From the article: If you haven't seen the documentary, The Pollinators, I highly recommend it as an informative investigation of the state of agricultural dependence on farmed bees. The global...
From the article:
Farmers around the world growing fruits, vegetables and nuts rely on bees to pollinate their crops. In many cases bees are trucked through agricultural areas, rather than staying local to one area — but now they cannot travel.
“A third of our food depends on the pollination by bees. The production of those crops could be affected,” said Norberto Garcia of Apimondia, the international federation of beekeepers.
If you haven't seen the documentary, The Pollinators, I highly recommend it as an informative investigation of the state of agricultural dependence on farmed bees. The global practice of migrating honeybee colonies among seasonal monoculture plantations isn't safe or sustainable in the best of times, let alone with COVID-19.
Personally, I think that kind of practice should be reserved for worst-case scenarios, at extremely high costs. Perhaps we wouldn't be having a terrible bee crisis if we moved back to more...
Personally, I think that kind of practice should be reserved for worst-case scenarios, at extremely high costs.
Perhaps we wouldn't be having a terrible bee crisis if we moved back to more sustainable farming methods, including care and cultivation of beehives throughout our farmland.
Not an expert (yet), but the beekeeping classes I've been taking make it clear that there are limitations to use of bees in conventional agriculture. You can't mono-crop, because any given...
Not an expert (yet), but the beekeeping classes I've been taking make it clear that there are limitations to use of bees in conventional agriculture.
You can't mono-crop, because any given agricultural plant species has a limited duration of pollen and nectar production. A hive can only forage within about 4 km radius before the energy expended exceeds the nutrition gained.
If you've seen aerial photos of most agricultural regions, the area given to single plant types vastly exceeds the flight ranges of honeybees, and that's why commercial beekeepers have to truck hives around the country.
That's actually what I was referring to wrt sustainable farming methods. Mono-cropping is dangerous and unsustainable long term. It requires more pesticides and fertilizer to keep the plants alive...
If you've seen aerial photos of most agricultural regions, the area given to single plant types vastly exceeds the flight ranges of honeybees
That's actually what I was referring to wrt sustainable farming methods. Mono-cropping is dangerous and unsustainable long term. It requires more pesticides and fertilizer to keep the plants alive and growing. Those three factors are likely heavily contributing factors to the global bee collapse.
I agree, and it's one of the excellent features of the Pollinators documentary that they spend some time talking about what that kind of farming would look like. Part of what drives the vast...
I agree, and it's one of the excellent features of the Pollinators documentary that they spend some time talking about what that kind of farming would look like.
Part of what drives the vast monocultures in agriculture is mechanization, since each crop has its own speciality equipment. That feeds the system of capitalist rent for all the inputs - land, seeds, chemicals, labor, machinery. Profitability requires maximum utilization and extraction, well beyond the capacity of natural regeneration of ecosystems. [This is Doughnut Economics stuff, also well worth a read.]
It's going to take top-down policy change and monetary support for poor people's nutrition, because the overall decrease in yield per hectare for sustainable farming practices will likely be around 10 - 20% at the outset, with some increases in labor costs. There's evidence that sustainable organic practices can approach conventional yields over time, as soil and other ecosystems recover.
The other detail is that honeybees aren't the only pollinators, just the convenient, domesticated, efficient ones that also produce their own extractive crop of honey. If farms leave natural native meadow strips and don't ecocide the entire landscape with repeated chemical applications, then the other pollinators can recover and help when honeybees aren't transported.
In addition, a lot of the others are also having troubles, like butterflies. Or they are way nastier, like wasps. Bees can sting you, but only once and they die. Wasps can sting you forever, and...
honeybees aren't the only pollinators, just the convenient, domesticated, efficient ones that also produce their own extractive crop of honey.
In addition, a lot of the others are also having troubles, like butterflies. Or they are way nastier, like wasps. Bees can sting you, but only once and they die. Wasps can sting you forever, and thus will do so with far less provocation.
It's the traveling that's at issue. California, a state with a flat COVID-19 caseload, might not want beekeepers from hotspot states like Michigan to send multiple semi-trucks. I'd think it's a...
