Honey Bees with beekeepers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve seen numerous reports over the past couple years about declining bee populations in North America in general and in Ontario in particular, leading to the question, what’s killing bees.
In this CBC article, a beekeeper says millions of his bees have been killed by a new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Premier Wynn is doing what all politicians do…she’s forming an expert panel to produce a set of recommendations by spring of next year. Meanwhile the folks who make pesticides along with some scientists suggest that the culprit may be Varroa mites and not the pesticides. Corn farmers say they need the neonicotinoid. What if both the mites and the pesticides are contributing to the collapse of bee populations? Perhaps there are other factors at play as well.
So why are the bees so important? They pollinate a high percentage of our flowering crops, meaning with no bees we’re going to lose a lot of food directly, not to mention crops that are used to feed livestock.
We’d better get this right and get it fixed.
Related articles
- What’s killing the bees? Time magazine examines the crisis (treehugger.com)
- Drop in honeybees population worries U.S. farmers (mysafetysign.com)
- Protecting honey bees and humans (mysafetysign.com)
- Home Gardeners’ New Plants Could Be Killing Off Bees (minnesota.cbslocal.com)
- Bee-killing pesticide found in garden store plants: What does it mean? (nbcnews.com)
- Bees live to help us – now we have to play our part and help them (edp24.co.uk)
- Retail garden plants intended to draw bees may harm them (kansascity.com)
27th Street 
You know, it isnt really a surprise that a species like bees are at risk. Im not saying that it is in any way good, just that it isnt a surprise. My dad used to tell me that he remembered when Atlantic salmon spawned in the Credit River and the Humber River. They dont do that anymore. You shouldnt eat fish caught in Georgian Bay either. When I was a teenager there was a thriving vegetable growing area in what was suburban Toronto. It was known as the Eglinton Flats and the small scale farmers there supplied much of Toronto with fresh vegetables. The farmers are gone now and the area has been developed. Southern Ontario had dozens of tiny trout streams within a 40 minute drive of the city. Not only are the trout gone but many of the streams are gone as well – dried up as wetlands were drained and forest were clear cut to make room for subdivisions. Most of this was made necessary but our rapidly expanding population. You have to store all these people somewhere so lets chop down that forest and build houses. Canada had a thriving agriculture industry. You learned about it in school. Farmers would wake up at 4 am to milk their cows then spend the day working their fields and looking after their cattle and their pigs. Life was good. But we had politicians who were visionaries and these guys could see that to keep everyone happy they needed to put the government deep deep into debt. So deep that those debts would never ever be paid off. But that didnt matter really because the more a government spent the happier the people became and happy people re-elected the guys who put the country into debt. Life was good for the politicians. Get elected. Blow as much money as you have to to get enough votes to get re=elected. Rinse. Repeat. Soon though they started to realize that at some point the country would run out of credit and when that happened the spending would stop and the people would tar and feather the politicians. The answer was pretty simple. Get more people. In fact get so many more people that they could collect zillions more in taxes and make our existing debts look small. At the same time they could keep their overspending at the same relative level and maybe no one would notice and they could all get re-elected and life for the politicians would continue to be good. The key was to keep the population growing in leaps and bounds. Interestingly there were some folks in the investment business who had similar thoughts. Solicit investments by promising high returns and provide those returns by simply always bringing in lots more investors. Then get rich by skimming off a big percentage while still providing returns to original investors. This sorta works until one day there are no new investors to pay the old investors and the whole thing collapses. This process has a name. It is called a Ponzi Scam and most of the folks who have become rich doing it found their way into prison. But not the politicians. I think that their Ponzi Scam executed with ever increasing politicians hasnt been recognized for what it is but at some point we will no longer be able to just bring in more people and the whole deal will collapse.
