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Alex Kollar

10 October 2016

BIOL 314

Position Paper

What About the Bees? : The Ongoing Struggle for Our Honeybee Population

When I was younger I hated bees. Even though they were so much smaller than

me, I was quick to run away whenever I heard any kind of buzzing sound. Aside from how

creepy I thought bees looked, what scared me the most was the threat of being stung. The

one instance I do remember getting stung by a bee I asked my mom: Why did God have to

create bees? Although I dont remember exactly what my mother said to my elementary-

school-self, Im sure she explained why bees were an important part of Gods creation

which, deep down, Im sure I already knew. Even though I wasnt the biggest fan of bees

as a child, I have always known that they play a fundamental role in keeping the earth

healthy; they are a part of life.

Even though most people understand importance of bees and an estimated one-

third of all food and beverages are made possible by pollination, mainly by honeybees

(USDA, 2013), I would argue that they dont regularly think about the status of the bee

population. It wasnt until the past few years or so that the issues facing the bee population

began to make their way to every day headlines. I never thought I would one day live in a

world where honeybees would be under the threat of disappearing.

In 2015, Rolling Stones released an article recounting the story of a long-time

beekeeper named Jim Doan. In 2014 he was devastated to learn that almost all of his bees

had died. The article goes on to explain Doans losing battle to keep his 5,600 hives alive
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started in 2006, when he discovered that 600 of them were completely empty. That

following year, Doan began to realize that he was not the only beekeeper to face such

puzzling circumstances. The article states that keepers all over the country, even the world,

were finding that their bees had not just died but had actually vanished (Morris, 2015).

This phenomenon would soon be known as Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder

(CCD), a devastating plague that causes seemingly healthy bees [to] simply vanish from

a hive, leaving the queen and a handful of newly hatched adults behind (Gutierrez, 2010).

According to Global Research, in the last 6 years, 30% of the national bee population has

disappeared and nearly a third of all bee colonies in the U.S. have perished (Hagopian,

2014). As statistics continued to rise and cases similar to Doans became more prevalent

throughout the country, researchers scrambled to understand why the bee populations were

declining so rapidly.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) were the leading forces in researching this epidemic. In May of

2013, they released a report concerning the health of honeybees. They listed multiple

factors causing the honeybee crisis including disease, genetics, poor nutrition and

pesticide exposure, but the most prevalent factor they found, was the parasitic Varroa mite.

Beekeepers have been trying to ward off this dangerous parasite since 1987 by using

genetically modified insecticides and herbicides (Hagopian, 2014) but in doing so, have

inadvertently weakened bees natural genetic defenses to fight off the parasite

(Hagopian, 2014). With an entire population of bees with weak immune systems, coupled

with the Varroa mites increased resistance to modern pesticides has lead to the rapid

decline of bee colonies.

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Although this information has become vital to beginning the restoration and

salvaging of bee colonies today, it surfaced almost a decade late; for beekeepers like Jim

Doan, the damage was already done. In the Rolling Stones article it states bees are

responsible for one out of every three bites of food you eat and are an agricultural

commodity that's been valued at $15 billion annually in the U.S. alone (Morris, 2015), and

for Doan, a third-generation keeper, the loss of his bees was a tragic blow to both his

livelihood and familys history. But the issue reaches far beyond the beekeeping

community. As stated in the USDA report, In the United States, pollination contributes to

crop production worth $20-30 billion in agricultural production annually (USDA, 2013),

which in turn puts immense pressure on the commercial agricultural community that relies

on pollination to produce healthy crops.

With such a huge, negative impact on the agriculture industry, in 2014 the USDA

announced that it would provide a $3 million subsidy in hopes of helping beekeepers to

replace and enrich their colonies while they continued research into the issue. Besides

announcing the $3 million dollar subsidy and the threat of the Varroa mite, the USDA

report also listed other key factors of CCD and possible steps in solving them. One

proposed idea includes taking action to affect land management to maximize available

nutritional forage to promote and enhance good bee health (USDA, 2013) and move the

hives away from pesticide-treated fields. The USDA also calls for coordinated

communication and collaboration between farmers, keepers, and stakeholders in order to

protect bees. There is also the problem of low genetic diversity within hives. According to

the USDA, genetic variation improves bees thermoregulation (the ability to keep body

temperature steady even if the surrounding environment is different), disease resistance

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and worker productivity (USDA, 2013) and would strengthen bees natural defenses to

Varroa mites and diseases.

While pinpointing possible causes and solutions and the $3 million subsidy might

have helped keepers acquire new queens for their hives, with the monetary loss estimated

at 30 billion dollars a year, the subsidy did not appear to be a long-term solution. Even the

researchs key findings did not spark a wildfire of change for the beekeepers; things had

become political. At the EPA/USDA Pollinator Summit in March 2013, there was little

representation for the beekeeping community, while over half of the speakers were from

large chemical companies. This means that pesticides, that are harmful to bees, continue to

be used while the EPA focuses more on just cleaning up the aftermath as best as possible.

