Not with a buzz but a whimper
by Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint 
on 04.18.07
The most familiar plea made by environmentalists warning us of the immanent disappearance of this or that species is a question: how will we explain the absence of the polar bear, or the manatee, or a certain species of eagle, to our children?
It is certainly a haunting prospect, imagining a world without a host of creatures, and describing things that are familiar to us in terms that will seem to children as fantastic as the creatures of their imaginations, or as strange and wonderful as the species that our ancestors hunted to extinction long ago.
It’s an effective argument, because when we imagine the absent animals and the wide-eyed kids, we also imagine ourselves as sad and remorseful.
It’s probably fair to say that mammals inspire more than their fair share of remorse. It’s not clear exactly why we need to save the harp seals, apart from the fact that it seems like the right thing to do, which appears to be the case in large part because they have big, round eyes, and helpless-looking bodies. They look like swaddled babies. Who wouldn’t want to save them? Even people who have never seen, and will likely never see one in the flesh, are outraged at the prospect that they may be clubbed to extinction.
However, the creature I’m most worried about right now is not a mammal. It’s an insect: the humble bee.
Stories have been trickling out in the past few weeks about the mysterious disappearance of bees around the world. In the US, some beekeepers lost as much as 90 percent of their bees over the winter. In the UK, the upper range has been 75 percent. The story is the same in Canada and Europe.
I’m not worried about the price of honey, or its disappearance from store shelves (though I can imagine telling children a generation from now about a wonderfully sweet food harvested from the nests of insects). I am rather more worried about the cascading effects of the bees’ disappearance from our ecosystems and economies. The work bees do to pollinate our crops is worth about ten times as much as the honey they produce almost incidentally. In Canada alone, bees contribute about a billion dollars to the economy. Worldwide, the number is staggering. And it does not include the ancillary ecological benefits, which are impossible to value.
And it’s not just money that will disappear without bees. It’s also food. About a third of our crops are pollinated by bees. Who will pollinate them if not the bees? Albert Einstein once said that if the bees were to disappear, "man would have only four years of life left.” Let’s hope he was wrong.
No one knows what is causing the bees’ disappearance, so it is too early to invoke climate change, or the Stern Review’s accounting for “ecosystem services” as part of the cost of global warming. But that’s not really the point. Recent speculation has it that cell-phone radiation is killing the hives. Perhaps that is so. But if your dog is run over, you don’t wring your hands and wonder whether it was a car or a truck that killed the poor animal. You wring your hands at your own loss and the senseless death. It seems to me that this is the appropriate response to the deaths of so many bees.
Because, whatever it is that is killing the bees, and whatever the economic and ecological cost will be, the disappearance of species is something we’re going to have to get used to. Perhaps these are not the right words, since we seem all too used to it already. But there is more in store.
The recent IPCC report warns that massive extinctions await us. Even one degree of warming exposes about 30 percent of the planet’s species to extinction, and we are already committed to at least one degree of warming, by most accounts. Moreover, even expensive and deliberate attempts to protect species look doomed in many cases to fail. Keep in mind that the IPCC reports are generally deemed very conservative, because they contain only data and conclusions that all parties can agree on.
Bees may contribute heroically to our economies, but they are only one species among many thousands at risk. What will the consequences be of widespread extinctions?
But in the end, this is not an economic issue. It is a moral issue, as the question of how we will describe long-lost bees to our grandchildren shows us. In mythology and in literature, bees have always represented what is best in human nature: industriousness, cooperation, sweetness, the soul. This should give a sense of what is at stake.
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Bees are not charismatic megafauna, but they are incredibly important. They suffer from prejudice because most people look on all bugs as nuisances.
And it's not likely that whatever replaces honeybees will be at all helpful to humankind. Killer bees, for example, don't make honey. And the most productive honeybees have, for thousands of years, have been selected for productivity throughout their interaction with mankind.
i agree with your lament but i think it misses the bigger point...how many great grandchildren can we really have, assuming we lose the utility and services of the bees, along with, conservatively, 30% of all species.
that's not the stuff of a sad song. that's survival.