All this extra population needed to be fed do the politicians developed a policy of providing cheap food. They implemented this in a truly sneaky way. They realized there were zillions of acres of land which wasnt being farmed and they set about getting it farmed with a view to flooding the country with food and driving down prices. They set up a system of property tax rebates for land which was farmed. You didnt have to actually farm it yourself to get the rebate. If you had vacant land you could let your neighbor farm it and still get your very significant rebate. This started when a family farm unit was typically 100 acres and a family could earn a small but adequate living on their 100 acres if they worked hard. These farmers typically couldnt afford a second farm and didnt have the labour available to work the extra land anyways. Suddenly though extra farmland became available to rent at very very low prices. Sometimes at $10 or $20 per acre. Some farmers took advantage of this and began to expand. Crop prices started to decline as a result (a success for the politicos) but shortly many of the family farm guys found they could no longer make a living on the family farm. Great! They could sell the farm to developers and their neighbors would make up the food shortfall by working rented land. In a space of about 25 years the whole concept of a family making a living on 100 acres had disappeared and so had all the farmers who had been doing it for generations. In there place was left Big Agriculture. A farmer would still own a 100 acre unit where he lived but he would rent an additional 1000 or 2000 or 5000 acres to produce crops. What happened though was as crop prices dropped these big farmers were squeezed hard and they had to specialize. A corn combine might cost $400,000 and you had better grow a LOT of corn to justify that. So Mr. Big Farmer grew corn. No more hay fields to feed the dairy cows. No more dairy cows either because the land was needed for corn. No more pigs in the barn. No barn either, they were knocked down so corn could be planted where they stood. Now the big farmer was working 20 farms. Gone were the 20 small gardens and the 20 small pastures and woodlots and home orchards. And gone was all the biodiversity that came with the small well managed farms. But we got cheap food. We also got monoculture and all the horrible environmental issues that comes with that. When a disease or a pest threatens the soybean crops it does so on a mind boggling scale and can actually threaten our food chain. Chemisty comes to the rescue and provides a short term solution that lasts just until the next crisis. There can be collateral damage though but if we want to eat we need to accept the collateral damage. It is the price we have to pay for allowing this Ponzi Scam to happen with our exploding population. This year the treehuggers want to save the bees and they are pointing the finger at the pesticides. Im not convinced that pesticides are the problem with bees as much as I believe our lack of biodiversity is the issue. Bees are the species du jour because there is money in bees and the treehuggers like their honey. But where were they when our swallow population was decimated. Where are the Kestrels? The pheasants? No money in swallows really I guess. The problem is that we have become so reliant on our monoculture supporting our exploding population that we cant really just start pointing the finger at this chemical or that forestry practice or this type of mine. We have put ourselves in a position where we NEED the oilsands and all the environmental issues they bring. We NEED the Exxon Valdez hauling crude. Well we think we do. What we need is to control the planet’s population to an extent that most would consider draconian. I figure if we really want to restore biodiversity and stop the global warming and stop the rainforests being stripped and stop the excessive pesticide use then the population on the planet needs to be reduced by about two thirds back to a level that nature can sustain. People talk about sustainable energy and sustainable agriculture and eco this and eco that but it is all a crock. There are too many humans sucking too much from the planet and environmental conditions on the planet arent going to improve until that stops. I feel sort of badly for the bees really, they are having a rough time. Maybe there is some pesticide that is killing them. maybe there isnt enough biodiversity to keep them healthy. Banning one chemical isnt going to help them long term though because in 10 years there will be significantly less biodiversity and there will be more chemicals. That is the way we run the planet and the cost of that will always be lost species. We have to either accept that or we have to address the root of the problem – the size of our population. I love it when I can rant on someone else’s blog, dont you?
That’s what the comment section here is for. Rant away, while you’re on a roll.
The bee/pesticide issue is a complex one and there are a number of important issues that the beekeepers keep very well hidden. Im gonna sort of go around some of the issues a bit here..
For starters bee keepers do not generally spray pesticides on their own land unless they also are farmers. What they do is keep their colonies of bees on a small parcel of land (which they perversely never plant with flowers that would help their bees) and they let their little bugs fly off onto someone else’s property to forage. Nice. That sort of ranks right up there with city folks owning dirt bikes then taking them out to trespass on some rural property when they get an urge to rip up some ground. Ok so the bugs dont do much harm when they wander onto someone else’s property to forage but I have a LOT of trouble with the concept that the beekeeper has even a wee small tiny right to tell that land owner what he can and cant spray on his own property. I figure if the beekeeper doesnt like what Im spraying on my crops he can keep his damn bugs at home because Im spraying pesticides to kill the bugs that are eating my crops! Ok not really talking about me but in general the beekeepers are getting pushy well beyond their reasonable rights. Even worse is that most beekeepers dont even keep all their hives at home. They spread them out all over in groups of 10 hives because often their neighbours arent producing enough foo to feed their bees. A smallish beekeeper can quite easily have enough of these satellite colonies spread out to give them total coverage of all the land in a 10 mile radius and they want to tell all the farmers in that radius what they can or cant do on their land. That just somehow seems wrong to me.
Pesticide poisoning of bees is only really an issue if a water based spray is applied to flowers while the bees are actively foraging on those flowers. the idea is that the bees pick up the pesticide with the pollen and carry it home to the hive. Some but not all insecticides will kill bees back at the hive if it gets there. Once the spray dries however there is pretty much no chance at all that the bees will pick it up. Some guy in his backyard that sprays the very common Sevin on his rosebushes in the middle of the afternoon can quite easily kill a couple of commercial beehives if the bugs are foraging in his garden. Some farmer will surely get blamed for this but farmers dont use sevin.
