BEES
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To help save the bees and to make sure they do not become extinct, please consider donating to the Honeybee Conservancy. You can donate online on their website https://thehoneybeeconservancy. org/.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEES
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THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES
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BY CC POLLEN CO.
BY CARL ZIMMER
13 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT BEES WHAT IS KILLING AMERICA’S BEES AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR US?
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BY ALEX MORRIS
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BEES 7
Importance
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IMPORTAN OF BEES
The bees place in our world is important beyond our understanding.
The small little insect that works so tirelessly and quietly around us certainly is one of the reasons, if not a main reason, for the possibility of human development on earth. Without them, the development of life on earth, as we know it now, would have been much different and the conditions for human development may not have existed. The conditions we are talking about here are the appearance of the flower bearing plants and pollinators, with the bees, being the crown jewel of the pollinators. The bees, the flowers, human beings and everything that developed alongside humans are all an interconnected series of events over an enormous
amount of time. In the writings, artwork and symbolism of cultures and religions around the world from time immemorial are references to the bees and the substances they collect in Nature and make in their bodies, namely honey, bee pollen, bee propolis, royal jelly and wax. These substances, along with the bees and the beehive, have been held in high esteem throughout human history in every part of the world. The references are almost always of renewal, rebirth and new beginnings. The references are almost always about the good, positive, reinforcing things of life. They are gifts and blessings.
NCE “Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.” 11
THE QUR’AN Some people believe that the Bees and Flowers developed at the same moment in time because they needed each other. Indeed, perhaps the beauty in flowers was developed as a mechanism to attract pollinators and lure them in their direction. The bees diet is flower based collecting pollen and nectar from the flower. Much of our diet is flower based in the fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables we eat that the bees pollinate. Flowers represent and symbolize the very definition of beauty on earth. The colors of every kind and fragrances of flowers cannot be reproduced. They can only be imitated. It is Nature and it is complex. That is where the bees go to work for their food. Bernard Jensen, Ph.D., one of the founders of the “alternative health” movement states in his book, “Bee Well Bee Wise”, that, “The bees are the greatest life workers of any community I have studied in nature……I believe sincerely that man will never progress until he gets into
the work that will never harm his fellow man.” You will understand why this statement was included in the following paragraphs. Most of nature lives in the “chase or be chased” or the “kill or be killed” life cycle of the food chain, where one thing is getting eaten by those things that are stronger and they, in turn, are getting eaten by the next stronger entity. This has taken place over immense amounts of time and countless numbers of eating species. Everything is an eating machine and EVERYTHING IS EATING EACH OTHER UP. Everything is preying on the things it can prey on. Taking life for one living thing to live and another living thing to die. Most all the eating species have evolved by the actual demise of other things. The metaphor here is, even the strongest die and become fodder for the weakest or lowest on the food chain. Nothing wrong with it. It is just the way it is. It is sometimes
In “The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and About the Dalai Lama”, His Holiness states; “I am attracted to bees because I like honey---it is really delicious. Their product is something we cannot produce, very beautiful, isn’t it? I exploit them too much, I think. Even these insects have certain responsibilities, they work together very nicely. They have no constitution, they have no law, no police, nothing, but they work together effectively. This is because of nature. Similarly, each part of a flower is not arranged by humans but by nature. The force of nature is something remarkable. We human beings, we have constitutions, we have law, we have a police force, we have religion, we have many things. But in actual practice, I think we are behind those small insects.”
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BUT WAIT A UTE! BEES G FERENT DIR called the “Grand Design”. The bees follow another plan. It is, in many ways, opposite of that “Grand Design”. Their relationship with their world is one of benefit and enhancement. The bees relationship with the plants it visits is mutually beneficial. The consequence of this relationship is the bees make more flowers by cross pollination which, in turn, makes more food produced from those plants. Just a little different from the other species, including humans, that are in the “eating each other up” “Grand Design”. This is a statistically unique place the bees occupy. The bees are in a full blown embrace with Nature that is probably difficult for us in “the other cycle” to understand fully. The bees do not harm. How unique is that!? Everyone knows of the bees but few people actually know
much about them. The historical reverence toward the bees, the beehive and the products of the beehive, as stated above, does not hold true in today’s world. In fact, the bees and the substances they collect have been forgotten or downgraded in the industrial and agricultural applications and salesmanship of the present day world. They are more an afterthought of little importance to most. Why? Could all the reverence of tribes and cultures, north and south, east and west, from the beginning, could they have been all wrong? Do we know more now? I don’t think so. It probably boils down in large part to the fact that, the industrialized world operates on patents, or exclusive ownership of things for profitability. Anybody can own a beehive. It is non patentable and non exclusive. The industrialized world has
A MINGO A DIFRECTION
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POLLEN:
no use for the beehive or the development of its products. Bees fly to flowers, and inside this incredible environment, they search for their food, pollen and nectar. The pollen from the flower is the genetic material of the plant. This pollen is the basic primal energy representing one of the most powerful urges in nature, that is, the urge to reproduce. Pollen truly is the “gold dust of nature�. It is the culmination of the life force of plants. This life force, when unleashed through cross pollination largely done by the bees, is the beginning of much of the foods that insects, birds, other animals and humans have developed on. Bee Pollen is a biodiverse, complex substance of plant material that when a chemical analysis is done, it shows a wide array of components in the minerals, vitamins, proteins, enzymes and due
to the complexity shown in nature, plenty of other things not yet identified by science. This biodiversity is represented by the bees visiting hundreds, if not thousands of different flowers of different species of plants. The bees gather pollen and nectar in the valleys, up the mountains, in the backyard, down the street, red flowers, blue, purple, white flowers. Where there are flowers you will find bees. These phytochemicals of plant origin, pollen and nectar, inheritantly contain a broad spectrum of components. Go to Arizona, go to Uruguay, go to Sweden and Mozambique. The bees are collecting pollen and nectar in all these places from countless flowers, all different. This is called biodiversity. Bee pollen is possibly the most biodiverse substance on earth. The combined chemical composition of all those plants makes for a complexity
and synergy that only nature can produce. In the book “Leaves of Morya’s Garden II (Illumination)” this is said about flowers and pollen,
“earthly flowers are the sole living bond between Earth and Heaven. In the creation of floral pollen there are precipitated, as it were, crystals of prana. Without frivolity one can say that in flowers the Heaven settles down upon earth. If the earth were deprived of flowers, half its vitali-
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WHY IS BIODIVERS IMPORTAN It is the Way of Nature ty would disappear.�
The question is often asked, “Why is biodiversity important?� The answer is simple when one looks closely at the world we are living in and the directions man has taken. We live in a world of mega agri-industry, mega pharmaceutical drug companies and processed to the maximum foods. The demands on these industries call for sameness. The companies produce and the public demands, sameness. When you buy something now you want it to be the same as last time. When we buy food or drugs or vitamins in New York we want it to be the same when
we buy them in Los Angeles or Flagstaff. Synthetics is one way to make sameness possible. Certain ways of processing make sameness possible. Singling out one ingredient, taking it out of a whole food substance that it came from, is another way to make sameness possible. Synthetics, over processing and the single isolated ingredient processing methods of food and pharmaceuticals, have taken over these industries, in many cases to our detriment. These processes take us down a road that goes directly against the natural world we live in. In nature, there are many parts and pieces to
RSITY NT? everything that collectively make a whole. These parts and pieces are all interrelated and exist as one organism, not as separate, stand alone substances. Nature is not a stand alone situation. Everything is interconnected. Taking one of those pieces out and making it a stand alone situation is how the modern industrial world works. That equates to sameness. There are many good arguments for sameness and it is necessary in many instances but as we move into the future it will become harder and harder to find the biodiverse, complex substances that are the real representatives of nature. We
need these whole complex substances like bee pollen, propolis, royal jelly and honey to help keep a balance against the overpowering pathways that industry and commerce is taking us down. Their salesman are everywhere touting their goods. Theirs is an unnatural world and a world of total sameness. Remember. Nothing in Nature is ever the same, no snowflake, no plant, no animal or human being is the same. Everything, at the very least, has slight variations. That is the “Way of Nature�. It is also why biodiversity is so important and the complex
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PROPOLIS AND HONEY physical/chemical make up of bee pollen is the manifestation of biodiversity.
