extinct in our lifetime, the consequences that would follow, and what we might do to stop that happening.

Although many characters in the honeybee world (bee-keepers, scientists, farmers, chemical companies and governments) have their own opinion on what is effecting the honeybees, there is little consensus on what may be causing CCD. There’s not even a global consensus that CCD exists. Research is fragmented and under-funded and strongly influenced by politics.

What unfolds in the book is a world that is seriously detrimental to Western honeybees (Apis mellifera). We’ve transported them across the world, exposing them to viruses and parasites they have no resistance against. We’ve inbred them to the point where they just don’t have the genetic diversity to cope with adversity. They don’t have robust mechanisms to deal with toxicity, and so the modern world with its environmental pollution and widespread pesticide use is not a healthy place for them.

In the US, honeybees are trucked across the country to provide pollination services to huge farms of one crop (California’s almond plantations being the largest) after another – spending long days on the road and never having a chance for a holiday. The increased industrialization of agriculture and urbanization means that bees diets are becoming more limited, and they are suffering nutritional stress. And we’re adding GM pollen to their diets.

Climate change is affecting bees too, with different flowering times for plant species and changing weather conditions that affect foraging bees.

What this adds up to is a complex mixture of industrialization, urbanization and globalization effects that bees simply may not be able to cope with. If honeybees die out, vast areas of agricultural land will go unpollinated – and the world will starve.

There are other pollinating insects, including thousands of bee species, but they are all suffering similar stresses from pollution, climate change and habitat loss. And they simply can’t be ‘managed’ as honeybees can (although that, in my mind, is a big plus).

Scientists are investigating many possible solutions (including anti-viral drugs and genetically modified super bees), but it seems as though there is little progress on the one thing that might make a difference – changing the way we grow our food. Adding space for wildlife back into the agricultural landscape has a huge positive effect on biodiversity, the availability of wild pollinators and the health of honeybee populations.

On a personal level, there isn’t that much we can do. You could choose to become a beekeeper (as Mel from Bean Sprouts has done), although your hives would be as much at risk of colony collapse as any other.

Or you can choose to help bees and wildlife generally, by gardening organically, planting a range of flowering plants and cutting down your carbon footprint and being more environmentally friendly.

Beyond that it’s a case of reading books like this one and badgering governments to take large scale action before it is too late. Do you really want to be hand pollinating all of your fruit and vegetable plants in 10 years time?