It's the traveling that's at issue. California, a state with a flat COVID-19 caseload, might not want beekeepers from hotspot states like Michigan to send multiple semi-trucks. I'd think it's a manageable risk, but there's not a lot of room for error here.
It undoubtedly is... but this is kind of an unprecedented situation and it's not like legislators have a playbook to follow here, so IMO it's very likely that this particular issue is something...
I would hope "possibility of starvation caused by massive crop loss" would be at the top of the list.
It undoubtedly is... but this is kind of an unprecedented situation and it's not like legislators have a playbook to follow here, so IMO it's very likely that this particular issue is something they simply aren't even aware of as being a potential problem. But thankfully raising these sort of issues is exactly what the press is good at (and industry lobbyists), and so hopefully with this article and all the others that have come out recently about the similar issues with the lockdown disrupting our agricultural processes, this will make its way up the chain and get worked out. E.g. by a representative pushing to have the beekeepers' paperwork fast tracked, or granting them travel restriction exemptions.
Unfortunately, commercial beekeepers aren't organized or profitable enough to have vast lobbying machinery, nor are the plethora of different crop farmers for which they provide services. The $2.6...
Unfortunately, commercial beekeepers aren't organized or profitable enough to have vast lobbying machinery, nor are the plethora of different crop farmers for which they provide services. The $2.6 billion profits (2014) from a single class of pesticides (e.g. neonicotinoids) exceeded the total beekeeping industry revenues (including honey production, not just pollination).
This is a structural problem in agriculture globally. Artificially cheap food means low revenues, and a vast undervaluation of the importance of nutrition, labor and input costs.
Former beekeeper here. My info is now a few years out of date, but when I was doing it, the almond industry in S California had exploded so much, so fast, that there literally weren't enough bees...
Former beekeeper here.
My info is now a few years out of date, but when I was doing it, the almond industry in S California had exploded so much, so fast, that there literally weren't enough bees on the entire NA continent to pollinate them. Every Feb-Mar, every commercial beekeeper from Canada to Mexico would load up 100s (for a few, 1000s) of hives onto semis and head to Cali. The money they got from the honey was a drop in the bucket, compared to the money they got for the pollination services.
And it still wasn't enough bees. CA almond growers started routinely importing hives from around the world to supplement the "local" hives.
Many beekeepers then believed (probably still do) that this was where CCD originally came from, Cali's indiscriminate importing of foreign hives from anywhere they could find 'em.
WI cranberry farms have a similarly ridiculous pollination cycle. I expect there are dozens of other crops similarly hyper-dependent — not only on bees, but on semi-truckers freely driving bees from one end of the continent (not country) to the other, and back again a month later.
I serially go thru hobbies. After a few months or years, once I've pretty much got the hang of it, I lose interest and move on to the Next Big Thing. Kept bees for about a decade (along with...
I serially go thru hobbies. After a few months or years, once I've pretty much got the hang of it, I lose interest and move on to the Next Big Thing.
Kept bees for about a decade (along with rabbits, chickens, worms, and a wide variety of gardening fruits & veggies ... my Homesteading years).
Among many other things, I'm also a former guitarist, pianist, chess player, and novelist.
I've gone through a few hobbies, but they have an unfortunate tendency to metastasize into professions, and they tend to run in parallel, not serially. I'm just starting to embark on my...
I've gone through a few hobbies, but they have an unfortunate tendency to metastasize into professions, and they tend to run in parallel, not serially. I'm just starting to embark on my homesteading years myself. The gardening bug has come and gone with available time, space, and money. Now I'm adding a bug bug... Quail-keeping will be coming, too. None of these feels like the Next Big Thing yet, but we're all kind of in suspension until COVID-19 passes. At least I can move dirt around in the meantime.
I'll ask the obvious question: why not breed more bees and keep them places rather than truck them around? I understand that climate (and climate change) make it likely deadly for them to live in...
I'll ask the obvious question: why not breed more bees and keep them places rather than truck them around? I understand that climate (and climate change) make it likely deadly for them to live in certain states, but why not augment the hives? Like a heated (or cooled) barn but for bees?
Warning - long answer. There are multiple problems with apiculture under current conditions. It's not just temperature or climate change, but a host of different stressors, including bad...
Exemplary
Warning - long answer.