This diversity also manifests itself in bee propolis and honey. Propolis is another complex primal material from the plant world. The bees gather sap from trees and bushes. Propolis is principally sap, which is tree resin, and beeswax with small amounts of pollen. The resin is the fluid that moves through the plant. This fluid is essentially the immune system of the plant and when these resins are compromised, by unfavorable weather conditions such as drought, the plants exist in an unhealthy state. The plants immune system is weakened when not enough sap/resin is produced and the plant becomes vulnerable to any number of threatening conditions. The bees collect this resin, convert it into propolis and have various uses for it inside the beehive, not the least of which can be described as a part of the
internal immune system of the beehive. Bees take the immune system of the plant life they visit and use it as part of their own immune system inside the hive. Again, propolis is a highly complex, biodiverse compound of numerous plants combined to make a substance the bees use to combat bacterial growth and the spread of disease in the highly populated environment of the beehive. It must be effective because the bees In James Fearnley’s book “Bee Propolis”, he states,
“The beehive is a symbol of simpler substances derived from the lower order of the plant world are elevated and transformed by the bee into substances appropriate for a higher order of existence.”
have existed for at least 100 million years and have had to combat numberless threatening conditions over that span of time. Again, propolis, like pollen, is the natural way and the natural way is complex and biodiverse unlike the manufactured world of singularity and sameness. By using these products of the beehive, humans are bringing the variability of plantw life and nature into their own being. Honey. Just think. A bee leaves the darkness of the beehive, goes out in the light of day, and flies over the ground until she gets to this beautiful flower, lands on the flower and goes inside. What could be better than that? And while there, in the back of the flower (that, by the way, smells real good too), is a little puddle of clean, pure and sweet nectar. A bouquet of smells and tastes. Totally underrated in todays world of ultra refined sugars from cane and corn that have a detrimental effect on your health.
“Now, the upward rays of the sun are the honey cells above. The secret teachings of the Upanishads are the bees. Brahman (Om) is flower. The water is nectar.”
Chhandogya Upanishad:
Part Three Chapter V: The Honey doctrine
“My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste”, Proverbs 24:13
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ROYAL JELLY IS A Over processed and over used in the food processing world to the point it is hard not to eat these substances. Honey stands outside that and has history to back it up. Bees create royal jelly from their own bodies. As are many things in nature, it is difficult to describe and explain this substance. It is a “milk” like substance fed to all the larva, drones, workers and queens but only the queens through their life. Queen bees are made not born and most of the reason for this appears to be her diet of royal jelly. Apparantly, because of her royal jelly diet she lives much longer and is much bigger than the other bees. Why this is, is a mystery. It is the only demonstratable substance known in nature that actually extends life, in this case, the life of the bee. Bees not fed royal jelly, workers and drones, live much shorter lives of 6 weeks, more or less, compared to the possible years of the queen bee. There is no identifiable reason to explain this
phenomenon. CC Pollen Co hopes to educate and bring an understanding of nature and the beehive and the unique and unusual products of the bees and nature into the minds and bodies of humanity. As the modern world moves forward in the direction of mega industry, mega agriculture and mega pharmaceuticals the balance of our individual existence will increasingly become more vulnerable and dangerous. CC Pollen Co founder Royden Brown stated,
“WHILE HEALTH ISN’T EVERYTHING, WITHOUT HEALTH, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS”. In the mega agri-industrial world we live in of denatured, processed foods and drugs, those words ring louder and louder with each passing day. The beehive’s complexity
“bees are influenced most of all by cosmic forces……. by way of the beehive, the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings and make them sound in mind and body” from Rudolf Steiner.
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The Secret Life of Bees
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On the front porch of an old Coast Guard station on Appledore Island, seven miles off the southern coast of Maine, Thomas Seeley and I sat next to 6,000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeley wore a giant pair of silver headphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of hair blowing out the back; next to him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. In his right hand, Seeley held a branch with a lapel microphone taped to the end. He was recording the honeybee swarm huddling inches away on a board nailed to the top of a post. Seeley, a biologist from Cornell University, had cut a notch out of the center of the board and inserted
a tiny screened box called a queen cage. It housed a single honeybee queen, along with a few attendants. Her royal scent acted like a magnet on the swarm. If I had come across this swarm spread across my back door, I would have panicked. But here, sitting next to Seeley, I felt a strange calm. The insects thrummed with their own business. They flew past our faces. They got caught in our hair, pulled themselves free and kept flying. They didn’t even mind when Seeley gently swept away the top layer of bees to inspect the ones underneath. He softly recited a poem by William Butler Yeats:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
A walkie-talkie on the porch rail chirped. “Pink bee headed your way,” said Kirk Visscher, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside. Seeley, his gaze fixed on the swarm, found the walkie-talkie with his left hand and brought it to his mouth. “We wait with bated breath,” he said. “Sorry?” Visscher said. “Breath. Bated. Over.” Seeley set the walkie-talkie back on the rail without taking his eyes off the bees. A few minutes later, a honeybee scout flew onto the porch and alighted on the swarm. She (all scouts are female) wore a pink dot on her back. “Ah, here she is. Pink has landed,” Seeley said. Pink was exploring the island in search of a place where the honeybees could build a new hive. In the spring, if a honeybee colony has grown large enough, swarms of thousands of bees with a new queen will split off to look for a new nest. It takes a swarm anywhere from a few hours to a few days to inspect its surroundings before it finally flies to its newly chosen home. When Pink had left Seeley’s swarm earlier in the morning,
she was not yet pink. Then she flew to a rocky cove on the northeast side of the island, where she discovered a wooden box and went inside. Visscher was sitting in front of it under a beach umbrella, with a paintbrush hanging from his lips. When the bee emerged from the box, Visscher flicked his wrist and caught her in a net the size of a ping-pong paddle. He laid the net on his thigh and dabbed a dot of pink paint on her back. With another flick, he let her go. Visscher is famous in honeybee circles for his technique. Seeley calls it alien abduction for bees. As the day passed, more scouts returned to the porch. Some were marked with pink dots. Others were blue, painted by Thomas Schlegel of the University of Bristol at a second box nearby. Some of the returning scouts started to dance. They climbed up toward the top of the swarm and wheeled around, waggling their rears. The angle at which they waggled and the time they spent dancing told the fellow bees where to find the two boxes. Some of the scouts that witnessed the dance flew away to investigate for themselves. Then a blue bee did something strange. It began to make a tiny beeping sound, over and over again, and
