Colony Collapse Disorder - Organic Bees - CCD
Nagarjuna N
Thanks to CELSIAS - Craig Mackintosh
http://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/04/13/colony-collapse-disorder-a-moment-for-reflection/
Spring has sprung, and despite the frantic efforts of scientists to
uncover the secret to the disappearing bees, no one has raised their
hand to give us a definitive cause, let alone a tentative solution.
The CBS report above begins, and ends, with a ridiculous statement -
but the report is semi-significant in that it's one of the few
references to Colony Collapse Disorder I've seen from the U.S.
mainstream media.
Our previous posts (here, here, and here) have been a very interesting
exercise. We've had great feedback from farmers, amateur and
professional beekeepers, scientists, and dozens of other interested/
concerned observers. In the meantime, accumulating reports tell us
that the problem is not constrained to the U.S. alone - but that, to
one degree or another, empty hives are becoming common in Germany,
Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Poland, and now possibly
the UK. Canada, so far, seems unsure if they have the problem, or not.
We've now also had unconfirmed reports from Brazil.
Personally, I believe situations like this are an opportune moment for
reflection - a time to humbly consider a few realities, and perhaps
learn a few lessons. Of significance to me is the fact that scientists
haven't got this figured out as yet. It begs the question - which is
easier, when dealing with the infinitely complex interactions of
nature: 1) predicting specific consequences to our 'tinkering' before
they occur, or 2) understanding how something happened after-the-fact?
I would have thought the latter was the easiest - you know the old
saying, "hindsight is a wonderful thing". Looking back at the results,
following the trail of clues, is a lot less challenging than
postulating over what could happen. Or, to put it into a framework
that might be better understood - if Sherlock Holmes, expert in crime
scene deductions, were to turn his attention to predicting crimes
rather than solving them, how would he have fared? Short of the kind
of psychic predictive skills seen in Minority Report-type science
fiction movies, I don't expect he'd fare so well.
What am I on about, you ask? Simply this - too many people hand
scientists the keys to the car, as it were, and bid them take it
wherever their employer wishes. Our governments do this, and too many
either encourage it, or stand by and let it happen. When the PR
departments that front these scientists portray a glorious new world
where man manages to, with perfect and meticulous coordination, juggle
all the intricacies of the natural world in one hand, whilst cashing
in on it and providing world peace and equality with the other - we
believe it. Yet, how can we have so much confidence in their ability
to read the future, when they are unable to decipher the past and
present - a task that should be a damned sight simpler, no?
As Australians are benefiting from an export boom in bees to the U.S.,
and while the best recommendations from the groups that have been
tasked with finding solutions to these problems are to advise which
chemicals to use and which not to (PDF), I will list some of the
possible causes for the present pollination crisis below (I call it a
pollination crisis here, rather than a honeybee crisis, because there
are other pollinators that would be lending us a hand - if we hadn't
driven them into exile):
Lack of diversity: This point, above all others, is a critical cause
of natural imbalance. Diversity is stability. Mono-crop farming
creates vulnerability. In fact, the dependence of our agricultural
systems on just one species of bee for pollination is a perfect
example of this vulnerability in action. In complete contrast to the
natural order, where diversity is the rule, we plant gigantic fields
of just one crop, leaving minimal borders, or 'bio-
corridors' (woodlands, shrubs, wildflowers, hedges, etc.), for
beneficial insects to take up residence, or none at all. Integrated
bio-diversity is the future of farming.
Pesticides & Herbicides: Crops (and even hedges, verges, and
woodlands, where they remain), are often sprayed with pesticides or
herbicides. These chemicals are the practical extension of an
exasperating belief that nature is our enemy. Pouring poison on our
food is a very simplistic way of dealing with our problems, and
ignores the root causes. New genetically modified crops, designed to
be immune to certain pesticides and herbicides, have resulted in the
increased usage of these chemicals (scroll down to: "New Problem:
Herbicide-Resistant Weeds in Genetically Engineered Crops" on this
page). Pesticides, particularly Bayer's imidacloprid, a nicotine-based
product marketed under the names Admire, Provado, Merit, Marathon and
Gaucho, have been concretely implicated in the destruction of bee
populations before (see also). That other bees and insects are not
raiding deserted hives to feed on the honey, as they normally would,
lends some credence to the theory of toxic overload.
