Vanishing wild bees will sting ecosystem
Richard Moore
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/289362
Vanishing wild bees will sting ecosystem
December 29, 2007
CAMERON SMITH
This is a darkening time for the world. I want to explain why in this column, but I also want to point to the effort of one family in Norfolk County that is trying to keep open one tiny speck of light.
They can't hold back the darkness by themselves. But they're doing what they can, and if others do the same, well, that's how a ray of hope develops.
There's a darkening because, with global warming, things are starting to get out of joint in nature.
For instance in Holland, the food chain is being disrupted around Great Tits, small birds with black and white heads and pale yellow breasts with a black stripe. They lay their eggs at the same time each year and feed their nestlings with winter moth caterpillars. The caterpillars eat newly sprouted oak leaves that have not yet acquired tannin. However, spring temperatures have risen and both the caterpillars and the oak leaves appear earlier, but at different times and this limits the food supply for both the nestlings and the caterpillars.
There are similar stories of a growing mismatch almost everywhere. It raises concern that as warming progresses, mismatches will become greater and more lethal.
In North America, the most serious situation may be with managed bees that are used for pollinating farm crops. In the last two or three years they have been disappearing by the hundreds of millions. In addition, up to 90 per cent of wild bees have disappeared. No one knows exactly why.
There are many single-cause theories for their disappearance: They are being killed by pesticides, by viral diseases carried by mites, by fungi, by electromagnetic radiation, by genetically modified plants, by so many medicinal antidotes that their immune systems are compromised, by sterile pollen, by stress.
However, in a provocative paper delivered in New Orleans in October, professor Peter Harries-Jones of York University in Toronto called on scientists to broaden their perspectives. Start looking at behaviour in ecosystems instead of searching for a single cause-and-effect culprit, he urged.
Prominent among the impacts experienced by bees, but not adequately studied, is global warming, he said, pointing out that in Baltimore, pollen and nectar are produced almost a month earlier than they were in the 1970s. This, for bees, has been a life-altering change.
But it may be coming on top of other life-altering changes. There's a suspicion, he said, that global warming may be causing some plants to produce sterile pollen. It's known that sterile pollen can result if temperatures are unusually hot when flower buds and pollen grains are forming. And if sterile pollen is a factor, Harries-Jones asks, when will mapping of ecosystem interactions begin?
Never forget, he warned, that ecosystems are intricate and complex networks, held together by "communicative interaction," and that timing is crucial to their functioning for instance, in the way one flowering plant blooms after another, so there is always a food supply for pollinators.
Global warming threatens these networks, he said. It changes timing cycles. It disconnects interactions.
In the face of the legion of changes precipitated by global warming, plus impacts from all the single cause-and-effect culprits, bees are reacting by leaving their hives and going off to die.
In the view of Harries-Jones, bees are offering a wake-up call to the possibility that global warming could unravel networks and lead to ecosystem collapse much sooner than collapse would occur because of drought or flooding, or some of its other physical effects.
In a small but important way, Bryan and Cathy Gilvesy are heeding this call without having specifically heard it.
They've noticed there are fewer bees on their Y U Ranch in Norfolk County, where they raise Texas Longhorn cattle so they are taking steps to create a stable food supply for wild bees.
They are part of an Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) pilot project, and are being paid a small sum to turn part of their land over to conservation.
The initiative got them thinking about bees, and so they planted two types of native clover and trefoil at the edge of a field. It was successful, and next spring they plan to expand the planting.
Wild bees are often solitary, Bryan says, and will nest in knotholes on old fence lines, and in dead trees. If they have reliable habitat, he hopes they will thrive. He speaks of bees with something approaching affection, recognizing the work they do pollinating farm crops.
But there's something more.
He and Cathy simply care about other living things and that's where you find the real beginnings of a ray of hope.
Cameron Smith can be reached at cams...@kingston.net
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