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started head-butting pink bees. Seeley had first heard such beeps in the summer of 2009. He didn’t know why it was happening, or which bee was beeping. “All I knew was that it existed,” he said. Seeley and his colleagues have since discovered that the beeps come from the head-butting scouts. Now Seeley moved his microphone in close to them, calling out each time the bee beeped. It sounded like a mantra: “Blue...blue...blue... blue...blue.” When you consider a swarm one bee at a time this way, it starts to look like a heap of chaos. Each insect wanders around, using its tiny brain to perceive nothing more than its immediate surroundings. Yet, somehow, thousands of honeybees can pool their knowledge and make a collective decision about where they will make a new home, even if that home may be miles away. The decision-making power of honeybees is a prime example of what scientists call swarm intelligence. Clouds of locusts, schools of fish, flocks of birds and colonies of termites display it as well. And in the field of swarm intelligence, Seeley is a towering figure. For 40 years he has come up with experiments that have allowed him to decipher the rules honeybees use for their collective decision-making. “No one has reached the
level of experimentation and ingenuity of Tom Seeley,” says Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. Growing up in Ellis Hollow, in upstate New York, Seeley would bicycle around the farms near his house; one day he discovered a pair of white boxes. They each contained a hive. Seeley was seduced. He came back day after day to stare at the hives. He would look into the boxes and see bees coming in with loads of pollen on their legs. Other bees fanned their wings to keep the hives cool. Other bees acted as guards, pacing back and forth at the opening. “If you lie in the grass in front of a hive, you see this immense traffic of bees zooming out of the hive and circling up and then shooting off in whatever direction they want to go,” said Seeley. “It’s like looking at a meteor shower.” For his PhD at Harvard, Seeley took up a longstanding entomological question: How do honeybees choose their homes? He climbed into trees and poured cyanide into hives to kill the honeybees inside. He sawed down the trees and measured the cavities. Seeley found that bee hive hollows were very much alike. They were at least ten gallons in volume, sat at least 15 feet off the ground and had a narrow opening.
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Seeley built 252 wooden boxes of different shapes and sizes and scattered them in forests and fields to test how particular bees were about these qualities. Swarms only moved into boxes that had the same features that Seeley had found in their tree cavities. “It’s really important to get them all right,” Seeley said. The architectural tastes of honeybees are not mere whims. If honeybees live in an undersized cavity, they won’t be able to store enough honey to survive the winter. If the opening is too wide, the bees won’t be able to fight off invaders. He took his research to Appledore Island because no native
honeybees live here, and it has no big trees where the insects could make their homes. Seeley and his colleagues would bring their own honeybees and nest boxes. “This is our laboratory,” Seeley said. “This is where we gain control.” In one experiment, Seeley set up five boxes of different sizes. Four of the boxes were mediocre, by honeybee standards, while one was a dream home. In 80 percent of the trials, the swarms chose the dream home. Through years of study, Seeley and his colleagues have uncovered a few principles honeybees use to make these smart decisions. The first is enthusiasm. A scout coming back from an ideal cavity will
dance with passion, making 200 circuits or more and waggling violently all the way. But if she inspects a mediocre cavity, she will dance fewer circuits. Enthusiasm translates into attention. An enthusiastic scout will inspire more bees to go check out her site. And when the second-wave scouts return, they persuade more scouts to investigate the better site. The second principle is flexibility. Once a scout finds a site, she travels back and forth from site to hive. Each time she returns, she dances to win over other scouts. But the number of dance repetitions declines, until she stops dancing altogether. Seeley
and his colleagues found that honeybees that visit good sites keep dancing for more trips than honeybees from mediocre ones. This decaying dance allows a swarm to avoid getting stuck in a bad decision. Even when a mediocre site has attracted a lot of scouts, a single scout returning from a better one can cause the hive to change its collective mind. “It’s beautiful when you see how well it works,” Seeley said. “Things don’t bog down when individuals get too stubborn. In fact, they’re all pretty modest. They say, ‘Well, I found something, and I think it’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s the best, but I’ll report what I found and let the best
“Bees are to hives as neurons are to brains,” 31
site win.’” During the time I visited Seeley, he was in the midst of discovering a new principle. Scouts, he found, purposefully ram one another head-on while deciding on a new nest location. They head-butt scouts coming from other locations—pink scouts bumping into blue scouts and vice versa—causing the rammed bee to stop dancing. As more scouts dance for a popular site, they also, by head-butting, drive down the number of dancers for other sites. And once the scouts reach a quorum of 15 bees all dancing for the same location, they start to head-butt one another, silencing their own side so that the swarm can prepare to fly. One of the things Seeley has been thinking about during his vigils with his swarms is how much they’re like our own minds. “I think of a swarm as an exposed brain that hangs quietly from a tree branch,” Seeley said. A swarm and a brain both make decisions. Our brains have to make quick judgments about a flood of neural signals from our eyes, for example, figuring out what we’re seeing and deciding how to respond. Both swarms and brains make their decisions democratically. Despite her royal title, a hon-
eybee queen does not make decisions for the hive. The hive makes decisions for her. In our brain, no single neuron takes in all the information from our senses and makes a decision. Millions make a collective choice. “Bees are to hives as neurons are to brains,” says Jeffrey Schall, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Neurons use some of the same tricks honeybees use to come to decisions. A single visual neuron is like a single scout. It reports about a tiny patch of what we see, just as a scout dances for a single site. Different neurons may give us conflicting ideas about what we’re actually seeing, but we have to quickly choose between the alternatives. That red blob seen from the corner of your eye may be a stop sign, or it may be a car barreling down the street. To make the right choice, our neurons hold a competition, and different coalitions recruit more neurons to their interpretation of reality, much as scouts recruit more bees. Our brains need a way to avoid stalemates. Like the decaying dances of honeybees, a coalition starts to get weaker if it doesn’t get a continual supply of signals from the eyes. As a result, it doesn’t get locked early into the wrong choice. Just as honeybees use a quorum, our brain waits until
Seeley thinks that this convergence between bees and brains can teach people a lot about how to make decisions in groups. “Living in groups, there’s a wisdom to finding a way for members to make better decisions collectively than as individuals,” he said. Recently Seeley was talking at the Naval War College. He explained the radical differences in how swarms and captain-dominated ships make decisions. “They realize that information is very distributed across the ship,” Seeley said. “Does it make sense to have power so concentrated? Sometimes you need a fast decision, but there’s a trade-off between fast versus accurate.” In his experience, Seeley says, New England town hall meetings are the closest human grouping to honeybee swarms. “There are some differences, but there are also some fundamental similarities,” he said. Like scouts, individual citizens are allowed to share different ideas with the entire meeting. Other citizens can judge for themselves the merit of their ideas, and they can speak up themselves. “When it’s working properly, good ideas rise up and bad ones sink down,” says Seeley.