GM Crops: GM Crops are widespread in the U.S., in particular, as is
unintended contamination through horizontal gene transfer. Creating
plants with built-in pesticides will kill insects. Bees, by the way,
are insects. Additionally, it is known that inserted genes can combine
in host DNA molecules to create unexpected proteins - that can be
toxic or allergenic. It is impossible to know all the implications of
how pollen from such plants will interact with the organisms they are
in contact with.
Direct Stress: Transportation, lack of natural food, and natural food
diversity, pesticides sprayed directly into hives, antibiotics and
GMOs in feed. Bees today are 'factory farmed' much in the way hens
are. We take too much of their honey, replacing it with sugary water
instead, and, like hens, stifle their instinctive habits - like
swarming. These things, and other environmental factors, can cause a
general weakening of pollinators' immune systems. The few dead bees
that have been located are often found to contain multiple pathogens
and diseases - indicative of an AIDS-like syndrome.
Varroa mites: Although some like to pin the blame on these mites, I'm
dubious, and I'm not alone: "Many bee experts assumed varroa mites
were a major cause of the severe die-off in the winter of 2005. Yet
when researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bee
Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, traveled to Oakdale,
California, where Anderson and a number of his fellow beekeepers spend
winter and spring, they could find no correlation between the level of
varroa mite infestation and the health of bee colonies. "We couldn't
pin the blame for the die-off on any single cause," says Jeff Pettis,
a research entomologist at the lab.- The Vanishing. However,
treatments against mites may be leaving hives open to the onslaught of
powerful pathogens, much in the same way the overuse of antibiotics
lead to super bugs in our hospitals.
Queen bee :
Artificial Insemination: "Rudolf Steiner gave lectures to the workers
at the Goetheanum in 1923 in Dornach, Switzerland. Among the workers
was a professional beekeeper, Mr Müller, who contributed to these
lectures in the form of insights and questions. However, Mr Müller
rebelled vehemently and showed no understanding when Steiner explained
the intricacies of the queen bee, mentioning that the modern method of
breeding queens (using the larvae of worker bees, a practice that had
already been in use for about fifteen years) would have long-term
detrimental effects, so grave that: "A century later all breeding of
bees will cease if only artificially produced bees are used (November
10). . . . It is quite correct that we can't determine this today; it
will have to be delayed until a later time. Let's talk to each other
again in one hundred years, Mr Müller, then we'll see what kind of
opinion you'll have at that point". Seventy-five years have passed and
the kind of queen breeding Steiner spoke of has not only continued,
but has become the standard, and is now supplemented with instrumental
insemination." - Gibson, commenting on Celsias
Weather : The hotter, dryer summers and wetter winters brought about
by global warming.
Mechanistic Mindsets: Last, but by no means the least, is the problem
of our mechanistic mindset - reducing an infinitely complicated world
of interactions to an overly simplistic viewpoint. This is the root
cause of several of the issues outlined above. Where, in mathematics
(adding numbers or inanimate objects) 1 + 1 = 2, in biology (i.e. the
combination of two life forms), 1 + 1 may equal 3, or a billion and
three. The term bio-engineering itself is a contradiction in terms -
they are entirely juxtaposed. 'Bio' equates to 'life'. 'Engineering'
refers to design and manufacture, a blueprint of exactness. Biological
forms (i.e. life-forms) can never be 'engineered' - i.e. predictably
controlled or manipulated. Unlike a sheet of metal that can be
machined with consistent results, organisms in natural systems are
ever changing and adjusting. This makes 'bio-engineering', in the best-
case scenario, a futile exercise and an enormous misallocation of
human and environmental resources, and, in the worse case scenario, an
ecological catastrophe with no chance for a product recall.
Navigational Hindrances: There was also a miscontrued study on
cellphone radiation and its effects on the bees ability to navigate -
which turned out to be an over-zealous knee-jerk reaction by The
Independent (see more on this here). Some have also mentioned other
navigational hindrances such as UV radiation, shifting magnetic fields
and even quantum physics.
Researchers are desperately seeking the 'cause' of colony collapse
disorder. The reductionist mindset would be tempted to pull a single
root cause out from amongst those above, but, I would propose that the
items listed above, in combination, constitute a great load on the
camel's back - with one or two of the above being the final straw that
broke it.
And, again, when considering the plight of the bee - let's remove our
blinders, and look around a little more. How are other creatures (some
of them also pollinators, like butterflies and birds) being affected
by our pesticides, our mechanisation, and our specialist systems? We
focus on the honeybee only because of its direct and immediate threat
to our livelihoods, and indeed our food supply - but, there's a whole
other world out there that's suffering under our (mis)management.
