10.5 Case study: agriculture and the global bee colony collapse  (Page 2/3)

The truth, as it is now unfolding, is more complex, and shows the importance of viewing the interactions between human and natural ecologies in systemic terms. In strictly pathogenic terms, CCD is caused by the combination of a virus (called Iridoviridae or IIV) and a microsporidian fungus called Nosema . The specific interaction between the pathogens, and why they cause bees in their millions to vacate their hives, is not understood. What is becoming clear, however, is the increasing burden being placed on bees by the human agricultural system, a burden that has rendered bees increasingly vulnerable to epidemic infection. Humans have been keeping bees for eight thousand years, and European bees were at the vanguard of the successful crop colonization of the Americas. But the numbers of bees in the United States had already declined by a third since 1950 before the arrival of CCD, owing to various viral and mite infestations, and the large scale changes in bee habitat and lifestyle.

Before the industrialization of farming, bees came from neighboring wildlands to pollinate the diverse range of crops available to them on small plots. But the conversion, for economic reasons, of arable land into enormous monocrop properties in the last sixty years, and hence the diminishment of proximate wildflower habitats, has necessitated a different system, whereby bees are trucked around the country to service one crop at a time, be it peppers in Florida, blueberries in Maine, or almonds in California. At the height of the recent almond boom, the California crop required almost the entire bee population of the United States to be fully pollinated. Wholesale suburbanization is also to blame for the destruction of the bees’ natural wildflower habitats. Be it a thousand acre cornfield or a suburban street of well-tended green lawns, to a bees’ eyes, our modern landscape, engineered to human needs, is mostly a desert.

Studies that have not identified specific culprits for CCD have nevertheless shown the extent of the long-term decline in bee health wrought by their conscription to industrial agriculture. For instance, researchers found no fewer than 170 different pesticides in samples of American honeybees, while other studies found that even bees not suffering CCD habitually carry multiple viral strains in their systems. The combined toxic and viral load for the average honeybee is enormous. In the words of Florida’s state apiarist, “I’m surprised honey bees are alive at all.” ( Jacobsen, 2008, p. 137 ) A further study showed a decline in the immune systems of bees owing to lack of diverse nutrition. Pollinating only almonds for weeks on end, then travelling on a flatbed truck for hundreds of miles in order to service another single crop, is not the lifestyle bees have adapted to over the near 80 million years of their existence. As Virgil warned, “First, for thy bees a quiet station find.” The lives of modern bees have been anything but quiet, and the enormous changes in their habitat and lifestyle have reduced their species’ resilience.

The most important lesson of recent research into CCD is not the identification of IIV and Nosema as the specific contributors, but the larger picture it has provided of a system under multiple long-term stresses. Complex systems, such as bee pollination and colony maintenance, are not characterized by linear development, but rather by sudden, nonlinear changes of state called tipping points . CCD is an example of a potential tipping point in a natural system on which humans depend, in which sudden deterioration overtakes a population beyond its ability to rebound. Everything seems fine, until it isn’t. One day we have almonds, berries, melon, and coffee on our breakfast menu. The next day there’s a critical shortage, and we can’t afford them.

In sustainability terms, bee colony collapse is a classic “human dimensions” issue. CCD will not be “solved” simply by the development of a new anti-viral drug or pesticide targeting the specific pathogens responsible. Part of what has caused CCD is the immunosuppressive effects of generations of pesticides developed to counter previous threats to bee populations, be they microbes or mites. Our chemical intervention in the lifecycle of bees has, in evolutionary terms, “selected” for a more vulnerable bee. That is, bees’ current lack of resilience is a systemic problem in our historical relationship to bees, which dates back thousands of years, but which has altered dramatically in the last fifty years in ways that now threaten collapse. And this is to say nothing of the impact of bee colony collapse on other pollination-dependent animals and birds, which would indeed be catastrophic in biodiversity terms.

That we have adapted to bees, and they to us, is a deep cultural and historical truth, not simply a sudden “disaster” requiring the scientific solution of a “mystery.” In the light of sustainability systems analysis, the bee crisis appears entirely predictable and the problem clear cut. The difficulty arises in crafting strategies for how another complex system on a massive scale, namely global agriculture, can be reformed in order to prevent its collapse as one flow-on effect of the global crisis of the vital honey bee. The incentive for such reform could not be more powerful. The prospect of a future human diet without fruits, nuts and coffee is bleak enough for citizens of the developed world and potentially fatal for millions of others in the long term.

Review questions

References

Jacobsen, R. (2008). Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury