Colony collapse disorder was reported by commercial beekeepers. Is it also happening to bees in the wild?
PETTIS: There's very few places where we actually monitor the feral population. I know of a group in Texas that was following some wild populations of bees, and a Cornell researcher has found a group around Ithaca, New York. But it's often hard to sample those bees. We know that wild bee populations were decimated by parasitic varroa mites over time, and they've rebounded, probably due to natural selection for natural resistance. But I'm not familiar with data coming in from feral populations.
McDONALD: A few years ago, in a very remote part of the state, I found thriving bee populations that I assumed were feral. To help them along, I set up bait boxes and put in anti-mite strips. I slipped them in seed oil and made little puddles so the bees had to walk through the oil in this experiment I called "remote medication." But as the summer went on, the bees collapsed in spite of my attempts to help them. The feral population is just getting so hard hit that I suspect it's virtually gone by now.
Are scientists looking at how the climate affects the bees' favorite flowers and food sources?
ESAIAS: That's a good question. Most of the nectar sources in Maryland, my state, come from trees -- tulip poplar, black locus and holly trees. There has been a great deal of research on plants and increased CO2 and warming. I tried to find out how temperatures would affect blooming dates, and there is virtually no information in the literature on how temperature affects blooming dates of our trees and how increased CO2 concentrations affect blooming dates. There's lots of research that says it makes plants grow faster, and some of them, like poison ivy, become more toxic. But ecologists in general have not paid attention to the timing of blooming and nectar availability and quality of pollen.
McDONALD: That is so true. The only number that I go on is that an apple tree will bloom after 40 days in 40-degree temperatures. That boils down that simple formula.
ESAIAS: As a kind of a climatologist, I'm getting paid to study the impact of potential global warming scenarios on our ecology. There's a lot of research being done on carbon cycling, but without information about when the plants bloom and how the quality of the flora changes, we are in a poor position to assess the effect of changes in temperature and rainfall on our ecosystems.
Can bees survive climate changes?
MUSSEN: I can tell you that beekeepers take their honeybees north to the upper Canadian border and all the way down to the equator. If they're warm, they cool themselves by evaporating water, and if they're cold, they heat themselves by sucking up a little bit of extra carbohydrate and rattling their muscles.
So they're great adapters?
MUSSEN: They're going to handle it. The honeybees are not the ones I'm concerned about. I think Wayne will back me up on this: Historians have said that thousands of years ago, there were some pretty nasty fluctuations in the Earth's weather. And through this period of time, we became and continue to be very good farmers. But for whatever reason, we are beginning to kind of move into a cycle where we are going to find more extremes than we used to have. The droughts may be hotter and longer, the storms and floods may be more severe. Things aren't going to be so nice in the future. But again, I think the honeybees are more likely to handle that as long as they've got some food available to them. But with some of these other pollinators, which we rely upon to keep the environment going for us, well, if they get knocked around too much by the weather, then that's going to be really consequential.
What do you think the disappearance of the bees teaches us about ecology?
ESAIAS: If I can go back to what Eric was saying, I too don't doubt the survivability of the honeybee. On average, it's going to do fine. But what we are dealing with now is a series of local effects. That doesn't mean we aren't going to see an average global increase of temperature in the future, if you believe the predictions.
What does it tell us about our native pollinators and ecology? That's such an exceedingly complex question that I don't know. It just puts me in awe of Earth's complexity. If you ask scientists to predict what global warming will do to an ecosystem, and they don't throw up their hands and say, "Beats me," then it shows we have a lot of work to do to understand the complexity and responses of all of these insect and plant interactions, when they occur, and will they get out of phase.
McDONALD: I think there is a cautionary tale here. Look at the progenitors of the maize, the corn which was developed in Mexico. It took a long time for environmental researchers to find the original plant because as the maize became dependent upon cultivation, a lot of those genes from the wild corn had died off. There used to be 1,000 small meatpacking plants, and if a problem arose at one, it was not particularly important to the other 999. But now with all these together as one vast factory, any problem that arises has instant implications everywhere. We're at the mercy of assembly-line farming and high-speed distribution, and maybe no accountability as far as the quality of the food. But I don't know how you do it. How do you get more people to go back to smaller farms? It's practically utopian to bring that up anymore.
It's amazing that an esoteric subject like beekeeping has erupted in the mass media. Do you think that's been beneficial?
ESAIAS: I think the media coverage is wonderful. I think we are facing a series of problems like this, problems that are environmental in nature, and this has been a real eye-opener for me as to how poorly prepared this country and countries around the world are in taking note of how climate change or global change will impact our ecosystems. Humanity is affecting our ecosystems, and it's very complex to determine whether this is due to environmental change or some disease. You can see now that it is very difficult to pull these things apart.
McDONALD: The media has done a very good job of telling all sides. But the problem is, how do you motivate people to change the way they are? Where I live, I try to live pretty low on the food chain and avoid the temptation of most of the things that people have. People are just incredible consumers and runners of fuel and buyers of gadgets. How do you change that? It's as if there's an ethical or a moral blank spot there. I don't like to preach, but it's pretty obvious: When you're killing the Corn Belt by growing fuel to run SUVs, there's a very bad disconnect somewhere along the line.
MUSSEN: Bees are a necessary part of our food production. If we don't grow our own cherries and apples, can't we just buy them somewhere else? The answer is yes. But do we want to become as dependent on foreign nations for our food as we are dependent on them for fuel? I would certainly hope the answer is no. I believe that the amount of food we exported to other countries last year was less than the amount of food we imported for our consumption. We used to be the breadbasket of the world. Now we're just one of the breadbaskets.
McDONALD: The basket case.
MUSSEN: [Laughs.] So to keep our industry healthy, we certainly have to keep our pollinators healthy.
In the end, are we the people the ultimate cause of the bees' collapse?
PETTIS: We're the ultimate cause in that we've changed the planet to suit our needs. We're running it to suit our needs and not to the benefit of all the organisms around us. Honeybees aren't totally domesticated, but we have tried to domesticate them. We've tried to make bees more gentle and make more honey. In enhancing certain traits, we make the bees more susceptible to other things.
Do you think the bees will be back?
PETTIS: I do. I don't think we've gone that far in domesticating them. The bee population is very diverse and can withstand an onslaught of different things -- including beekeepers.
Research assistance by Jonathan Vanian.
About the writer
Kevin Berger is the features editor at Salon.
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