I was fortunate to grow up in a place and time when honeybees were healthier, when I could walk into the bee yard certain I’d find life inside the hives.
But by and large, the world has turned against the honeybee since the days of the honey bus. Grandpa’s prediction in the seventies of a widespread bee decline has come to pass, and the news is churning with apocalyptic stories of massive food shortages as we try to imagine a hungry planet without bees. I wish it were hyperbole, but when more than one-third of global crop production is dependent, wholly or in part, on bee pollination, it’s hard to ignore.
What went wrong?
Honeybees thrived for fifty million years, but began to decline shortly after World War II, not long after farmers began using synthetic fertilizers instead of flowering clover and alfalfa cover crops to add nitrogen to their soil. Bee colonies took a dive from four and a half million colonies in the United States to just under three million today.
But commercial beekeepers in the United States first reported something was uniquely wrong in 2006, when they opened their hives after the winter frost expecting to see the usual—that most colonies had survived and about 15 percent had succumbed to cold or hunger and perished in a pile on the bottom board. But instead they found a mass exodus, anywhere from 30 to 90 percent of their colonies vanished from seemingly robust hives. Beekeepers had never seen anything like this before—healthy hives one day, and then ghost towns the next. Overnight, worker bees deserted hives brimming with honey and new generations in the nursery, leaving behind one stunned, unattended queen and only a smattering of hungry, lethargic newborns that had not yet learned to fly or feed themselves.
Funding poured into national labs, where entomologists raced to figure out what was happening. Emergency hearings were assembled as beekeeper after beekeeper told the same devastating story of sudden financial ruin. Beekeepers in Europe chimed in, saying their hives had been collapsing, too. In China, bee losses were so bad in some places that farmers had begun hiring people to pollinate crops by hand, spreading pollen to flowers with small paintbrushes.
This inexplicable catastrophe was given a clinical sounding name that implied the authority of a known cause but had none—Colony Collapse Disorder.
Scientists, beekeepers and activists have since offered a wide range of theories, blaming pesticides or fungicides, migratory beekeeping practices, the parasitic Varroa destructor mite, climate change, habitat loss, monoculture and various honeybee pathogens. While there is some promising research suggesting ways to boost honeybee immunity to withstand these threats, there’s still no consensus on what’s causing wholesale colony failure.
Europe has aggressively targeted neonicotinoids, a specific family of insecticides developed in the 1990s, commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting. Designed with a similar chemical structure to nicotine, the synthetic toxins are absorbed by the growing plant and affect the nervous systems of small insects, leading many researchers to conclude they disrupt a honeybee’s ability to navigate back home. The European Union has experimented with a temporary two-year ban on neonicotinoids for flowering crops that attract bees, and a handful of states in the US no longer sell products containing neonicotinoids.
Results of these efforts are still being debated, with some pushing for a permanent ban and others arguing the experiments are inconclusive, wrongheaded, or worse for bees because they force farmers to switch to nonflowering crops or older, more toxic sprays.
Meanwhile, the bees are still struggling. While there has been a slight improvement in beehive survival since the shock of 2006, beekeepers continue to report to the United States Department of Agriculture that they are losing nearly one-third of their hives each year, a rate that is unsustainable over time even for a species that can multiply quickly.
Today, reports of colony collapse are just as inexplicably waning, and instead what a growing number of beekeepers say is killing their bees is not a mystery malady, but the parasitic Varroa destructor mite, a dark red creature no bigger than the head of a pin that attaches itself and sucks the body fluids of bee larvae and adult bees. They pass viruses to the bees that wreak havoc on the bee’s ability to walk and fly, weaken its immune system and cause deformities such as wrinkled, useless wings.
Since Varroa destructor first appeared in the United States in 1987, the mites have continually developed resistance to the various organic and chemical methods designed to kill them. They can overtake a colony in days, multiplying exponentially each time a female mite enters a honeybee brood cell and lays eggs on the larva. The young mites are timed to hatch when the sickened bee emerges from the cell, unleashing a population explosion.
There’s no easy answer to why bees are dying, but what’s clear is that modern life has become increasingly stressful for honeybees, leading some in the beekeeping community to rename the epidemic Multiple Stressor Disorder.
I believe Grandpa was onto something when he predicted a man-made honeybee die-off. We are the ones who paved over the wildflower meadows. We are the ones who took bees out of their habitat and forced them to migrate on semis. We replaced small, diverse farms with mono-crops, and then sprayed chemicals on the plants and trees we forced the bees to pollinate. The bees aren’t to blame for overpopulation, factory farming, or lengthening droughts that dry out their flowers. But like the canary in the coal mine, they are dropping first. We have weakened the bees to the point they can no longer defend themselves against Varroa destructor and a host of newer diseases such as Nosema gut pathogen and the Slow Bee Paralysis virus.
It’s death by a thousand cuts for the bees. But what to do? People have to eat, so crops need to be pollinated. Birds, butterflies, bats, moths and ants pollinate, too, but can’t possibly cover the millions of acres of produce the way honeybees can. Farmers need bees, but the paradox is that maybe we need them too much. We are squeezing the very lifeblood out of them to keep ourselves fed, and our farms profitable.
But we are also the ones who can use our ingenuity to help the honeybees live closer to the way nature intended. Lucky for us, bees are incredibly resilient and, if kept healthy, can propagate quickly. Across the globe, entomologists are working to breed hygienic, mite-resistant bees. Others are experimenting with mushroom teas to boost honeybee immunity. Citizen scientists are collecting hive data and helping keep track of bee populations. Gardeners are restoring landscapes with pollinator-friendly native plants. Farmers are switching to organic crops, and pushing the demand for nontoxic pesticides.
There’s a growing consensus that we each have to do our own small act, whether it’s seeding the roadsides with flowering plants, starting backyard hives of our own, or breaking up the food desert by planting flowering borders around mono-crops.
It’s the principle of the hive—if each of us does our small part, it could add up to a bigger whole.
I owe Grandpa at least that much—to try.
And I owe it to the bees.
As long as honeybees stay strong, they can continue to pass their ancient wisdom to the next generation, so children can learn that even when they are overwhelmed with despair, nature has special ways to keep them safe.
My personality was shaped by the life lessons I learned in a bee yard. Every child should have that same opportunity to grow.