The issue of Well we NEED the bees or we will all starve is both a bit true and a big crock of ****. The truth is that our major food crops do not require bees to be productive. Cereal grains like wheat and barley dont need bees they are wind pollinated. So is corn and soybeans. Potatoes dont need to be pollinated at all. Tomatoes rely on wind.We arent gonna starve without bees. Wont happen. There ARE some crops that do need insects to pollinate them i order to produce fruit. Stuff like apples, pears, cucumbers, and oranges. Interestingly these crops can be pollinated by wild bees just as easily as they can be pollinated by bees in intensively managed beekeeping operations. The thing is that these farmers have discovered that if they import a bazillion bees into their orchards while the trees are in bloom their yields will increase impressively and they will grow rich. To make that happen these guys have made arrangements to actually rent bees from beekeepers. Ya that sounds seriously weird but it is a win/win situation. When you are a beekeeper the first thing you learn is that in spring there are never enough flowers to keep your colonies expanding and healthy. You could set up satellite colonies all around commercial orchard areas but the orchardists spray insecticides and your bees would certainly be killed. The answer was to get into bed with the orchardists. You rent your bees to the guy who runs the orchard and you charge him big bucks (think $200/colony) and you physically deliver those wooden colonies of bees into the orchard at the rate of about 1 box/acre. In return, besides paying dearly for the bees the guy who owns the trees promises to not spray anything nasty while the bees are in his orchard (usually for about 10 days). When the bloom period is over the beekeeper collects his hives now heavy with honey and takes them back home or to wherever they will spend summer. Because this relationship is pretty profitable for both sides a great deal of care is taken to keep the rental bees safe and healthy. In fact I have heard of cases where a beekeeper will want any wild colonies killed before he brings his bees into an orchard because wild bees can carry bee diseases. Weird huh? The net of this is that the bees which their keepers say are so important for our luxury crops are very very well protected and cared for. If these is a problem it happens once the bees are taken away and set up next to someone who doesnt want them there in the first place.
The other sort of very well hidden issue is one that I think needs to be addressed in depth. The beekeepers are saying that they are plunking down their satellite colonies next door to some farmer that might be spraying a nasty chemical on his crops that do not need bees for pollination and that his bees are bringing some of that really nasty chemical back into the hive and that some of these chemicals might be killing their bees. Think about that a bit. Beehives containing nasty agricultural pesticides. Honey laced with these nasty agricultural pesticides being harvested from the hives, bottled up and sold. If the beekeepers are right you would have to be crazy to buy honey. You basically would be poisoning yourself. Oh ya but the beekeeper will tell you that his honey is all organic and pure as the driven snow- no chance of pesticides in my honey he says. Then what the hell is he complaining about? This is all about money folks. The beekeepers want to feed their bees on someone else’s land. They could approach the guy who actually owns the land and say hey buddy my bees are living for free on your land and im worried about what you spray so I will offer you $75/acre to not spray this chemical. They could do that. The farmers would happily take their cash and spray something safer but the beekeepers would rather try to control the farmland without paying the price. Something wrong with that I think. It will be very very difficult for the beekeepers to actually prove any of their bees are being killed by any specific bug killer. It will be even more difficult to force all farmers everywhere to stop trying to kill bugs. Especially if we wish to continue to eat. Yet the treehuggers will weigh in on this issue. Yes keeping the world’s bee population healthy is a worthwhile goal. We need to be really careful though what we trample trying to reach that goal.
On a side note I want to relate my experience with renting bees (yes I have rented bees) . For years each May I would rent a pickup truck loaded with beehives from a guy abot 30 miles away. On the agreed day he would pull his truck up to a cluster of hives and pick up these stacked boxes of live active bees one box at a time, carry them over to the open pickup truck and load them on. Each of the hives held in the order of a half million bees and he would cram a dozen or so hives into the back of the truck and drive them 30 miles over to my place. Then he drove into the orchard and with each bump in the field the hived were jostled around. When he got to the right spot he would stop and remove the tarp that covered them. In talking maybe a total of 5 million really pissed off honey bees in the back of his truck. Ok he would arrive a bit before dark so the bees were a bit docile but I wanna assure you that there were still 5 million pissed off bees. The guy wore shorts and a T-shirt. He said if he wore a long sleeve shirt and a bee wandered up his sleeve he would be stung for sure. He would then proceed to unload these hive one by one by hand, carry the hive maybe 10 feet and try to set it on the ground gently then go back for another. Sometimes 10,000 bees would come out to see exactly what or who was shaking their hive. When he was done the bed of the pickup might have a 2 inch thick layer of annoyed bees walking around so he would hop up into the back of the truck and sweep them all out onto the ground. His wife and I would watch from a not very safe distance of about 50 feet. She said he would be stung around 25 times on a delivery like this. The problem wasnt the pain (he was pretty much immune to the pain) but rather that a bee injects adrenaline into you when it stings and after 25 stings there is no possible way to sleep that night. No way in the world will you see me walk up to an active bee hive and pick the thing up and load it into a truck. Nope. No way.
OK……any beekeepers out there want to comment?