Fear of a Bee Planet

It turns out that it might not be Africanized honeybees we need to be afraid of; maybe we should be worried about the Americanized kind.

I read an article yesterday in the latest issue of Discover that discussed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, the mysterious die-off and disappearance of honeybees sweeping North America for the past decade or so. For years the causes of CCD were unknown; everything from mites to air pollution to global warming was blamed, but nothing seemed conclusive. The issue came to the national fore when, in true capitalist fashion, a monetary value was ascribed to the dying bees: worldwide honeybees are responsible for pollinating a vast amount of agricultural crops. In fact, pollination is of such importance to American farms and orchards that an entire industry of honeybee pollination has grown from niche service to big business. And apparently, that's the root of the problem.

It seems that what's causing CCD and killing honeybees is basically what's killing Americans too, a lifestyle built around profit, monoculture, monotony, and slavish devotion to industry. Consider an average industrial bee-keeping outfit. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of hives are shipped around together on flatbed trucks, moved from orchard to orchard as the season progresses, used as an agricultural tool more than a living agent. The bees, which have been genetically selected and managed by their keepers, are fed through the winter months on corn syrup, pumped into their hives via gasoline nozzles. And we wonder just what could possibly go wrong...

What CCD seems to be, at least among commercial honeybees, is simply this industrialized lifestyle finally catching up with the little buzzers. The stress placed on these utility bees is immense; trucked around on a whim, left to find their home amongst hundreds of identical hives, the bees natural homing instincts are pushed to the limit. How can you perform a waggle dance when the last blossom you visited was two hundred miles away, the day before? Another problem with this lifestyle is nutritional. Under ordinary circumstances, bees visit a myriad of flowers, each of which has pollen with its own trace minerals and proteins. But when a hive is brought in to specifically pollinate a cherry or apple orchard, the bees feed on that type of pollen and that type of pollen alone, often for months at a time. And in the winter months, corn syrup alone sustains the bees, giving them the energy needed to survive perhaps, but offering little else. It'd sort of be like a person trying to live exclusively off Big Macs and Coke. Sound familiar?

So ultimately, what's responsible for colony collapse disorder? Well, we are. In turning honeybees into cogs in the industrialized agriculture system, in trying to get them to live like we do, overworked and unhealthily, we push them to ruin. There's no great mystery, so 'smoking mite' to ascribe blame to. The bees are disappearing because nothing in the natural world can survive the American way. Maybe we should all pay attention.