ideas—the more the better, in fact. But those ideas will only lead to a good decision if listeners take the time to judge their merits for themselves, just as scouts go to check out potential homes for themselves. Groups also do well if they’re flexible, ensuring that good ideas don’t lose out simply because they come late in the discussion. And rather than try to debate an issue until everyone in a group agrees, Seeley advises using a honeybee-style quorum. Otherwise the debate will drag on. One of the strengths of honeybees is that they share the same goal: finding a new home. People who come together in a democracy, however, may have competing interests. Seeley advises that people should be made to feel that they are part of the decision-making group, so that their debates don’t become about destroying the enemy, but about finding a solution for everyone. “That sense of belonging can be nurtured,” Seeley said. The more we fashion our democracies after honeybees, Seeley argues, the
Groups work well, he argues, if the power of leaders is minimized. A group of people can propose many different
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13 Fasc ing Fac About B BY LUCAS REILLY
cinatcts Bees 35
Sure, you know that bees pollinate our crops and give us honey. But there’s so much more to these buzzing insects than that.
1. THEIR STING HAS SOME BENEFITS A toxin in bee venom called melittin may prevent HIV. Melittin can kill HIV by poking holes into the virus’s protective envelope. (Meanwhile, when mellitin hitches a ride on certain nanoparticles, it will just bounce off normal cells and leave them unharmed.) Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis hope the toxin can be used in preventative gels.
Bee stings may also ease pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers at the University of Sao Paulo found that molecules in bee venom increase your body’s level of glucocorticoid, an anti-inflammatory hormone.
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THEY WORK HARDER THAN YOU
2. During chillier seasons, worker bees can live for nine months. But in the summer, they rarely last longer than six weeks— they literally work themselves to death.
3. WHEN THEY CHANGE JOBS, THEY CHANGE THEIR BRAIN
Bees are hardwired to do certain jobs. Scout bees, which search for new sources of food, are wired for adventure. Soldier bees, discovered in 2012, work as security guards their whole life. One percent of all middle-aged bees become undertakers—a genetic brain pattern compels them to remove dead bees from the hive. But most amazingly, regular honeybees—which perform multiple jobs in their lifetime—will change their brain chemistry before taking up a new gig.
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THEIR BRAINS DEFY TIME
When aging bees do jobs usually reserved for younger members, their brain stops aging. In fact, their brain ages in reverse. (Imagine if riding a tricycle didn’t just make you feel young—it actually made your brain tick like a younger person’s.) Scientists at Arizona State University believe the discovery can help us slow the onset of dementia.
5. THEY’RE CHANGING MEDICINE
To reinforce their hives, bees use a resin from poplar and evergreen trees called propolis. It’s basically beehive glue. Although bees use it as caulk, humans use it to fight off bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Research shows that propolis taken from a beehive may relieve cold sores, canker sores, herpes, sore throat, cavities, and even eczema.
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THEY CAN RECOGNIZE HUMAN FACES
Honeybees make out faces the same way we do. They take parts—like eyebrows, lips, and ears—and cobble them together to make out the whole face. It’s called “configular processing,” and it might help computer scientists improve face recognition technology, the New York Times reports.
THEY HAVE PERSONALITIES
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Even in beehives, there are workers and shirkers. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that not all bees are interchangeable drones. Some bees are thrill-seekers. Others are a bit more timid. A 2011 study even found that agitated honeybees can be pessimistic, showing that, to some extent, bees might have feelings.
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THEY GET BUZZED FROM CAFFEINE AND COCAINE Nature didn’t intend caffeine to be trapped inside an orange mocha frappucino. It’s actually a plant defense chemical that shoos harmful insects away and lures pollinators in. Scientists at Newcastle University found that nectar laced with caffeine helps bees remember where the flower is, increasing the chances of a return visit.
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While caffeine makes bees work better, cocaine turns them into big fat liars. Bees “dance” to communicate—a way of giving fellow bees directions to good food. But high honeybees exaggerate their moves and overemphasize the food’s quality. They even exhibit withdrawal symptoms, helping scientists understand the nuances of addiction.
9. THEY HAVE VIKING-LIKE SUPERVISION
Bees use the sun as a compass. But when it’s cloudy, there’s a backup—they navigate by polarized light, using special photoreceptors to find the sun's place in the sky. The Vikings may have used a similar system: On sunny days, they navigated with sundials, but on cloudy days, sunstones—chunks of calcite that act like a Polaroid filter—helped them stay on course. 10. They can solve hairy mathematical problems Pretend it’s the weekend, and it’s time to do errands. You have
to visit six stores and they’re all at six separate locations. What’s the shortest distance you can travel while visiting all six? Mathematicians call this “traveling salesman problem,” and it can even stump some computers. But for bumblebees, it’s a snap. Researchers at Royal Holloway University in London found that bumblebees fly the shortest route possible between flowers. So far, they’re the only animals known to solve the problem.
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10. THEY CAN SOLVE HAIRY MATH PROBLEMS Pretend it’s the weekend, and it’s time to do errands. You have to visit six stores and they’re all at six separate locations. What’s the shortest distance you can travel while visiting all six? Mathematicians call this “traveling salesman problem,” and it can even stump some computers. But for bumblebees, it’s a snap. Researchers at Royal Holloway University in London found that bumblebees fly the shortest route possible between flowers. So far, they’re the only animals known to solve the problem.
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THEY’RE NATURE’S MOST ECONOMICAL BUILDERS
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In 36 BC, Marcus Terentius Varro argued that honeycombs were the most practical structures around. Centuries later, Greek mathematician Pappus solidified the “honeycomb conjecture” by making the same claim. Almost 2000 years later, Thomas Hales wrote a 19-page mathematical proof showing that, of all the possible structures, honeycombs use the least amount of wax. And not only are honeycombs the most efficient structures in nature—the walls meet at a precise 120-degree angle, a perfect hexagon.
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THEY CAN HELP US CATCH SERIAL KILLERS
Serial killers behave like bees. They commit their crimes close to home, but far away enough that the neighbors don’t get suspicious. Similarly, bees collect pollen near their hive, but far enough that predators can’t find the hive. To understand how this “buffer zone” works, scientists studied bee behavior and wrote up a few algorithms. Their findings improved computer models police use to find felons.
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13. THEY’RE JOB CREATORS Americans consume about 285 million pounds of honey each year. On top of that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that honeybees pollinate 80 percent of the country’s insect crops—meaning bees pollinate over $20 billion worth of crops each year.