There are multiple problems with apiculture under current conditions. It's not just temperature or climate change, but a host of different stressors, including bad economics, perverse incentives, and invasive pests and diseases.
Honeybees are themselves a non-native monoculture - Apis mellifera is a European bee species that's been spread globally, continually bred for human needs like tameness and honey yield, not necessarily for universal survival traits.
Because the genetic lines of honeybees are relatively narrow to start with, they're highly susceptible to new pests and diseases. Humans usually have to intervene, both with treatments and to diversify genetics with newly imported queens.
Bees get rapidly selected for local adaptations. Domesticated queens mate with hardy wild drones, and the resulting hives are more specialized for climate or forage that's only available in one place.
Honeybees can only feed themselves when there's sufficient flower bloom that provides pollen and nectar. In a natural environment with forests and meadows, there are hundreds of different plants - trees, flowers, grasses, with many different overlapping blooming periods. This diversity provides a continuous food supply from frost to frost.
Bees store honey to feed themselves through winter, drought, and nectar dearth. A typical hive colony in a cold climate needs about 30 kg of honey to make it from October to April, when nectar and pollen become available again. Responsible beekeepers only take surplus, but honey is such a valuable commodity that many commercial beekeepers take most or all the honey and feed cheaper sugars instead. This creates nutritional stress on the bees until they can forage again.
A crop like almonds only has a few weeks of bloom, almond flowers don't make much nectar, and the fields are continually sprayed with herbicides to suppress any other competing vegetation. After the bloom, there's nothing for bees to live on unless they're continually fed sugar and/or moved.
Pests like Varroa destructor and diseases like Nosema are very easily spread and impossible to control completely without doing other harm to the bees. There are long-term projects to breed resistance, but typical stationary hive losses are around 40 - 50%/year right now, not including pesticide kills.
Stopping now, because I'm kind of obsessive about this stuff.
Okay, just one more batch of details: On the bad economics and perverse incentives front, counterfeit honey is driving beekeepers to unsafe practices, or out of business entirely. Genuine honey...
Okay, just one more batch of details:
On the bad economics and perverse incentives front, counterfeit honey is driving beekeepers to unsafe practices, or out of business entirely. Genuine honey costs about $5 - 10/kg to produce, but colored and flavored rice syrup costs pennies. There's not enough enforcement during importation, processing, and packing to ensure authenticity.
Heat-treated honey and some processed sugars, like high-fructose corn syrup, contain hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a Maillard reaction byproduct. This chemical is highly toxic to bees, but generally regarded as safe for human consumption. It's easy for artificial bee feeds to get contaminated (improper storage in hot climates, etc.), and this is another source of nutritional stress.
We've probably all heard by now about the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on pollinators. One thing not mentioned is that they have years-long environmental half-lives. Even if all use stopped now, it will take several years for the effects to cease.
Short version ... keeping bees is both expensive and technically complicated ... and making 1000s of extra hives to just sit around 11 months/year for the 1 month your crop actually needs them...
Short version ... keeping bees is both expensive and technically complicated ... and making 1000s of extra hives to just sit around 11 months/year for the 1 month your crop actually needs them would be prohibitive.
ETA: Beekeepers tend to lose about 1 hive in 3 or 4 every winter (both North and South), and must constantly buy and/or breed (and then gradually nurse up to full strength) new colonies to replace those lost. It's just a really hard, never-ending battle against disease & parasites.
Current official stats on hive losses are at 40 - 50%, mostly due to Varroa plus neonics. With replacement colony costs running $100 - $150/hive depending on genetics, it's a loser's industry...
Current official stats on hive losses are at 40 - 50%, mostly due to Varroa plus neonics. With replacement colony costs running $100 - $150/hive depending on genetics, it's a loser's industry right now.
From the article:
If you haven't seen the documentary, The Pollinators, I highly recommend it as an informative investigation of the state of agricultural dependence on farmed bees. The global practice of migrating honeybee colonies among seasonal monoculture plantations isn't safe or sustainable in the best of times, let alone with COVID-19.
Personally, I think that kind of practice should be reserved for worst-case scenarios, at extremely high costs.
Perhaps we wouldn't be having a terrible bee crisis if we moved back to more sustainable farming methods, including care and cultivation of beehives throughout our farmland.
