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A single honey bee weighs just a tenth of a gram, but a beehive is worth more than its
weight in gold.
Crops pollinated by bees are worth $215 billion worldwide, and they provide us with 75% of
the fruits, veggies, and nuts we eat. Their pollinating services are worth at least
$24 billion to U.S. farmers, but that’s probably an underestimate.
Bees also pollinate the coffee plant. That might be the most critical job on Earth.
One could say that bees are the bee’s knees.
To say that bees are important would be like saying Beyonce is a pretty good singer. Incidentally,
she has a bee-impersonating fly named after her.
When people talk about bee death, they’re usually talking about the European honey bee.
Cue the bee roll please. This one species is basically a domesticated
animal, just like cows, sheep, or chickens, taken from the wild, put in a box, and used
to harvest honey and pollinate crops.
Each winter, it’s normal for a small fraction of colonies to die off, but between 1947 and
2005 US beekeepers lost nearly half their bees. By 2006 beekeepers were reporting losses
as high as 90% and this honey bee apocalypse was given a name: Colony Collapse Disorder.
Talk about a buzz kill-- "Too soon!"
A hive that falls victim to CCD is like a ghost town: no adult worker bees, the honey
and immature young left behind… it’s pretty much just a lonely queen wandering around
like her friends stranded her at a party.
But honey bees’ wild, solo-living cousins are in trouble too.
It’s estimated that over the past 120 years, as many as half of all wild bee species have
gone extinct.
Bee die-offs have been reported as far back as 1868, but as far as we know they’ve never
happened on this scale before. And we’re not entirely sure what’s causing it.
Pesticides are one of the likely culprits, particularly a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids.
Feeding on neonic-tainted food can be deadly to bees, and even at nonlethal doses bees
can lose the ability to communicate and forage.
In some places, there’s just not as many flowers as there used to be. Like humans,
bees do best when they eat a balanced diet from many different sources. Thanks to habitat
loss, we’re giving them a buffet with just a few choices, and it’s definitely not “all
you can eat”.
Just because they’re small doesn’t mean bees can’t get sick. When a colony is weakened
by pesticides or lack of food, they become more vulnerable to viruses, parasites, and
all kinds of other infections.
Like these blood-sucking mites, which, judging from their name I’m guessing are pretty
bad. These bacteria can turn larvae into liquid. And these parasites lay eggs inside the bees’
breathing tubes, suffocating them to death.
Turns out some bees are naturally resistant to some of these infections, so scientists
are trying to breed entire colonies that can fight off these microscopic horrors.
According to a 2015 study in the journal Science, it’s likely that instead of one culprit,
bee declines are being driven by a perfect storm of troubles: pesticides, habitat loss,
and infections.
But there are possible solutions, and all of us can do our part.
We can plant more flowers in more places, reduce the use of pesticides, keep out invasive
species, and take better care of our wild bees.
Most of all, we all need to keep an eye on our relationship with nature, in the garden
or in the grocery store. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck wrote in 1901,
"You will probably more than once have seen her fluttering about the bushes, in a deserted
corner of your garden, without realizing that you were carelessly watching the venerable
ancestor to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and fruits, and possibly even our
civilization."
As William Shakespeare once said, to bee or not to bee. To bee.
Stay curious.