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What Is Killing America’s Bee Us
ees and What Does It Mean for 51 Us?
There was a moment last year when beekeeper Jim Doan was ready to concede defeat. He stood in the kitchen of his rural New York home, holding the phone to his ear. Through the window, he could see the frigid January evening settling on the 112-acre farm he’d just been forced to sell two weeks earlier. On the other end of the line, his wife’s voice was matter-of-fact: “Jimmy, I just want to say I’m sorry, but the bees are dead.” By then, Doan was used to taking in bad news. After all, this was long after the summer of 2006, when he had first started noticing that his bees were acting oddly: not laying eggs or going queenless or inexplicably trying to make multiple queens. It was long after the day when he’d gone out to check his bee yard and discovered that of the 5,600 hives he kept at the time, all but 600 were empty. And it was long after he’d learned back in 2007 that he was not alone, that beekeepers all around the country, and even the world, were finding that their bees had not just died but had actually vanished, a phenomenon that was eventually named colony collapse disorder and heralded as proof of the fast-approaching End of Days by evangelicals and environmentalists alike. Theories abounded about what was causing CCD. Were bees, the most hardworking
and selfless of creatures, being called up to heaven before the rest of us? Were they victims of a Russian plot? Of cellphone interference? Of UV light? Were they the “canary in the coal mine,” as the Obama administration suggested, signaling the degradation of the natural world at the hands of man? Possibly. Probably. No one knew. Even to Doan, at the epicenter of the crisis, none of it had made a lick of sense. As a third-generation beekeeper, he and his family had been running bees since the 1950s, and it had been good money; in the 1980s, a thousand hives could earn a beekeeper between $65,000 and $70,000 a year in honey sales alone, not to mention the cash coming in from leasing hives out to farmers to help pollinate their fields. But more than that, it was a way of life that suited Doan. He’d gotten his first hive in 1968, at the age of five, with $15 he’d borrowed from his parents. He paid his way through college with the 150 hives he owned by then, coming home to tend them on the weekends. He was fascinated by the industrious insects. “It’s just that they are such interesting creatures to watch on a daily basis,” he says. In fact, humans have felt this way about honeybees for millennia. In ancient times, they were thought to be prophetic.
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Honey gathering is depicted in cave paintings that date back to the Paleolithic Age. The ancient Egyptians floated bees on rafts down the Nile to get them from one crop to another. While honeybees are not native to North America, they were deemed important enough to be packed up by the Pilgrims, and crossed the Atlantic around 1622 (according to Thomas Jefferson, the Native Americans referred to them as “white man’s flies”). Today, bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food you eat and are an agricultural commodity that’s been valued at $15 billion annually in the U.S. alone. They are a major workforce with a dogged work ethic — bees from one hive can collect pollen from up to 100,000 flowering plants in a single day, pollinating many of them in the process. Americans wouldn’t necessarily starve without them, but our diets would be a lot more bland and a lot less nutritious.
At first, Doan blamed himself. “Before 2006, basically you couldn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “Very seldom did you lose bees unless you were a really bad beekeeper. If you lost one hive a yard, that was a lot.” He racked his brain, trying to figure out what mistakes he might be making. He worried that he was letting his father and grandfather down, that he was letting his son down — even though he knew that other beekeepers were struggling too. Every time a major die-off happened, he tried to regroup, taking the remaining healthy hives, dividing them in two and buying new queens to stock them, but the constant splitting meant that the new colonies were weaker and less established than the ones before. Doan grew more and more depressed. “I was just mentally exhausted,” he tells me. “I mean, you have to have bees to be a beekeeper. At that point, I truly thought, ‘What’s the point of living?’ ”
By the time Doan got that call from his wife in January 2014, his hives had dwindled from 5,600 in 2006 to 2,300 in 2008 to a mere 275, most of which he now feared were dead. Even the hives that did survive had to be coaxed and coddled. Rather than finding their own food, they needed to be fed. Instead of averaging 124 pounds of honey per hive, they averaged nine.
Doan never really considered the possibility that the fault might not be his own until scientists at Penn State who had been testing his bees told him of news coming out of France that pointed the finger at a relatively new class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics. The first commercially successful neonicotinoid compound was synthesized by agrochemical giant Bayer
CropScience in 1985, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that they began to be used extensively. Compared to older, more toxic insecticides, neonics certainly seemed to be a win-win: Though neurotoxins, they mess with insect brains far more than those of mammals, and their application is a breeze. All a farmer need do is sow a seed coated in neonics and the water-soluble chemicals get drawn back up into the plant as it grows. Referred to as systemic insecticides, they spread through the plant, making it resistant to predators. Neonics don’t require repeated applications in a hazmat suit. Rain can’t wash them away — but then again, neither can your kitchen faucet (unless you’re eating strictly organic, you’re eating neonicotinoids all the time). Doan knew his hives had tested positive for the neonicotinoid clothianidin, but the results had seemed dubious because clothianidin wasn’t even registered for use in New York state. That’s when he learned that neonic-coated seeds weren’t subject to the same regulations as sprayed pesticides, meaning that seeds couldn’t be treated in New York, but they could be purchased elsewhere and then planted there, with no one the wiser. Furthermore, studies demonstrated that bees exposed to sublethal amounts of these neonicotinoids showed
a loss in cognitive functions, including their ability to navigate home. To Doan, this seemed like a breakthrough — a perfect explanation for why his bees hadn’t just been dying, but disappearing altogether. He testified at the Environmental Protection Agency. He testified in front of Congress. He was interviewed for a Time magazine article on neonics in 2013, the very same year a report by the European Food Safety Authority showed “high acute risks” to bees from neonics and the European Union issued a ban on the three that are most widely used. Meanwhile, the Saving America’s Pollinators Act, a congressional bill introduced in 2013 by Reps. John Conyers and Earl Blumenauer that would have taken neonics off the market until their safety was more definitively proven, never made it out of committee. (The bill was reintroduced this spring, but its fate remains uncertain.) Doan waited expectantly for the EPA to step in and address the situation: “When I first started learning about this, I’m like, ‘Well, the EPA’s there to protect us. We don’t have to worry about this, because the EPA’s here to help.’”But as the years passed and the use of neonics spread, it started to seem that maybe the EPA wasn’t there to
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help beekeepers after all. To Doan, the mystery of colony collapse disorder deepened. He no longer wondered what was killing his bees; he wondered why steps weren’t being taken to save them. In the past decade, neonicotinoid insecticides have gone from little-known chemical compounds to the most commonly used insecticides in the world. Virtually every genetically modified corn seed and at least a third of soybeans that are planted in this country are coated in these toxins. According to conservative estimates, neonics are used on 100 million acres of American farmland, though the real number is probably much higher. More than 90 percent of corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically modified; they cover an estimated 89 million and 85 million acres, respectively. A 2012 U.S. Department of Agriculture survey found neonics in 30 percent of cauliflower, 22 percent of cherry tomatoes and in more than a fourth of bell peppers. In 2011, the Food and Drug Administration found them in 29 percent of baby food. Neonics may have come on the scene rapidly, but their adoption is due to forces that have been at play for decades, starting
with the Dust Bowl, which cleared the Midwest of many small family farms and left massive tracts of land available to be bought up cheaply. For large farms and corporations, it made the most economic sense to plant huge expanses of only one crop and to maximize the space by clearing the land of any other vegetation, a system known as monoculture. While good for business, monoculture is disastrous for biodiversity, wiping out beneficial species that need more varied habitats and diets, and also creating a smorgasbord for pests that prey on a single crop. (If every plant for miles blooms only two weeks a year, bees have nothing to eat for the other 50.) Some of these monocultural crops rely on migratory beekeeping, a system in which hives are trucked in to pollinate a crop as it blooms and then hauled over to the next crop when the blooms are gone. Of the roughly 2,000 American beekeepers who own 300 hives or more, about two-thirds are migratory. (“Everybody knows everybody, because there aren’t a whole lot of us,” Doan says.) It’s not a perfect system — an 18-wheeler isn’t exactly a bee’s natural habitat, after all, and beekeepers expect to lose a