Not an expert (yet), but the beekeeping classes I've been taking make it clear that there are limitations to use of bees in conventional agriculture.
You can't mono-crop, because any given agricultural plant species has a limited duration of pollen and nectar production. A hive can only forage within about 4 km radius before the energy expended exceeds the nutrition gained.
If you've seen aerial photos of most agricultural regions, the area given to single plant types vastly exceeds the flight ranges of honeybees, and that's why commercial beekeepers have to truck hives around the country.
That's actually what I was referring to wrt sustainable farming methods. Mono-cropping is dangerous and unsustainable long term. It requires more pesticides and fertilizer to keep the plants alive and growing. Those three factors are likely heavily contributing factors to the global bee collapse.
I agree, and it's one of the excellent features of the Pollinators documentary that they spend some time talking about what that kind of farming would look like.
Part of what drives the vast monocultures in agriculture is mechanization, since each crop has its own speciality equipment. That feeds the system of capitalist rent for all the inputs - land, seeds, chemicals, labor, machinery. Profitability requires maximum utilization and extraction, well beyond the capacity of natural regeneration of ecosystems. [This is Doughnut Economics stuff, also well worth a read.]
It's going to take top-down policy change and monetary support for poor people's nutrition, because the overall decrease in yield per hectare for sustainable farming practices will likely be around 10 - 20% at the outset, with some increases in labor costs. There's evidence that sustainable organic practices can approach conventional yields over time, as soil and other ecosystems recover.
The other detail is that honeybees aren't the only pollinators, just the convenient, domesticated, efficient ones that also produce their own extractive crop of honey. If farms leave natural native meadow strips and don't ecocide the entire landscape with repeated chemical applications, then the other pollinators can recover and help when honeybees aren't transported.
In addition, a lot of the others are also having troubles, like butterflies. Or they are way nastier, like wasps. Bees can sting you, but only once and they die. Wasps can sting you forever, and thus will do so with far less provocation.
It's the traveling that's at issue. California, a state with a flat COVID-19 caseload, might not want beekeepers from hotspot states like Michigan to send multiple semi-trucks. I'd think it's a manageable risk, but there's not a lot of room for error here.
It undoubtedly is... but this is kind of an unprecedented situation and it's not like legislators have a playbook to follow here, so IMO it's very likely that this particular issue is something they simply aren't even aware of as being a potential problem. But thankfully raising these sort of issues is exactly what the press is good at (and industry lobbyists), and so hopefully with this article and all the others that have come out recently about the similar issues with the lockdown disrupting our agricultural processes, this will make its way up the chain and get worked out. E.g. by a representative pushing to have the beekeepers' paperwork fast tracked, or granting them travel restriction exemptions.
Unfortunately, commercial beekeepers aren't organized or profitable enough to have vast lobbying machinery, nor are the plethora of different crop farmers for which they provide services. The $2.6 billion profits (2014) from a single class of pesticides (e.g. neonicotinoids) exceeded the total beekeeping industry revenues (including honey production, not just pollination).
This is a structural problem in agriculture globally. Artificially cheap food means low revenues, and a vast undervaluation of the importance of nutrition, labor and input costs.
Former beekeeper here.
My info is now a few years out of date, but when I was doing it, the almond industry in S California had exploded so much, so fast, that there literally weren't enough bees on the entire NA continent to pollinate them. Every Feb-Mar, every commercial beekeeper from Canada to Mexico would load up 100s (for a few, 1000s) of hives onto semis and head to Cali. The money they got from the honey was a drop in the bucket, compared to the money they got for the pollination services.
And it still wasn't enough bees. CA almond growers started routinely importing hives from around the world to supplement the "local" hives.
Many beekeepers then believed (probably still do) that this was where CCD originally came from, Cali's indiscriminate importing of foreign hives from anywhere they could find 'em.
WI cranberry farms have a similarly ridiculous pollination cycle. I expect there are dozens of other crops similarly hyper-dependent — not only on bees, but on semi-truckers freely driving bees from one end of the continent (not country) to the other, and back again a month later.
Just out of curiosity, why "former" beekeeper?
I serially go thru hobbies. After a few months or years, once I've pretty much got the hang of it, I lose interest and move on to the Next Big Thing.
