About 130 million years ago during the early Cretaceous period, something rather unexpected
happened.
A flower bloomed.
This was undoubtedly awkward for the plant involved.
Nobody had ever seen a flower before.
The plants all around it were mosses and seed-bearing pines, cycads and ferns.
They probably called the floral shrub names and made jokes about the length of its stamen.
You know how cruel plants can be.
Exactly why and how this happened is not entirely clear.
Looking totally different from any other vegetation of the time and with no obvious evolutionary
ancestors, the emergence of flowering plants remains a botanical conundrum to this day.
In 1879, a grumpy Charles Darwin called it an “abominable mystery.”
What bugged him was that flowering plants, collectively known as angiosperms, quite inconveniently
didn’t follow his theory of gradual evolution.
Like hip hop artists in the 1970s, they appeared to have arrived from nowhere and then grown
quickly in volume and diversity.
In just a hundred million years, flowering plants have conquered almost every habitat
on earth, today accounting for 9 out of every 10 plant species on the planet.
They have redefined the natural landscape and formed the foundation of new ecosystems.
And without them, we’d all be on the Atkins diet.
Recently published research suggests Darwin was fretting over nothing: angiosperms quite
possibly evolved progressively and over a suitably long period of time, though their
relative fragility makes finding them in the fossil record harder than it is compared to,
say, dinosaurs, who let’s face it could have stood to lose a few pounds.
Still, amgiosperms’ eventual total dominance of the plant kingdom remains one of nature’s
great success stories.
But let’s not hype flowers too much - they couldn’t have achieved this triumph on their
own.
All the angiosperm in the world is useless to you if you can’t even stroll over to
another plant and buy her a drink.
No, flowering plants need help to reproduce, and no-one has facilitated more plant-on-plant
action than the humble bee.
Fossilised nests of bee or wasp-like creatures found in the Petrified Forest of Arizona date
back around 220 million years, before flowers existed in the form we know today.
But scientists think that, back then, there probably wasn’t much of a buzz between the
blossoms and the bees.
Flowers were pretty ugly and bees only went for cheerleaders.
But at some stage plants appear to have realised they were missing a trick.
Flowers began to evolve to be more attractive to flying insects, especially bees.
90 to 100 million years ago they developed petals and started competing with each other
to lure the most pollinators, a process believed to be partially responsible for their rapid
diversification and colonisation of the earth.
In response, bees changed their shape, structure, and behaviour to optimise their access to
pollen and nectar.
It’s a famous story of co-evolution that has seen flowers and bees live in mutually-beneficial
harmony for millions of years.
Until recently, that is.
Because the world’s bees are dying, and nobody knows exactly why.
In mid-November 2006, American beekeeper Dave Hackenberg made a discovery that would shake
the beekeeping world.
In a routine inspection of his 2400 hives, he found 400 of them totally abandoned.
The bees were gone.
Not dead, gone.
Like little buzzy ghosts.
By February 2007, several large beekeeping operations in the US had reported similar
cases, with some losing as many as 90% of their colonies.
Similar disappearances had happened throughout the history of beekeeping, also known as apiculture,
with the first recorded case dating back to 1869.
The phenomenon has been called by many names over the years, including “disappearing
disease”, “May disease” or “Spring Dwindle”.
But what took place in 2006 was unprecedented in its scale.
So, they gave it a new name: Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.
The original name was going to be Colony Upheaval and neutralisation Tragedies, but then someone
pointed out that the acronym was rather problematic.
What’s really strange about CUN - I mean CCD is that there weren’t any dead bees
left behind, just empty hives.
It’s as if one morning a lone worker bee said, “Screw this, we work too hard.
I’m going to Mexico.”
And after some furious waggle-dancing 80 000 bees followed him.
Some newspapers started referring to it as the Bee Rapture, while in the UK they called
it Mary Celeste syndrome after the merchant ship discovered off the Azores in 1872 with
not a single passenger aboard - I’ll be covering that story in an upcoming video,
by the way – subscribe so you don’t miss it.