We're just not paying attention.
Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives just two weeks ago,
the head of the Illinois Department of Entomology had this to say:
It is an unfortunate consequence of benign indifference to the
precarious nature of an overwhelming reliance on a single species that
few alternative actively managed species are currently available for
use. And despite evidence of their efficacy as crop pollinators, wild
species are not being exploited to any significant extent. While
efforts to monitor honey bees are inadequate, efforts to monitor the
status of wild pollinators in North America are essentially non
existent.... There is reliable evidence that some North American
pollinator species have gone extinct, become locally extirpated, or
have declined in number. At least two bumble bee species, one of which
is a crop pollinator, could face imminent extinction, and several
other pollinators have declined significantly. For some species, there
is no evidence of population decline because their populations have
never been monitored over time; there is seldom a historical baseline
with which contemporary data can be compared.
The committee noted that, while systematic, thorough monitoring
programs in Europe have revealed dramatic declines in native
pollinator abundance and diversity, there are no comparable North
American programs....
... Beyond agriculture, pollinators are crucial to maintaining the
quality of American life. They serve as keystone species in most
terrestrial ecosystems in that the services they provide allow most
plants to reproduce and maintain genetic diversity. These plants in
turn provide food and shelter for animals; fruits and seeds produced
by insect pollination are a major part of the diet of approximately 25
percent of birds and of mammals ranging from red-backed voles to
grizzly bears. In some areas, pollinator-supported plant communities
prevent erosion by binding the soil-thereby conserving an important
resource and keeping creeks clean for aquatic life.
Phalanxes of economists devote many hours to estimating and
calculating our energy reserves but there has been no comparable
effort to calculate our pollination reserves. Human technological
innovation has not, in most cases, replaced or even improved upon
animal pollinators and is unlikely to do so in the immediate future.
"The birds and the bees" remain an essential fact of life; as long as
plants depend on pollinators, so will people and it behooves us to
shepherd them wisely. - Colony Collapse Disorder and Pollinator
Decline, Statement of May R. Berenbaum, Professor and Head, Department
of Entomology University of Illinois before the Subcommittee on
Horticulture and Organic Agriculture Committee on Agriculture, U.S.
House of Representatives, March 29, 2007
If enough spokes in a wheel get bent or broken, the wheel will
eventually collapse (there's that word again). From appearances, at
the moment, the livelihoods of beekeepers, farmers and agricultural
industries are the immediate concern (estimates of 15 billion dollars
worth of agricultural produce is at risk in the U.S. alone), but even
this will become inconsequential if the problem progresses into a
biological meltdown. Insects, plants and animals, are all
interdependent, and we rely on them (despite popular belief, and
contrary to the PR broadcasts of the chemical companies). If
pollinators are indicators of the health of our environment - our
current canary-in-the-cage, so to speak - then isn't it time we moved
to safety ?
Nagarjuna N
the many organic beekeepers that have been commenting on our posts,
but there have been several reports of organic bee colonies surviving
where the 'industrial' bee colonies are collapsing. Here is the latest
to come to my attention:
Pollination, as practised for 1000s of years?
Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time
organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island.... In a widely circulated
email, she wrote:
I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly
Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including
commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The
problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in
their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to
the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make
more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.
Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site, where Michael
Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on
the top page:
Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to
say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the
winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting
or better ways to feed the bees.
This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to
natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a
long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees
than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of
natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people
use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you
translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee
that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees
build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and
Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by
one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less
Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.
Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us
that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax
into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef
industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem?
Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world
at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action
in dealing with this issue?
These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held
opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems
to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering
agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been
crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast
approaching this limit for some time.
We've been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate
professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in
Ontario, told the CBC. And we're starving them out by feeding them
artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress
commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by
parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or
pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's all of the
above... - InformationLiberation
That's funny - that's just what I said...
Let's hear it for the natural/organic beekeepers out there! I hope
this CCD incident will reinforce that natural systems respond far
better to imitation and cooperation than reductionist arbitrary
control. Work within the system, observe and learn. There's a lot more
to nature than meets the eye, or the microscope.
On May 17, 2:06 pm, Nagarjuna N <nagarjuna1...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Colony Collapse Disorder - CCD - Organic Bees
> Thanks to CELSIAS - Craig Mackintoshhttp://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/04/13/colony-collapse-disorder-a-mom...