Kept bees for about a decade (along with rabbits, chickens, worms, and a wide variety of gardening fruits & veggies ... my Homesteading years).
Among many other things, I'm also a former guitarist, pianist, chess player, and novelist.
I've gone through a few hobbies, but they have an unfortunate tendency to metastasize into professions, and they tend to run in parallel, not serially. I'm just starting to embark on my homesteading years myself. The gardening bug has come and gone with available time, space, and money. Now I'm adding a bug bug... Quail-keeping will be coming, too. None of these feels like the Next Big Thing yet, but we're all kind of in suspension until COVID-19 passes. At least I can move dirt around in the meantime.
I'll ask the obvious question: why not breed more bees and keep them places rather than truck them around? I understand that climate (and climate change) make it likely deadly for them to live in certain states, but why not augment the hives? Like a heated (or cooled) barn but for bees?
Warning - long answer.
There are multiple problems with apiculture under current conditions. It's not just temperature or climate change, but a host of different stressors, including bad economics, perverse incentives, and invasive pests and diseases.
Honeybees are themselves a non-native monoculture - Apis mellifera is a European bee species that's been spread globally, continually bred for human needs like tameness and honey yield, not necessarily for universal survival traits.
Because the genetic lines of honeybees are relatively narrow to start with, they're highly susceptible to new pests and diseases. Humans usually have to intervene, both with treatments and to diversify genetics with newly imported queens.
Bees get rapidly selected for local adaptations. Domesticated queens mate with hardy wild drones, and the resulting hives are more specialized for climate or forage that's only available in one place.
Honeybees can only feed themselves when there's sufficient flower bloom that provides pollen and nectar. In a natural environment with forests and meadows, there are hundreds of different plants - trees, flowers, grasses, with many different overlapping blooming periods. This diversity provides a continuous food supply from frost to frost.
Bees store honey to feed themselves through winter, drought, and nectar dearth. A typical hive colony in a cold climate needs about 30 kg of honey to make it from October to April, when nectar and pollen become available again. Responsible beekeepers only take surplus, but honey is such a valuable commodity that many commercial beekeepers take most or all the honey and feed cheaper sugars instead. This creates nutritional stress on the bees until they can forage again.
A crop like almonds only has a few weeks of bloom, almond flowers don't make much nectar, and the fields are continually sprayed with herbicides to suppress any other competing vegetation. After the bloom, there's nothing for bees to live on unless they're continually fed sugar and/or moved.
Pests like Varroa destructor and diseases like Nosema are very easily spread and impossible to control completely without doing other harm to the bees. There are long-term projects to breed resistance, but typical stationary hive losses are around 40 - 50%/year right now, not including pesticide kills.
Stopping now, because I'm kind of obsessive about this stuff.
By all means go on, interesting stuff!
Okay, just one more batch of details:
On the bad economics and perverse incentives front, counterfeit honey is driving beekeepers to unsafe practices, or out of business entirely. Genuine honey costs about $5 - 10/kg to produce, but colored and flavored rice syrup costs pennies. There's not enough enforcement during importation, processing, and packing to ensure authenticity.
Heat-treated honey and some processed sugars, like high-fructose corn syrup, contain hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a Maillard reaction byproduct. This chemical is highly toxic to bees, but generally regarded as safe for human consumption. It's easy for artificial bee feeds to get contaminated (improper storage in hot climates, etc.), and this is another source of nutritional stress.
We've probably all heard by now about the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on pollinators. One thing not mentioned is that they have years-long environmental half-lives. Even if all use stopped now, it will take several years for the effects to cease.
Short version ... keeping bees is both expensive and technically complicated ... and making 1000s of extra hives to just sit around 11 months/year for the 1 month your crop actually needs them would be prohibitive.
ETA: Beekeepers tend to lose about 1 hive in 3 or 4 every winter (both North and South), and must constantly buy and/or breed (and then gradually nurse up to full strength) new colonies to replace those lost. It's just a really hard, never-ending battle against disease & parasites.
Current official stats on hive losses are at 40 - 50%, mostly due to Varroa plus neonics. With replacement colony costs running $100 - $150/hive depending on genetics, it's a loser's industry right now.