For approximately the next nine years, CCD claimed about a third of all bee colonies
in the United States every year, without anyone being able to work out exactly why.
And then it just… stopped.
We’re not really sure why that happened either - do we actually know anything? - but
for about the last five years we haven’t seen that particular set of issues, or at
least not to anywhere near the same extent.
Good news, right?
Unfortunately not.
Bee populations have continued to nosedive, with more than 30% of tracked American honey
bee colonies dying off every year for the last decade or so, up to around 40% last year
and the year before.
But it’s not only the US who are experiencing this - it’s a global trend.
Hanyuan county in China's Sichuan province is known as the pear capital of the world,
but with local bee numbers in steep decline, the annual pollination needed to ensure a
full crop of fruit is now done mostly by hand, one flower at a time.
And in Germany, a decades-long study of protected nature reserves found that 75% of flying insects
in these areas have died over the last 30 years or so.
Some scientists suggest that this is all part of a wider mass extinction event in which
the majority of the planet’s species will die off.
This has happened five times before that we’re aware of, and we could be witnessing the 6th
right now.
After all, populations of animals all over the planet are declining so rapidly that researchers
say we’re in a process of "biological annihilation."
That might seem hard to believe, but only because when people say “endangered animal”
you probably automatically think of some of the big ticket beasties like tigers and rhinos..
But insects make up around 90% of all species of animals on the planet, and more than half
of all living things.
There are approximately 1.4 billion insects for every human on earth, but around the world
that ratio is rapidly declining.
The obvious question is, “Why should you care?”
Nobody likes insects anyway, right?
Especially ones like bees that can fight back when you piss them off.
But insects, and particularly the bee, are crucial to human survival.
Besides the honey bee, there are actually 25 to 30 000 different bee species, and they
could all be suffering too.
That matters because without them we wouldn’t have most of the food we eat on a daily basis.
Remember the flowering plants I mentioned earlier?
They include the fruit, vegetables and crops that make up the bulk of our natural diet,
and they’re all pollinated by bees and other insects.
According to the UN, up to 75% of world food crops depend on bees and other pollinators
in some way, while one international study estimates the annual global food production
that depends on pollinators is worth half a trillion dollars.
Without insects, but especially bees, our food system wouldn’t necessarily collapse,
but many more people would go hungry.
We would still be able to grow staples like grain and cereals which are pollinated by
the wind, but fruits and vegetables would be unavailable or unaffordable At a minimum
you would lose access to good nutrition and most of the stuff that you like to eat.
Unless you’re super rich you’d probably have to start familiarising yourself with
the symptoms of scurvy, and you likely wouldn’t be able to get your hands on coffee.
I’ll let that one sink in for a moment.
No.
Coffee.
Beyond our human concerns, if all the bees died off the ripple effects would be felt
throughout most major natural ecosystems.
Without pollinators there would be fewer plants, which would ultimately mean less food for
most of earth’s animal species and more extinctions of all kinds.
Basically, an armageddon of the natural world.
It’s a pretty bleak picture, so how do we stop it from happening?
First step, of course, is to understand the problem.
Easier said than done, since this is a complex issue with many moving parts.
And no, it’s not, as some have suggested, caused by cellphones, electromagnetic radiation,
a Russian mind control experiment, or aliens - aliens really do get blamed for a lot of
stuff don’t they?
It’s no wonder they never visit.
But scientists have identified a number of things that could be impacting the populations
of all insect pollinators.
Perhaps the most obvious candidate is climate change, which impacts all ecosystems, but
there isn’t yet much evidence to directly link climate change to insect die-off.
Another concern is habitat destruction.
Humans have a nasty tendency of taking over natural environments to build things like
car parks, shopping malls, and starbucks outlets, leaving less room for other species to live
and grow.
Strongly related to this is modern agriculture, which sees increasing areas of land, usually
forests, being cleared and repurposed to grow food.