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handful of their hives due to the stress of all that travel — but it’s a system that’s been in place in this country for decades, long before colony collapse disorder struck. Up until recently, the bees were all right. What weren’t all right were the crops. Monoculture not only provides a feast for pests, necessitating the use of a whole lot of insecticide, but it is also a perfect petri dish for insects to grow resistance. Genetically modified crops were meant to be less harmful than chemical applications, changing the plant itself to ward off predators. But altering genes can only protect a plant so much. Where modifications were found to be inadequate, neonics were adopted to pick up the slack. Chemical companies have always faced a conundrum: How do you kill the plants you don’t want without killing the ones you do, and how do you kill harmful insects without killing beneficial ones? That neonic insecticides can kill honeybees is not up for debate. If an unlucky bee flies into a cloud of dust kicked up when coated seeds are planted, she’ll die on the spot. What is contested, however, is the severity of the effects that
might arise from tiny, sublethal exposures to neonics over the course of a worker bee’s six-week lifespan as she gathers pollen and nectar that is laced with trace amounts — and what happens when she brings this pollen and nectar back to the hive. A 2014 study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found that 90 percent of honey tested positive for at least one neonic, and 50 percent contained at least two. It’s true that honeybees can metabolize these toxins quickly, but that also makes them difficult to detect. According to a report released in April by the European Academies Science Advisory Council, the effects are cumulative. Like an allergy, the response could get worse with repeated exposure. “It’s the perfect crime,” says Jeff Anderson, a beekeeper who is on the board of directors of the Pollinator Stewardship Council. “Neonics don’t necessarily kill on first exposure — they can kill many months later.” Which has been a hard concept for many beekeepers to wrap their heads around. Doan says that only about 30 percent agree with him that neonics are specifically to blame. “These beekeepers grew up with pesticides where you’d see the damage
right away, and they still expect that sort of causeand-effect relationship,” Doan tells me. “People don’t look at what happened two months ago as affecting them today.”
recent study published in Nature showed that rather than avoiding neonics, as had been hypothesized, bees actually prefer them — they are related to nicotine, after all.)
And the truth of the matter is that the world right now isn’t the friendliest place for bees, even with pesticides out of the picture. Since the 1980s, honeybees have been preyed on by a nasty little blood-sucking, disease-spreading mite known as the varroa destructor, and thus have to contend with the miticides beekeepers apply to hives (miticides, mind you, that have the tricky task of killing one bug that literally lives on another). Meanwhile, there’s a plethora of new bee pathogens emerging at warp speed, plus ever-shrinking habitats and the aforementioned stresses of a migratory lifestyle. All of which is why entomologists like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who was part of the group that gave colony collapse disorder its name, caution against assigning just one cause to what is no doubt a complex problem. Certainly, each of these issues exacerbates the others: A hungry, stressed-out bee will be more susceptible to toxins, and eating neonics has been shown to cause bees to eat less. (In fact, a
Despite all these factors, Doan and many others feel strongly that neonicotinoids were the final stressor in a cascade of them, and the one that tipped the scales — and that discussion of other potential causes deflects attention away from neonics, which chemical companies are at pains to do. At the very least, the industry — particularly Bayer and Syngenta, the major manufacturers of neonics — doesn’t dispel the confusion. They argue that there are more hives in America now than there were five years ago (which is true, but only because beekeepers constantly have to divide their colonies to make up for losses); that bees are thriving in a sea of neonic-infused canola in Canada (“If someone’s pointing you to a study and saying, ‘Look, it shows no harm,’ you might want to see if it’s a canola field,” says Lori Ann Burd, the environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “For whatever reason, honeybees seem to experience significantly less harm in canola fields
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than in other fields”); and that any study that sees significant harm to bees after neonic dosing had methodological errors or used too high a dose. “The basic principle of toxicology and risk assessment is ‘the dose makes the poison,’”says David Fischer, the chief bee researcher at Bayer CropScience. “Or to put it another way, all substances are toxic, but what differentiates a poison from a remedy is the dose.” Industry scientists emphasize that no one cause can explain the bee die-offs. “I don’t think that we can deny that if a bee is exposed to a pesticide, there’s not stress there,” says Jay Overmyer, technical lead of Syngenta’s Ecological Risk Assessment. “But it all goes back to the fact that there are multiple stressors, and they all
have to be taken into consideration.” To assess how, or how much, neonics affect bees, many look to Europe, where the neonic ban has been in place for almost two years; yet the ban’s outcome is still inconclusive, in part because of the persistence of the chemicals. Studies have shown that neonics can persist in the ground for years and that some neonic compounds break down into substances even more toxic than the parent product. This past January, a task force of 29 independent scientists reported that they had reviewed more than 800 recent, peer-reviewed studies on systemic insecticides and determined that sublethal effects of neonics are very, very bad for bees indeed. But Fischer, the scientist at Bayer — which reportedly made
$262 million in sales of the neonic clothianidin in 2009 alone — says that he doesn’t see the study as being objective and that Bayer’s research shows the opposite. ”This is an inherent problem because it’s very easy to spin these things in a million directions,” says Greg Loarie, a staff attorney for Earthjustice. “There are ways in which you can downplay the negative and prejudice the outcome.” In fact, the greatest indication of what a study will find is often who is conducting or financing it. (A press contact at Syngenta sent me studies that ostensibly showed that neonics were not harming bees: The first was conducted by Syngenta employees; the second was funded by Bayer.) Through it all, the loss of honeybees has continued
apace, with an average of 30 percent of hives dying every year. Classic cases of CCD — in which the bees literally vanish — are now relatively uncommon. These days, beekeepers often find dead bees in or near the hive, implying that whatever is killing them is doing so acutely — or the colonies slowly dwindle until there is nothing left. Supposedly standing guard between the tiny pollinators and the agrochemical giants is the EPA. It’s the EPA’s job to parse all this, and if not to fully protect the environment, per se, then at least to make sure that one particular industry doesn’t ruin nature to such an extent that it too drastically hurts the bottom line of others. In 1972, revisions to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and
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Rodenticide Act placed the responsibility on manufacturers to provide the safety data for the products they make, the idea being that American taxpayers should not cover the bill for tests done to products that financially benefit private companies. In practice, what this means is that the studies provided to the EPA when a product is up for approval are, by law, generated and submitted by the manufacturer of that product. Jim Jones, the assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention at the EPA, maintains that compliance monitoring is designed to keep companies honest: “They have to generate the data according to good laboratory practices, and our scientists review this.” Loarie, the attorney for Earthjustice, isn’t so sure. “I think there are many, many opportunities for the data to be played with,” he says. Also of concern then is the fact that agrochemical companies are not only responsible for reporting how much environmental exposure a pesticide might have, they’re likewise responsible for submitting to the EPA’s review the lethal dose for non-target organisms — what amount it would take to kill 50 percent of a population. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse,” says Ramon Seidler, a former senior research scientist in charge of the GMO Biosafe-
ty Research Program at the EPA. “And the fox is the one collecting the eggs and bringing them to the regulators.” Even if the EPA wanted to test a product itself, the agency isn’t set up that way. EPA scientists are meant to review studies conducted by others (including independent research), not to conduct studies themselves. It can take the agency two to three years to do a full review of a commercial product. “And with 80,000-some-odd of these chemicals to do?” says Seidler. “My God, it’s an impossible task.” For this reason, regulators mainly consider a compound’s active ingredient, which, as the entomologist vanEngelsdorp explains, can be problematic. “There is data that the inert ingredients may be having a negative effect on colonies on their own,” he says. “Or that in combination with the active ingredient, they’re much more toxic than they were before.” Nor are regulators generally considering the combinations of multiple insecticides and herbicides sometimes coated on a single seed or how any of this might interact with the other agrochemicals applied to crops, a chemical bath that the program director for the Pollinator Stewardship Council, Michele Colopy, calls “meth in the field.”
