The 2008 honey bee deal

The bee deal

The European Honey Bee was imported to North America is colonial times. In the course of its pollination work, it became a symbol of American agrarian industriousness. We see an indication of that in the names of the McClatchy newspapers -- Sacramento, Modesto and Fresno Bees -- in the region built on the greatest fruit, nut and vegetable production in the nation. Poetically, we might see an analogy between the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in the honey bees and Subprime Mortgage Disorder (SMD) in subdivisions that have replaced so many agricultural fields and orchards in recent years. But, we aren't as poetic as the McClatchy chain.

Established agricultural scientific research, mainly coming from the land-grant university system, has identified several factors and tentatively suggested that no one factor in bee environment is causing the CCD, but that it is a combination of stresses. Arguments of both sides of the polarized debate around genetically engineered crops is inconclusive that their pollens are involved, however some land-grant university professors are willing to grant that it might be one weakening factor among others. The anti-GE forces continue to produce compelling information that, due to biotechnology corporate influence in the Clinton and Bush administrations, approval of GE crops was granted by the federal government without adequate human health studies as to their effects, and that US and Canadian citizens are now unwitting guinea pigs in a massive, unregulated dietary experiment. This would be somewhat similar to the recent SMD experiment in the credit markets conducted with such enthusiasm here in recent years, as we were unwittingly dragged from the "old" agricultural economy into the "new economy."

The "old" economy, however, is the devil we know. It was never particularly stable and this latest mess in the almonds, the largest market for rental bees in the world it seems, is another case of the original problem of high concentration of mono-cropping of a luxury crop humanity could actually do without, particularly this year with the lowest grain storage quantities since WWII and Third World food-importing nations scrambling to avoid famine. Add to this that a great many almond acres are simply plantings to hold land in agriculture to the tax advantage of developer owners, speculating on a future real estate boom, and it presents a view of extreme agricultural irresponsibility, sort of suicidal in fact. It looks more like Ricardo's dour thoughts on (land) Rents than like agriculture at all.

Nevertheless, although Adee, the South Dakota bee magnate, says (below) that he lost 40 percent of his bees in the California almond orchards this year, he didn't say he lost money on the deal. Aside from the 28,000 Sioux Falls honey bees that did not return from California this year -- about which no one seems to care anymore than Economic Man cares about anyone beyond his own family -- it is becoming likely that the California almond industry is a death trap for bees. And that has consequences far beyond the family of the grower or the investor in the almond deal, when it is considered that honey bees pollinates about a third of a commercially grown crops in the US.

The almond deal, however, can rest assured that as the land-grant university scientists dither on with their various hypotheses and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced ducks and runs from his House Agriculture subcommittee responsibilities including bees, one hypothesis that will never be considered, at least for funding, is what the effect of 600,000 acres of one crop -- largest magnet for bee rental in the nation -- is having on the nation's premier commercial fruit, nut and vegetable pollinator. This would challenge "scientific" laws of a much higher order of value: economic rather than merely biological.

So, we have a crop, almonds, that originated in China and Central Asia, brought on the Silk Road to Italy and Spain, and brought to California by Spanish missionaries, that must, at least at this quantity, be pollinated by a bee brought to the American Colonies by the English. Our 600,000-acre block supplies an estimated 80 percent of world production and draws in bees for its six-week pollination period from all over the nation and even other parts of the world for an annual International Honey Bee Jamboree, held simultaneously with the annual International Honey Bee Disease Festival.

There is a well-known analogy here: the San Joaquin Valley's huge blocks of mono-cropped orchards and vineyards have attracted the largest infestations of pests ever known -- a great boon to land-grant university pesticide researchers and manufacturers. Evidently, when economic and biological laws conflict, scientists and biotechnology corporations make money. This process has looped around to the point -- all scientists seem to agree on this -- that the pesticides in the Valley are one of the causes for CCD.

