The Plight of the Honeybee

Mass deaths in bee colonies may mean disaster for farmers--and your favorite foods

By Bryan Walsh, Aug. 19, 2013

(edited)

You can thank the Apis Mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee, for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you'll eat today.

Around 2006, commercial beekeepers began noticing something disturbing: their honeybees were disappearing.

Beekeepers would open their hives and find them full of honeycomb, wax, even honey--but devoid of actual bees. Seven years later, honeybees are still dying on a scale rarely seen before.

"The take-home message is that we are very close to the edge," says Jeff Pettis, the research leader at the USDA's Bee Research Laboratory. "It's a roll of the dice now."

Agricultural pesticides were an obvious suspect-- specifically a popular new class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids.

Beekeeper Jim Doan is involved in a lawsuit with other beekeepers and with green groups (laurel writes: including SIERRA CLUB) that calls on the EPA to suspend a pair of pesticides in the neonicotinoid class.

The (neonics) are known as systematics, which means that seeds are soaked in them before they're planted. Traces of the chemicals are eventually passed on to every part of the mature plant--including the pollen and nectar a bee might come into contact with--and can remain for much longer than other pesticides do.

There's really no way to prevent bees from being exposed to some level of neonicotinoids if the pesticides have been used nearby.

Studies have shown that neonicotinoids attack their nervous system, interfering with their flying and navigation abilities without killing them immediately.

"The scientific literature is exploding now with work on sublethal impacts on bees," says James Frazier, an entomologist at Penn State University. The delayed but cumulative effects of repeated exposure might explain why colonies keep dying off year after year despite beekeepers' best efforts. It's as if the bees were being

poisoned very slowly.

The widespread adoption of these pesticides roughly corresponds to the spike in colony loss.

Best of all, if the problem is neonicotinoids, the solution is simple: ban them.

That's what the European Commission decided to do this year, putting a two-year restriction on the use of some neonicotinoids.

But while the EPA is planning to review neonicotinoids, a ban is unlikely.

Since 2006 an estimated 10 million beehives have been lost, at a cost of some $2 billion.

As valuable as honeybees are, the food system wouldn't collapse without them. The backbone of the world's diet--grains like corn, wheat and rice--is self-pollinating. But our dinner plates would be far less colorful, not to mention far less nutritious, without blueberries, cherries, watermelons, lettuce and the scores of other plants that would be challenging to raise commercially without honeybee pollination.

LAUREL WRITES: Most of these "coated" crops are genetically manipulated.

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