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“We do look for some obvious interactions, but you can’t test for every possible combination of chemicals that might occur out in the real world,” says Fischer. Yet it’s unclear what the agrochemical companies are testing: Because they contain “proprietary information,” the insecticides’ nonactive ingredients are not publicly disclosed. Despite these limitations, many feel that the body of evidence against neonics is strong enough that the EPA should be taking a stand. Which raises certain questions. “Why did the Europeans put a hold on the use of neonicotinoids?” Seidler asks. “And why
did the EPA look at that and stare it right in the face and say, ‘No’?” Why is the EPA not restricting neonics when another government agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, announced that it would phase them out on national wildlife refuges by 2016? In fact, just three days after the European ban was announced, the USDA/EPA National Stakeholders Conference on Honey Bee Health issued its report in which the potential harm posed by neonics was not mentioned at all in the executive summary. “That really got to me,” says Dr. Eric Chivian, founder and
former director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. “There was huge international press attention that the EU banned the most widely used insecticides in the world because of concern about honeybees, and the part of the report most people read doesn’t even mention them?” At the EPA/USDA Pollinator Summit in March 2013, less than two months after the EU issued its initial neonic warnings, “Half the speakers were from industry,” says Chivian. “It would be as if the Surgeon General held a conference on the dangers of smoking and half the speakers were from Big Tobacco.” No one is saying that what the EPA is tasked with comes easy. “Go after Congress,” Seidler says. “They are the ones who are not providing a sufficient budget for the EPA and other regulatory scientists to stay up with industry discoveries.” Indeed, the number of laboratories serving the office of the pesticide program at the EPA has dropped from a reported dozen in 1971 to two today, which means it’s very difficult for the EPA to keep pace with industry. “It’s always a challenge,” says the EPA’s Jones, who maintains that despite the difficulties, the agency is resourced and operating adequately. But according to Loarie, “They’re using 20th-century method-
ologies to test 21st-century pesticides. The EPA still doesn’t appreciate the extent to which systemic pesticides are different.” With their livelihoods in the balance, beekeepers have grown frustrated with the EPA’s lack of action. “I’ve been going to Washington for years working on these issues, basically asking them to do their job, and my experience has been that generally the agencies don’t understand, and their approach doesn’t get to the heart of the problem,” says Zac Browning, a fourth-generation Idaho beekeeper who lost 50 percent of his hives in 2009. “On the ground, we’re not seeing results.” What beekeepers are seeing, however, is that chemical companies — and their lobbyists — seem effective at fighting off tougher standards. “The problem is that industry knocks on the door and walks in,” says Doan. “Beekeepers knock on the door, and it’s like, ‘Hold on, we’ll see you in a while.’ Industry has an open door into the EPA and beekeepers do not.” There has been some effort to address bee mortality. This past May, President Obama unveiled a strategy to promote honeybee health that did not call for a restriction on insecticides, but did request that pollinator habitat be improved
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by restoring 7 million acres of land and water. “The president is ordering specific action on a bug, you know? This is the first time anything like this has happened,” says Burd of the Center for Biological Diversity. And in April, the EPA announced that it would not approve new outdoor uses of neonicotinoids “until the data on pollinator health have been received and appropriate risk assessments completed.” This data involves not just looking at how neonic exposure affects individual bees, but how it affects the whole hive. “To evaluate this, we had to create a completely new test,” says Jones. “It just did not exist when these chemicals were first put on the market.” But beekeepers and activists question why the agency would continue to allow any use at all if the data they have is, by their own admission, incomplete. “We wouldn’t be doing the work if I knew what the answer was,” Jones says of the new hive studies. And in April, the EPA announced that it would not approve new outdoor uses of neonicotinoids “until the data on pollinator health have been received and appropriate risk assessments completed.” This data involves not just looking at how neonic exposure affects individual bees, but how it affects the whole hive. “To evaluate this, we had to create a completely new test,”
says Jones. “It just did not exist when these chemicals were first put on the market.” But beekeepers and activists question why the agency would continue to allow any use at all if the data they have is, by their own admission, incomplete. “We wouldn’t be doing the work if I knew what the answer was,” Jones says of the new hive studies. Then again, the EPA doesn’t have to have all the answers. Through its process of “conditional registration,” new chemicals can in certain circumstances enter the market before a company has submitted all the tests requested by the EPA. Jones maintains that a conditional approval would never be granted without “reasonable certainty of no harm.” Unlike in Europe — which operates under the precautionary principle — chemicals in America are often given the benefit of the doubt. While Seidler is quick to say that the EPA scientists he worked with were “good people, hardworking, rigorous,” he did not feel like the work theyw passed on to the regulatory arm of the agency was appropriately heeded. “They supported our research, they supported us within the agency, they made it very clear that we were doing the right kinds of things that would help the regulators,” he says. “But although we provided a lot of documentation, I never became aware that
our regulators ever required industry to do any of the things we thought would be relevant for them to do.” As to why the industry seems to be running roughshod over regulators, he’s more blunt: “It’s corporate greed over environmental safety — and I have to live with this knowledge every day.” As Jim Doan delved deeper into the mystery of why his bees were dying, he wasn’t surprised to learn of the lengths big conglomerates might go to protect their bottom line and manipulate the system; he was surprised to learn how easily it seemed that the system could be manipulated. After all, bees themselves are an important commodity. It takes 60 percent of all the commercial honeybees in this country just to pollinate the almond crop in California. Pesticides may cut down on losses, but it’s pollination that increases yields. And without bees, crops would be devastated — in one province of China where wild bees were eradicated, farmers have been forced to hand-pollinate their apple orchards, a painstaking, highly labor-intensive process. The USDA reports that 10 million beehives have been lost since 2006, at a $2 billion cost to beekeepers (by contrast, in 2009 alone, the sale of neonics brought in $2.6 billion globally). In the past year’s tally, hive losses were up to 42
percent, and for the first time ever, more losses were reported in the summer, when bees typically thrive, than the winter. No one knows exactly why. What is known is that the prophylactic use of pesticides is leading to more insect resistance. Instead of applying insecticides periodically, systemics are present from the moment the plant starts to grow to the moment it’s harvested. “It’s no different than the repeated use of antibiotics,” says Seidler, the former biosafety researcher at the EPA. “If you use the same antibiotic every time you sneeze, you are going to select for a population of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” GMO supporters may claim that fewer insecticides are being used, but seed coatings aren’t included in that tally. “When you count that in, along with other pesticides sprayed at the time of planting, the industry is not using less insecticide,” Seidler says. “It’s using more. Industry is trying to make the point that our farmers would be in a crisis without using those neonic-coated seeds” — or that they would have to resort to using more toxic chemicals — but the EPA’s own recent study showed that growing soybeans without neonics had little or no effect on yields. “Our farmers are paying for something that’s not of any benefit,” says Seidler.