Do you lament the passing of the passenger pigeon to your children? How about the disappearance of squirrel migrations as documented in the Lewis and Clark Expedition journals? We do hear about the American bison being decimated, but only because it's tied to the ruination of American Indian culture.
People, sadly, get by and accept the current status quo unless it somehow impacts their lives negatively in a direct, noticeable manner. Granted the honeybee's disappearance will have a huge impact, but I think it's much too early to write them off.
While I agree we'll be loosing a lot because of climate change, I'm not sure you can count bees in that category. We still don't know what's causing CCD, it may be a virus, disease, mite, bad chemical reaction or something else.
Also, i feel i need to point out that it's unclear if that quote is from Einstein at all. http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?p=127316
It's true that another insect will arise that will function as a pollinator, but it's unlikely to have the skill set off the bee, which is truly expert in that role. Their modes of communication, their incredible ability to hover and turn on a dime, their ability to promote themselves by producing a useful product for humankind, no other insect can do this. This could lead to an agricultural crisis. No car can run without tiny ball bearings.
I've been talking to local beekeepers and they inform me that the wild bees have not recovered from the mite infestations that decimated them (and commercial bees) in the last few years. The loss of commercial honeybees will not be made up by feral bee pollination because the feral bees are pretty much already gone.
This has been depressing me for the last couple of weeks. I keep on thinking that it is too late to stop the spiral of destruction but I await the opinion of John Todd, the ecological designer and an old friend. He seems to have some ideas on what can be done.
I second the cavil on the Einstein quote.
"Do you lament the passing of the passenger pigeon to your children?"
yes i do, the passenger pigeon's story is horrible, the most abundant bird in north america, population estimated in the billions, decimated a little over a hundred years. The great auk similar story, they were just shot for fun on many accounts. People do lament over such ridiculous acts and you can guarantee that our children will as well. Extinction is a serious and horrible thing especially when the cause is so easy to prevent.
The real lament will start when the cost of a loaf of bread hits $10 as a result of wheat scarcity.
Are bees really just the one species? In the UK for example, people are encouraged to create places in their gardens where 'solitary Mason bees' can hole up (and incidentally pollinate their plants). Or are these just honey-bees in one particular stage in their life?
With respect, I feel the author has missed the point. Bees, and other pollinators, are not something we'll merely look back upon and tell our wide-eyed great grandchildren about with a nostalgic tear in our eye, they're omens of our own extinction. Have we become so detached from reality that we cannot see that we cannot feed off the teats of our tractors and our factories? Man is more dependent on this world, then the world is on us. We're overlooking this realisation as we sweep aside the environment and turn it into a factory floor.
Some readers may find this post on Colony Collapse Disorder of interest.
wheat and soy beans are self pollinators. bread may be $10 a loaf but not due to lack of wheat.
Hmmm. I take issue with some of what is said in the celsias blog. In what i looked at there's some good info, but there's also some misleading simplifications.
Also, I'd say with CCD the only choice we have is to had the keys over to the scientists. living simply and buying organic food is all well and good, but in this case we need to find out what's causing it and get it banned, now. the only way to do that is in the laboratory and the legislature.
In Canada the bee industry is worth $100 million annually but typically returns $1 Billion to her economy, especially by bolstering Canola yields.
Bees will bee hit hard by climate change. I encourage everyone to make www.everyclick.com their search engine and IBRA (Interenational Bee Research Association) their selected charity. One cent from every search will then go to a bee journal that will hopefully facilitate apiculture research.
So happens I've written a story about honeybees myself.
I'd invite you to visit my blog & give it a read.
Just go to
www.earthkeeperfarm.blogspot.com
& scroll to "Lament for the Honeybee" on the 1st page.
Thanks!