10 Things You Didn’t Know About Bees (And Why They’re Disappearing)
Do you like honey? (Mmmm…there’s no better sweetener)
Like seeing wildflowers blooming by the side of a country road?
Enjoy picking tomatoes and cucumbers out of your backyard garden in the summer?
We take these things for granted, yet none of them would be possible without the tireless work of the honeybee. And now they’re dying off in incredible numbers, and no one’s really sure why. Worse yet, a lot of people aren’t even aware how seriously this could effect agriculture and food supplies all over the country.
The Weekly Reader reports, “Tens of thousands of honeybees in 24 states across the United States are vanishing from their hives and dying in the fields. A typical healthy colony contains between 40,000 and 60,000 bees. Some beekeepers have lost more than half of their colonies. “
If you’re an advocate for sustainable agriculture, you can’t afford to ignore the plight of the honeybees any longer- so here are 10 things that you probably didn’t know about bees, their work, and the way that their health is inextricably linked to ours.
1. Honey is to a bee what electricity is for humans — energy. One teaspoon of honey weighing 21 grams contains 16 grams of sugar or 60 calories, and it took 12 bees their entire foraging lives, combined flying time of about 9,700 kilometres, to produce that 21 grams of honey.
2. To understand the importance of honeybees, consider that every third bite on your plate is a result of their primary role on the planet as pollinators; the most important group on Earth.
3. Honeybees contribute at least $47 billion a year to the North American economy, as they pollinate crops such as almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, broccoli, canola, carrot seeds, cherries, citrus, cranberries, cucumbers, grapes, lettuce, macadamias, melons, peaches, plums, pumpkins, onion seeds, squash, sunflowers, kiwis, tomatoes and zucchinis (to name a few); alfalfa and clover for beef and dairy industries; cotton for our clothes; honey, candles and medicines.
4. Bees have been on the planet for more than 100 million years, or about 14 times longer than the first human progenitor. Bees have a memory; they vote, are being trained to count and are helping people as an early detector of disease by sniffing skin and lung cancers, diabetes and tuberculosis.
5. The Red Cross estimates there are 80 million to 120 million landmines in 70 countries, with 40,000 more being deployed weekly. Researchers from the University of Montana are using bees to find residue of TNT, the primary ingredient in landmines, while conducting surveys many miles away from the hive.
6. Research from Europe showed that bees exposed to electromagnetic radiation from cellular towers made 21 per cent less honeycomb, and that 36 per cent of bees taken a half mile from the hive were unable to navigate home.
7. The abnormally high temperatures of 2006 were likely the tipping point for bees in North America. The searing springtime temperatures during the onset of flowering are believed to have caused sterile pollen in many plants. In 2007, almond, plum, kiwi and cherry pollen that were tested exhibited little if any protein content. Infertile soils lacking essential nutrients, bacteria, fungi and protozoa, along with climate change, were 
implicated.
8. Each year, 2.3 billion kilograms of pesticides are applied globally. Many of them are neonicitinoids, a nerve poison that prevents acetylcholine from allowing neurons to communicate with each other and with muscle tissue. In humans it would trigger Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Imidacloprid, one form of neonicitinoids, is manufactured by Bayer under the trade names of Gaucho and Pancho. It killed millions of bees in France before it eventually was banned there, yet it’s still widely used throughout North America.
9. The honeybee genome was decoded in 2006. Their genetics revealed only half as many genes for detoxification and immunity, compared to other known insects. This means that stacking pesticides, a common practice on many farms that increases toxicity (sometimes by a thousand-fold!), could be the end of bees.
10. The cause of the honeybee loss is currently unknown. Researchers are looking into several possibilities, including viruses, poor nutrition, and pesticides. Until the cause is found, they are calling the syndrome “Colony Collapse Disorder.”
LEARN MORE:
View a map of the states affected by Colony Collapse Disorder.
Check out this animated look into a bee hive (requires Macromedia Flash plug-in).
(Many of these “bee facts” were found in an article by the Star Phoenix: read the full article here).
I have a sneaking suspicion that the honeybee decline is due to various aspects of commercial agriculture more than anything else. You mentioned pesticides in this post. Another culprit may be monocultures, placing them in a huge area of monoculture with little or no wild plants, giving the bees access only to a single food source; naturally the bees would be pollenating a variety of flowers and picking up trace minerals. I've also seen the suggestion that colony collapse disorder is caused by feeding bees corn syrup from genetically modified corn.
Another suggested culprit I've seen has been eliminating natural hive sites for bees (i.e. cutting down dead trees) and thus not having any wild population for the bees. Wild populations preserve genetic diversity and help species adapt to local conditions as well as changing conditions.
It's interesting to note though that honeybees are not native to North America. So, in a sense, the disaster is more for humans than for the natural ecosystems.
Another interesting observation, just of a personal nature, was that when I started reading about this problem with the bees, I started looking for bees in my own yard in Delaware and also at my parent's house in Pennsylvania. I found many bees in both places! Both the non-native honeybees and the native bumblebees and other types of bees. I often would be able to count 3 or 4 species of bees pollenating even a single species of flower!
This also suggests to me that the problem is commercial agriculture, monoculture, and pesticides. We use no chemicals in our gardens…and our gardens are very diversified, with lots of plants growing wild, lots of weeds that we don't pull out, it's all overgrown. This is the way it was meant to me and if we grew things like this, we wouldn't have problems like this with the bees.
11. That where European honeybees have disappeared, native bees and insects pick up 80% of the slack.