Why Dead Honeybees Means the Beginning of the Apocalypse
Learn why bees are dying off, how this affects your food supply, and what you can do about it before it’s too late.
Lee Falin, PhD
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Why Dead Honeybees Means the Beginning of the Apocalypse
Prior to moving to England, I was a beekeeper for a few years. When I took my “Intro to Beekeeping” course at the local college, there was a lot of concern about bees dying off. The big threat to bees at the time was a little mite called Varroa destructor (one could expect trouble from a bug with that kind of name). Recent research has shown that Varroa mites are only part of a larger problem called colony collapse disorder, wherein entire colonies of bees suddenly die off for unknown reasons. If you’re thinking, “Meh, good riddance. I don’t like bees anyway,” you’d better think again. Because if the bees go, we all go.;
The End of the World as We Know It
Would we really die if bees died off? Maybe you wouldn’t die, but you sure would be hungry. Bees are the pollinators for an enormous list of foods. Apples, almonds, pears, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and many other fruits are all pollinated by bees.
“That’s okay,” you think, “I don’t really like fruits or nuts anyway, I’d rather have a nice candy bar.” Well too bad for you. While they aren’t the primary pollinators, bees are major contributors to the pollination of cocoa, vanilla, and coconut. Without bees, the yields of these crops would be extremely low, making the raw ingredients of most candy bars extremely scarce. And you might remember from your basic economics class that when a lot of people what something that is scarce, prices tend to go way up.
Mighty Mites
So what’s behind colony collapse disorder (CCD)? For a long time, researchers were looking for a single cause of CCD, something that could easily be fixed. Now they’re starting to realize that CCD is most likely caused by several different things, a perfect storm of bee killing effects, that result in entire colonies of bees disappearing.
Mites are a big (figuratively speaking) part of the problem. The Varroa mite, sometimes called the bee vampire mite, reproduces inside beehives and survives by sucking on the bees’ equivalent of blood. During this process, the mites spread various viruses to the honeybee larvae which can result in them dying off completely, or being born with deformities that prevent them from flying or gathering pollen.
Various methods have been developed over the years to combat the mites, including modifying the way hives are built to make it more difficult for mites to stay in the hive, using chemicals to kill of the mites, and breeding bees that are genetically resistant to the viruses transmitted by Varroa mites.
See Also: What Is Interspecies Breeding?
“Hygienic” bee breeds that have a special sensitivity to mites have also been developed. When they detect a larvae infected with the mite, they kick it out of the hive completely in a show of family solidarity. (The next time you get the flu, be thankful that your family aren’t as hygienic as bees).
Pesky Pesticides
Another problem for honeybees are pesticides. While technically considered “safe” for honeybees because the pesticides don’t kill the bees, recent research has found that many of the pesticides in use by farmers today act as neurotoxins to the bees, causing them to forget how to get back to the hive, forget how to forage, and basically fly off into the great wide unknown, never to be seen again. Since mysteriously disappearing bees is one of the main symptoms of CCD, this has led many scientists to raise warnings against the widespread use of these types of pesticides.
See Also: Which Foods Are Highest in Pesticides?
Even Bees Need to Eat Right
Another problem facing bees, and possibly contributing to CCD, is malnutrition. This can be caused by extremely bad winters, and by bad beekeeping. As colonies become more scarce, renting beehives to farmers has become an extremely lucrative business. Unfortunately, this usually involves loading the bees up into tractor trailers and shipping them across the country.
As anyone who has ever traveled extensively could sympathize with, honeybees don’t exactly like being forced to travel. Research has shown that forcing honeybees to travel across several time zones, and then introducing them to vast acres of farmland with only a single crop, tends to compromise their immune systems and cause malnutrition, which can lead to CCD.
Conclusion
So now that you know what problems are facing bees, and how it can affect you, what can you do about it? The biggest thing is to help raise awareness of the problem and the effects it will have on human life. You can write to your government leaders and ask for more testing and regulation be put in place to protect bees from harmful pesticides. You can also “vote with your wallet” and purchase foods from suppliers that practice bee-friendly farming.
But one of the biggest things you can do is to become a beekeeper yourself. It’s easier than you think, and funding is often available to help you get started. Contact your local agricultural extension agent for more details.
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Bee image from Shutterstock
