Who is Killing Nature's Precious Bees?
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 08.15.06
How important are bees? One-third of the food we eat comes from crops that need animal pollinators. "Without the services of managed honeybees, provided by migratory beekeepers, billions of dollars' worth of crops across the United States would fail." Unfortunately, as we pointed out before, there was a there was a 57% decline in bee colonies in the US between 1985 and 1997. One of the things responsible for that decline is the use of pesticides by farmers in their fields and by consumers around their homes and gardens.
Here's a preview of what might happen if we don't start taking better care of bees:
American agriculture is addicted to honeybees -- and in the past few years has begun to run short of them. Anderson's spring starts in February, when the almonds in California's Central Valley come into bloom. California has more than 580,000 acres planted in almonds, though commercial beekeepers living full-time in the state hold enough bee colonies to pollinate only about half that acreage.In the spring of 2005, many of the migratory beekeepers who work the California almond bloom discovered that their colonies had suffered heavy losses during the winter. [...] The result was a pollinator panic in the Central Valley. [...] Beekeepers traveled from as far away as Florida and North Carolina to service California's almond groves. For the first time in 50 years, U.S. borders were opened to honeybees from New Zealand and Australia. The fate of a $1.2 billion crop -- more than half of all almond production worldwide -- rested on the slender back of the embattled honeybee. [...]
In the long run, our own survival is deeply entwined with the lives of bees. And the bees' survival depends on the ways we manage not only rural farms, but also city parks and gardens and the landscape of suburban America, where native bees can survive in even small patches of habitat, such as native shrubs and plants. "There's an economic benefit to taking care of native bees," says Thorp. "But until people understand this, they won't spend time and effort on it."
August 2006 is the deadline for the US Food Quality Protection Act passed in 1996 by congress (thanks to the NRDC, among others). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has to reassess the safety of all pesticides now on the market. Unfortunately, the EPA is keeping on the market very dangerous broad spectrum insecticides like carbaryl (known as Sevin).
About 3.9 million pounds of carbaryl are sold annually in the U.S. for agriculture, lawns, and gardens. Carbaryl is classified as likely to cause cancer in humans, and is known to cause nausea, dizziness, and even respiratory paralysis and death in extreme cases. It is harmful to wildlife and highly toxic to bees and aquatic wildlife, including Atlantic salmon. It has been implicated in numerous worker poisonings, bee-kills, and fish-kills, and is one of the most common pesticide pollutants in rivers and streams. Carbaryl is also a serious risk for endangered species; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has indicated that continued use of carbaryl may endanger more than 80 wildlife species. Because of these and other related risks posed by carbaryl -- and given the availability of less toxic alternatives -- NRDC in 2005 led a coalition of public interest groups who petitioned the EPA to eliminate its use; EPA has not yet responded to this request.
We must reconsider our approach to agriculture fast before more irreparable damage is caused. Brute force doesn't work for long; what farmers consider "pests" are killed along with nature's most useful workers, but the poison doesn't disappear after doing that, it stays in the food chain for a long time. ::The Vanishing, ::Unexpected Haven for Bees. See also: ::Please Sign This NRDC Petition, ::Video: NRDC TV - South by Southwest, ::TreeHuggerTV: NRDC Does Bonnaroo, ::NRDC: Shopper's Guide for Paper Products, ::Blue Whale Nursery in Patagonia's Golfo Corcovado
What makes the situation even worse is that since the 1980s honey bees have been plagued by various parasitic mites. This is also a major cause of the declining honey bee populations.
I love bees, and reading this post makes me sad. Aside from the fact that I love them, and the fact that widespread death and destruction are bad, maybe this info can wake people (gov't and big business) up and make them realize the implications of their short-sightedness.
This short term thought is to blame for so much of the environmental destruction we spread.
Actually, there was a large article about this lack of honeybees in the Boston Globe some weeks ago that placed most of the blame on a mite (that I cant remember the name of) that burrows into the bees to lay its eggs that then eat their way out. The colonies that are shipped around the country are of a foreign strain that is resistant to this bug. If pesticides were the only problem, these shipped colonies wouldn't fare any better when they came into contact with sprayed crops.
This is the title of the article and author...
CROPS NEED POLLEN - AND CROSS-COUNTRY BEEKEEPERS
Published on June 20, 2006
Author(s): Beth Daley, GLOBE STAFF
I know some vegans do not eat any honey, are there any that will not eat anything that has been pollinated?
It's not quite clear if the mites are really the main factor. Here's a quote from the article this post is based on:
"Many bee experts assumed varroa mites were a major cause of the severe die-off in the winter of 2005. Yet when researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, traveled to Oakdale, California, where Anderson and a number of his fellow beekeepers spend winter and spring, they could find no correlation between the level of varroa mite infestation and the health of bee colonies. "We couldn't pin the blame for the die-off on any single cause," says Jeff Pettis, a research entomologist at the lab.
Anderson has his own ideas about what caused the almond pollination crisis, and what is most responsible for wiping out honeybees across the United States. "Varroa is a bit of a red herring," he says. "One of the biggest problems is irresponsible use of pesticides and the failure of regulators to enforce the rules meant to protect bees from poisoning.""
I am a vegan and I can answer your vegan question =)
There are some vegans who eat honey, I however, do not. The reason is just as simple as the reason why vegans do not eat other animal products, which is because honey bees are often exploited by beekeepers. Bees are bred just for their honey, and the queen is sometimes kept in a cage so that she will not fly away and relocate the colony. Also, since bees do not produce honey during the winter but still need to eat, many beekeepers kill them so they will not need to care for them during the winter. The vegan lifestyle basically is a way of expressing the feeling that we do not believe humans have the right to own, hurt, or exploit any living creatures and do not wish to support such industry. Therefore, I can't think of any reason why a vegan would choose not to eat plants that have been pollinated by bees or other animals, especially since so many plants need to be pollinated to produce their fruit which is the edible part (unless that person wasn't a vegan for the right reasons and didn't really understand the motives behind it!) =)
I am a vegetarian...
this makes me so sad. the world is ending-the ozone layer, the bees, the bear, everything. all because of MAN. I dont want to see this happen, but its the terrible truth.