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Bee Not AfraidThe disappearance of the honeybees isn't the end of the world.

By Heather Smith
Posted Friday, July 13, 2007, at 3:55 PM ET

When the honeybees disappeared this winter, the thought of losing such a fuzzy and adorable animal inspired dismay. The fact that bees might also be useful drove us to despair. The first official reports of "colony collapse disorder" began to surface in October of 2006; seven months later, USDA officials were calling CCD "the biggest general threat to our food supply," and newspaper columnists nervously joked about the impending "bloody wars not for oil or land or God but over asparagus and avocados." Experts pointed to the $14.6 billion worth of free labor honeybees provide every year, pollinating our crops. With a full quarter of them AWOL, presumed dead, who would make sweet love to the $1.6 billion California almond harvest? More precisely, who would help the almond harvest make sweet love to itself?

Few people realized that the honeybee apocalypse was already over. We may continue to associate them with childhood sugar rushes and chubby-cheeked fertility metaphors, but in real life honeybees have been virtually extinct in North America for more than 10 years, their absence concealed by a rogue's gallery of look-alikes. The stragglers have been kept alive only by the continued ministrations of the agricultural giga-industry that needs them.

It used to be that it was hard to eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich without a honeybee showing up and doing a little dance around your head. Hives (literally) grew on trees until 1987, when a mite called Varroa destructor turned up in a honeybee colony in Wisconsin. Even for a parasite, varroa is less than charming. It looks like a microscopic baked bean, with sharp fangs used to slurp tiny droplets of blood from the abdomens of unsuspecting honeybees. Since these bites also transmit disease, like deformed wing virus and acute bee paralysis virus, an infested colony is kaput within four years. By 1994, an estimated 98 percent of the wild, free-range honeybees in the United States were gone. The number of managed colonies—those maintained by beekeepers—dropped by half.

The honeybees may have been especially vulnerable to the varroa epidemic. When the honeybee genome was sequenced a few years ago, researchers discovered fewer immune-system genes than you'd find in other insects. This despite the fact that the honeybee lives in tenementlike conditions, anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 of them crammed into a hive the size of a filing cabinet. To make matters worse, a weakened hive often becomes the target of honey-raiders from healthier colonies, which only helps the parasites to spread.

It's possible that if the American honeybees had been left to their own devices, they would have died off in epic numbers and then evolved natural defenses against varroa (like more effective grooming), as they did in Asia. But crops had to be pollinated and no one had the time to sit around and wait.

Beekeepers opted to keep their colonies on life support with selective breeding, and by sprinkling them with medicine and insecticides aimed at the invading mites. This was no longer a hobby for amateurs. The only honeybees left—i.e., the ones that started disappearing in October—had become the cows of the insect world: virtually extinct in the wild, hopped up on antibiotics, and more likely to reproduce via artificial insemination than by their own recognizance.

If anything, it's impressive that the honeybee has hung on in America for as long as it has. The commercial hives spend half the year sealed and stacked in the back of 18-wheelers, as they're schlepped down miles of interstate to pollinate crops around the country. During this time, they get pumped up with high fructose corn syrup, which keeps the bees buzzing and lively, but it's no pollen. And if a bee happens to get sick on the road, it can't self-quarantine by flying away from the colony to die. (In the wild, a bee rarely dies in the hive.) Add to the above the reduced genetic diversity resulting from the die-offs in the 1990s, and you have an insect living in a very precarious situation—where a new pathogen, even a mild one, could spell honeybee doom.

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Heather Smith (e-mail) is a writer living in San Francisco.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Just the end of a world. A creature that worked like the dickens because that's just what it did to fit into the natural world, being replaced by legions of slave bees worked virtually to death by professional bee keepers, trucked all night to new fields every day, unrelated to the natural rhythms of its life, killed off by the millions just to be replaced by another factory produced batch.

Hmmm, ask not for whom the bee bell toils......

It toils for thee.

--doodahman

(To reply, click here.)

I've kept my one hobby hive find for a few years now with no insecticide, no corn syrup, just serve-yourself flowers. I've heard organic beekeepers are not suffering from CCD.

The mites came from Asia, and like measles or smallpox introduced into a new population, they are devastating until the populations come into balance and develop some resistance; that's been happening for some years now. Varroa are no longer certain doom (I have a sticky board and keep catching a few varroa mites, but it has never got bad - maybe I haven't hit this 4-year rule). Certainly nothing was "over" for bees that I heard of when I started researching prior to getting my bees. Beekeeping is alive and well in Oregon.

Anything buzzing around your peanut butter and jelly was probably a yellow jacket, I've never seen a honeybee (or bumble or ground or mason bee) do that.

--LisaInOregon

(To reply, click here.)

The title of the honeybee article, as well as its tone, seems to suggest that the author has concluded that the disappearance of the honeybee from North America is unimportant and trivial.

I fully expect to witness this attitude applied to every extinction that occurs, right up until the moment that people realize humans are next. Come on, be serious - where else is this going except faster and faster towards the demise of our OWN species?

--pixie superhero

(To reply, click here.)

(7/15)

Washington Post
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