In the last 50 years, the human population has nearly doubled while the average calories
consumed per person has increased by about 30%, so the theory goes that we need more
land to grow more food.
There’s a lot of debate about that particular point, not least because a lot of the food
we grow is being fed to animals, not people.
About a third of all arable land, in fact, is used to grow crops that feed livestock.
But we’ll save that debate for another time.
Climate change and habitat destruction can partly account for declining populations of
wild animals, but they don’t sufficiently explain why so many commercial and domestic
honey bees are dying too.
To understand that we need to consider the three Ps: pesticides, poor nutrition, and
parasites.
To increase size and reliability of yields, commercial farming relies heavily on the use
of pesticides and insecticides.
It stands to reason that bees, being insects, do not react particularly well to these substances,
but some are worse than others.
A relatively new class of insecticides, neonicotinoids, are used widely in agriculture today and may
be outright deadly to bees, short-circuiting their memory and navigation.
As the name implies, these chemicals have an unintentional nicotine-like addicting effect
on the bees, causing them to repeatedly come back for more.
Other pesticides have less lethal effects, but they work to weaken bees’ immune systems,
making them more susceptible to disease and parasites.
Making matters worse is a mass drop in the quality of bee nutrition.
Left to its own devices, your average honey bee would spend its day humming show tunes
and flitting from flower to flower, drinking nectar and collecting pollen.
Then it would fly home to its hive, where the nectar would be converted into honey,
and the pollen would be used as a protein food source in the form of bee bread.
In this scenario, a bee might visit hundreds of different flowers from different plants
every day, enjoying a diverse diet in the process.
However, modern farming methods tend to favour monoculture, the practice of planting massive
areas of land with a single type of plant.
At its worst, this might be thousands of hectares of farm land planted with commercial crops
like soy or corn, which aren’t pollinated by insects.
To a bee that’s the equivalent of an empty supermarket.
A food desert that will effectively lead to starvation.
Monocultures of flowering crops aren’t much better, though.
California produces 80% of the world’s almonds, with more than 1.4 million acres of land dedicated
to almond trees and very little else.
Come spring, that’s a lot of almond flowers, and those need a lot of bees.
Every February, an incredible 85% of all commercial bee colonies in America are taken to California
for the single largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world.
The demand is so great that even more hives are flown in from countries like Australia.
On the surface it seems like bee paradise: hundreds of miles of almond flowers - what
more could a bee want?.
But because all the blossoms are from one variety of plant, the bee’s diet becomes
one-dimensional, lacking sufficient nutritional diversity.
Imagine if you only ate one thing all day, every day.
You wouldn’t starve, but you wouldn’t be very healthy, either - even if that thing
was broccoli.
As a result, bee immune systems become compromised, an effect made worse by the large quantity
of pesticides used in the almond groves.
So, with pesticides and poor nutrition creating weaker bees, the stage is set for the final
P in our puzzle, parasites, and one vicious bastard in particular: the varroa destructor
mite.
This horror story of a creature is only about 1.2 millimetres long, but it’s capable of
doing some serious damage.
It starts by climbing onto the back of a bee, where it proceeds to wedge itself between
the plates of the bee’s exoskeleton.
Once there, it pierces the skin, injecting a cocktail of digestive enzymes that gradually
liquify the bee’s insides, providing the mite with an all-you-can-eat bee-smoothie
buffet.
Delicious.
Hives used to be able to withstand varroa attacks, provided the infestation didn’t
overwhelm more than 20% of the colony.
But nowadays, with weakened immune systems and pesticide-resistant strains of varroa
mite, the survival threshold is only about 3% of the bee population.
After that, the hive is decimated.
And it's been happening more and more for the past three decades.
Solving the bee genocide issue isn’t rocket science, which is lucky because most of the
scientists working on the problem are entomologists.
But it is a problem that needs to be addressed if your kids hope to be eating something other
than gruel in 50 years’ time.