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It’s not in the interest of agrochemical companies to modify crops so that they don’t require insecticides: These companies make the GM seeds, and they make the chemicals to treat the GM plants once bugs and weeds develop resistance. “These are not purveyors of seeds, per se,” says Seidler. “They are chemical companies, and chemical companies get profits by selling chemicals. So they have an internal conflict of interest. Don’t expect them to be using less and less chemicals — that does not fit their business plan.” Of course, any ideology, whether it’s capitalism or environmentalism, has the potential to be biased, and when it comes to the plight of the bees, it’s tempting to have someone or something to blame. It’s possible that in time, neonics could prove to be a limited factor in bee die-offs, a single leak in a sinking ship, as entomologist May Berenbaum has put it. But right now, the best that can be said of these chemicals is that we are pumping toxins into our environment without understanding exactly what implications they have. “If you take your car to 10 mechanics, and eight tell you that you urgently need to replace your brakes, are you really going to wait for two more to call you back?” asks Burd. “Our pollinators are tanking, and this has all kinds of con-
sequences for humans and the ecosystem. And we’re going to do more studies?” Indeed, bees are not the only stakeholders in determining the non-target effects of neonics. They are what’s referred to as an “indicator species”: They provide a glimpse into broader environmental impacts, and because commercial honeybees are economic commodities, we pay attention to them in a way we don’t to other insects. Yet if honeybees are suffering, native pollinators are suffering too. In a study published in Nature this past April, honeybee populations exposed to field-realistic doses of neonics were not harmed in the short term, but wild-bee density was reduced by half, indicating that they are especially vulnerable. Other studies show that neonics are affecting earthworms, amphibians and a plethora of species at the bottom of the food chain. The chemicals have also shown up in water sources throughout the Midwest, and at levels known to be toxic to aquatic organisms if exposed over an extended time. A 2013 report done by the American Bird Conservancy found that a single neonic corn kernel can kill a songbird. What harm, if any, they may pose to humans in the long term is unknown. “We don’t have data on neonicotinoids in our bodies because they’re
not included in the panel of pesticides that the CDC’s biomonitoring program evaluates,” says Melissa Perry, president of the American College of Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “These compounds have come on the market so rapidly that they’ve outstripped scientific readiness.” Perry’s research team recently completed a review of all the studies published in English globally on the health effects of neonics on humans and found, to its surprise, that there were only seven. Four looked at acute effects — poisonings — and only three at chronic exposure. Of those three, all of them found adverse effects on children. “There were cases of congen-
ital abnormality, associations with suggestion of autism, associations with suggestion of heart defects, birth defects,” says Perry. Nevertheless, she counsels against using three studies to draw any major conclusions. “The status of the literature is so deficient that we know practically nothing,” she says. What we do know is that some neonics have been shown in rodents to cross the placenta, which has raised concerns that if a pregnant woman ingests the toxins, the developing fetus’ brain could be exposed. “I certainly have spent well over 20 years of my career having to play catch-up on the next chemical,” says Perry. “Do we have to allow decades to elapse before we come to the conclusion that this is the wrong decision?” And if it is, will it be too late to repair the damage? Destroy the bottom of the food chain, and what eventually happens
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at the top? When Jim Doan got down to Florida, where his wife had taken their 275 hives to wait out the cold New York winter, he surveyed the colonies she had given up for dead and found that some of them could be salvaged. Sure, they were ailing, but there was enough life left in them that he thought he’d give beekeeping one last shot. He made a pact with himself that from that moment, his bees would never return home, that he’d keep them away from neonicotinoid pesticides no matter what. He researched places where he could put them, places away from corn and other major GM crops, places where his bees could roam freely and mainly encounter crops that were neonic-free or organic. He leased some land in Amish country, found some safe
havens in Florida. “We’re never going to get 100 percent away from chemicals, because they’re out here. They’re in the water,” Doan says. “But we can at least reduce the amount of susceptibility.” Since making this plan, he says, he has been able to grow his hives up to 1,100 and has not yet experienced a serious die-off. In 2013, he joined a collection of beekeepers who are suing the EPA, not for money, but for regulation. “When you go to the EPA and talk to them, they say, ‘Well, if you don’t like our decisions, then sue us.’ So you have to sue them,” he says. In questioning the EPA’s conditional registration of the neonic clothianidin, the suit not only alleges that the agency has not met its own criteria for granting approval, but also challenges its approval process overall. Two years in, it’s still
in its initial stages of litigation and may not be decided for years. Meanwhile, plans are being made for a time when perhaps bees won’t be around. Scientists at Harvard have tried to make a robotic bee, while agrochemical companies are trying to develop a GM one, resistant to pesticides in the same way GM crops are meant to be resistant to herbicides. They are also touting the benefits of flupyradifurone, a new systemic pesticide that’s supposed to be safer for bees because it’s even more toxic, the idea being that if it kills a bee on the spot, then that bee won’t transport the toxin back to the hive. But, as Doan sees it, it’s not bees that will go extinct first, it’s commercial beekeepers.
that failed three generations of Doans keeping bees. I didn’t want it to end with me,” Doan says. But he knows that he may not have a choice in the matter. “I mean, we want something to pass on, but I’m not sure there’s going to be anything to pass on in another year or two. Just empty boxes.”
“I didn’t want to be the person
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