We have discovered nothing in this brief essay. However we may be able to salvage something because, unwittingly, we might have rediscovered the definition of "junk science." This term is widely used at least in the state Capitol and no doubt in Washington, wherever committees meet on natural resource or agricultural issues. We think it can be defined as: "data from the natural sciences that in any way conflicts with special economic interests." When legislators start babbling about "junk science," typically prodded on in their opinions by lobbyists and economically pliable scientific experts consulting for special interests, it is necessary for the public to "scientifically" research the legislators' property, business involvements, those of their campaign contributors, and make sure who's paying the "expert," before accepting the derogatory judgment and legislative consequences. The failure of this sort of science has led, in other realms, to blind acceptance of weird formulas designed to create the illusion that the latest crop of Nobel Prize-winning geniuses had erased investment risk from economic history.

Contemplating this example of "junk" math and its consequences raises the issue of what the general public, not arrayed in any special-interest bloc, fewer by the day in our region being able to afford a can of salted, oiled and smoke-flavored almonds, can do to defend the environment against continual depredations by increasingly lethal special interests in control of the government and most media outlets. While the term, "in the public interest," is still bandied about by government, it is frequently used against the public on behalf of special interests. The poor old Common Good"appears in recent years to have gone the way of the Rights of Man.

Moving from the scientific to the legal quagmire we now call the Homeland, we might faintly echo Christopher Stone's question about forests by asking: "Do Honey Bees have rights?" Other questions in this vein that occur are: Do beekeepers have public responsibilities? Do California almond growers have public responsibilities with regard to pollinators? Is CCD a genuinely public issue in which the public -- to be carefully distinguished from land-grant universities' research priorities and funders -- is the only advocate possible for the bees? So far, reports are nearly unanimous in covering the story strictly from the point of view of the economic interests of farmers and beekeepers. Yet, reporters dutifully mention the datum that they pollinate 90 US commercial crops. Sometimes, Einstein's speculation is brought in: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." Of course, we aren't talking about the disappearance of all bees, just the European Honey Bee. But CCD is, at the very least, an unsettling precedent.

There is something grotesque about looking at so much massive death of a species so valuable to all of us and to nature itself, as well as being a creature valuable solely in its own right, totally in terms of the economic problems of its "owners and users;" and, to the extent that deals like almonds are export-led, to other people and industries as well. However, though it is not fundamentally an economic story, there is something equally horrible about never mentioning the scale of "ownership" and "use," as if bigger is always better in agriculture. "Science" is looking everywhere but at its alliance with the special interests it serves in the name of the public interest.

While the Fed is busy printing billions socializing Wall Street's private debt, you'd think they could print a few hundred millions without any special-interest strings attached to help save the bees, considerably and consistently better citizens than your average hedge-fund CEO. And Congress, which seems to have rediscovered its power to regulate, should do what regulation can do to help the situation, and not, under any circumstances listen to some phony "win-win/public-private" crap apt to come from the mouth of the Ol' Shrimp Slayer, now representing his rotten borough, which includes most of the California almond deal, from residence inside the Beltway.

Badlands Journal editorial board
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4-1-08
AP/Google News
Mystery Die-Off Worries Beekeepers...WAYNE ORTMAN (AP)
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5geLzVDyhEvU5FBCUb4vgydkz7i6QD8VOUO700
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — The California winter has been a tough one on South Dakota beekeepers like Richard Adee. Last fall he sent 155 semitrailer trucks to California loaded with hives containing bees fit and ready to pollinate the almond crop.
"We lost 40 percent of the hives we sent there. We sent 70,000 out and lost 28,000," said Adee, whose Adee Honey Farms in Bruce is considered the largest beekeeping operation in the nation."I would say overall the losses of South Dakota bees — from what I've heard — from what they started in the spring of '07 until they came out of the almonds is at least 50 percent. It's not good."
Now, in preparation for the honey-making season in South Dakota, he's working to get back to full strength from a mystery called colony collapse disorder.No one's really sure what's causing the disorder, evident when adult bees abandon the hive...The U.S. Agriculture Department has earmarked money and research to solving CCD because it says one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination.
"As beekeepers we're confused and the scientific community is even more confused because they feel like they should be able to figure this out and get a handle on it, and yet there are so many variables they are just having a problem," said Adee, chairman of the legislative committee for the American Honey Producers Association.
Researchers with the Agricultural Research Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture are chasing various theories about CCD, said Jon Lundgren, an ARS entomologist in Brookings not directly involved in the research.Among the possible causes are parasites, a virus, or pesticides.It may be a several factors resulting from stress on the bees, he said...The California almond industry covers about 600,000 acres and prefers two bee colonies per acre to do a good job during a pollinating season that lasts about six weeks.