One of the best examples of this was when President Obama presented a strategy

to protect honeybee health that did not call for a restriction on insecticides, but did

request that pollinator habitat be improved by restoring 7 million acres of land and water

(Morris, 2015). Although this seemed like a valiant effort to try to salvage the beehives,

restoring lost resources does not solve the overarching problems or provide a long-term

solution.

Today, the decline of the bee population is still a pervasive environmental issue

that researchers are still trying to understand. According to an article published by The

Bee Informed Partnership in May of this year, beekeepers across the country, much like

Jim Doan, lost 44% of their bees marking this as the second consecutive survey year that

summer loss rates rivaled winter loss rates (The Bee Informed Partnership, 2016). The

article goes on to say that the deadly Varroa mite is still the one to blame for all the weak,
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collapsing colonies. With how important bees are to our very existence, it is baffling to me

that CCD is still destroying so many colonies each year at such a rapid rate.

Truthfully, though it may sound ignorant, I had always grouped bees and the work

they do in the same category as gravity: a crucial part of the natural world, but one that I

never really thought about. In their article, Global Research described that the loss of the

global honeybee population is perhaps the biggest foreboding danger (Hagopian, 2014)

facing humanity today, it impacts man at the highest levels on our food chain, posing an

enormously grave threat to human survival (Hagopian, 2014). So why, then, does it seem

that nothing is being done to effectively cure this epidemic?

Its easy for me to blame the wealthy chemical companies for drowning out the

voices of the beekeepers in order to ensure that their pesticides stay in circulation, even if

the chemicals are harmful to the bees. This is what led Jim Doan to ban together with

fellow beekeepers in 2013 to sue the EPA, not for money, but for regulation; to gain any

support for the struggling beekeeping industry. I do not know the outcome of the case, but

the Rolling Stones article states that it is still in its initial stages of litigation and may not

be decided for years (Morris, 2015). To hear that keepers, who are just trying to literally

keep their livelihood alive, are not being represented or supported by the only

organizations that are supposed to help them restore their beehives is really sad and

frustrating.

Though I may not have always been the biggest fan of bees in the past, I now

completely understand why they are so vital to our ecosystem and very way of life. They

are the most important creatures to maintaining a balanced and healthy environment. Even

with the USDAs efforts to make vast areas around the country bee-friendly (Valentine,
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2015), there just doesnt seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. If honeybees continue

to die off, the human race will suffer in ways we could never imagine. Thats why I think

its important that we must take the next step that is reevaluating the pesticides used on

crops. Although I do not want to cast the chemical companies as the villains, studies have

shown that some common pesticides, like neonicotinoid clothianidin (Morris, 2015),

leave bees susceptible to the deadly Varroa mite.

I understand that its not a simple case of just not using pesticides anymore, those

substances are used to ward off other insects that would destroy our food sources, but

without bees, that wont matter since there wouldnt be much crop to start with. There

needs to be a change in the pesticide industry, a movement towards more bee-friendly

components that will not weaken the bees. If we were to treat this epidemic like the flu

virus, perhaps there would be better results and movement towards a cure. I am not

suggesting to weigh bees illnesses on the same level has human sickness, but I now

understand that if the bee population continues to drop this rapidly it would detrimental to

the human population. God created bees to support the earth, and He put humanity in

charge in caring for them. Thus, is is our responsibility to do as much as we can to combat

this issue.

References
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Gutierrez, David. (2010). Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder Finally Explained: Too

Many Chemicals. Natural News. Retrieved from

http://www.naturalnews.com/028429_colony_collapse_disorder_chemicals.html

Hagopian, Joachim. (2014). Death and Extinction of the Bees. Global Research.

Retrieved from

http://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684

Morris, Alex. (2015). What Is Killing America's Bees and What Does It Mean for Us?

Rolling Stone. Retrieved from

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-is-killing-americas-bees-and-

what-does-it-mean-for-us-20150818

The Bee Informed Partnership. (2016). Nations Beekeepers Lost 44 Percent of Bees in

2015-16. Bee Informed. Retrieved from

https://beeinformed.org/2016/05/10/nations-beekeepers-lost-44-percent-of-bees-

in-2015-16/

USDA. (2013). USDA and EPA Release New Report on Honey Bee Health. United

States Department of Agriculture. Retrieved from

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2013/05/0086.xml

Valentine, Katie. (2015). The Future Of Our Food Depends On Honeybees, And The

USDA Is Spending Millions To Save Them. ThinkProgress. Retrieved from

https://thinkprogress.org/the-future-of-our-food-depends-on-honeybees-and-the-

usda-is-spending-millions-to-save-them-d06060d88a51#.j9e1ilbx7