3-1-07
The Independent (UK)
Albert Einstein speculated that "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."
Species under threat: Honey, who shrunk the bee population?
Across America, millions of honey bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving beekeepers facing ruin and US agriculture under threat. And to date, no one knows why...Michael McCarthy
http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.7.BEES.htm
It has echoes of a murder mystery in polite society. There could hardly be a more sedate and unruffled world than beekeeping, but the beekeepers of the United States have suddenly encountered affliction, calamity and death on a massive scale. And they have not got a clue why it is happening.
Across the country, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, honey bee colonies have started to die off, abruptly and decisively. Millions of bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die (they cannot survive as a colony without the queen, who is always left behind).
Some beekeepers, especially those with big portable apiaries, or bee farms, which are used for large-scale pollination of fruit and vegetable crops, are facing commercial ruin - and there is a growing threat that America's agriculture may be struck a mortal blow by the loss of the pollinators. Yet scientists investigating the problem have no idea what is causing it.
The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a "tremendous pathogen load", the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.
"We are extremely alarmed," said Diana Cox-Foster, the professor of Entomology at Penn States University and one of the leading members of a specially convened colony-collapse disorder working group."It is one of the most alarming insect diseases ever to hit the US and it has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry. In some ways it may be to the insect world what foot-and-mouth disease was to livestock in England."
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera, the honey bee, and the value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6bn (£8bn) annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops - a colony usually being the group of bees in a hive.
California's almond crop, which is the biggest in the world, stretching over more than half a million acres over the state's central valley, now draws more than half of the mobile bee colonies in America at pollinating time - which is now. Some big commercial beekeeping operations which have been hit hard by the current disease have had to import millions of bees from Australia to enable the almond trees to be pollinated.
Some of these mobile apiaries have been losing 60 or 70 per cent of their insects, or even more. "A honey producer in Pennsylvania doing local pollination, Larry Curtis, has gone from 1,000 bee colonies to fewer than eight," said Professor Cox-Foster. The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, "which does not seem to match anything in the literature", said the entomologist...
Professor Cox-Foster went on: "And another unusual symptom that we're are seeing, which makes this very different, is that normally when a bee colony gets weak and its numbers are decreasing, other neighbouring bees will come and steal the resources - they will take away the honey and the pollen. Other insects like to take advantage too, such as the wax moth or the hive beetle. But none of this is happening. These insects are not coming in.This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them."
The scientists involved in the working group were surveying the dead colonies but did not think the cause of the deaths was anything brought in by beekeepers, such as pesticides, she said.Another of the researchers studying the collapses, Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the State of Pennsylvania, said it was still difficult to gauge their full extent. It was possible that the bees were fleeing the colonies because they sensed they themselves were diseased or affected in some way, he said. This behaviour has been recorded in other social insects, such as ants.
The introduction of the parasitic bee mite Varroa in 1987 and the invasion of the Africanised honey bee in 1990 have threatened honey bee colonies in the US and in other parts of the world, but although serious, they were easily comprehensible; colony collapse disorder is a deep mystery.
One theory is that the bees may be suffering from stress as beekeepers increasingly transport them around the country, the hives stacked on top of each other on the backs of trucks, to carry out pollination contracts in orchard after orchard, in different states.
Tens of billions of bees are now involved in this "migratory" pollination. An operator might go from pollinating oranges in Florida, to apples in Pennsylvania, to blueberries in Maine, then back to Massachusetts to pollinate cranberries.
The business is so big that pollination is replacing honey-making as the main money earner at the top end of the beekeeping market, not least because in recent years the US has been flooded with cheap honey imports, mainly from Argentina and China...