Life Before Death

In a depressingly alarmist article on BBC News UK, Finlo Rohrer encourages us to imagine an idyllic image of British countryside, complete with the harmonious buzzing of busy bees, and then asks us to fast forward ten years to this desolate vision:

The hedgerow is deteriorating, the birds are silent, the orchard is disappearing and the countryside is changed. Why? The hives are empty. Their once-buzzing occupants mysteriously vanished.

Excuse me?

I’ve encountered this idea before. I suppose it’s not entirely far-fetched; after all, I’m sure a lot of humans feel as though they would die without sex. But let me assure you, this is not the case for apple trees. An orchard in the absence of beehives might yield less fruit, and if all pollinating insects disappeared, perhaps none at all, but the poor trees, albeit sexually unfulfilled, wouldn’t die from it. Nor would the birds stop singing (that doesn’t make any kind of sense - would the birds go quiet in mourning?).

Although I love my bees and think they are fantastic little creatures, I don’t think they have a special place in the world. Although bees may be important for agriculture, I don’t really believe that the prevalence of our particular favourite species of honeybee is absolutely vital to the survival of plants. There are many, many other pollinating insects (and in some places other animals as well) out there - including a variety of bees other than Apis mellifera - and I suspect many of them would fare quite a lot better in the absence of bees. And I’m not aware of any predator that subsists primarily on honeybees (not even bee-eaters).

The rest of the article is marginally better. British beekeepers are complaining that unusually many hives died last winter, which may or may not be true, but at least the article includes a more reasoned voice, stating that “Beekeeping always goes through periods of prosperity and dearth. People do enjoy a good panic.” Someone complains that varroa mites are getting resistant to the chemicals we use to combat them, which is true, but usually this happens only when people use the chemicals wrong.

Case in point is Apistan, which is applied to a hive during a few weeks in the autumn in the form of plastic strips from which the chemical slowly leaks into the hive, and are then supposed to be removed. A lot of ignorant beekeepers reason that longer exposure to the chemicals will kill more varroa, so they leave the strips in, and/or reuse old strips, exposing the hives to gradually lower concentrations of miticide. Anyone familiar with how bacteria gain resistance to antibiotics can figure the rest out for themselves.

In short, when it comes to varroa, it’s entirely manageable if you’re smart and follow the proper instructions of whatever methods you’re using to battle the “infection”. If beekeepers actually started behaving rationally it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

The article also dwells on CCD, essentially saying that if beehives started to die in the UK … beehives would die in the UK. Oh, dear. In the end, the conclusion is that we don’t really know if the hives are all going to die, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, someone is writing a book about all the horrible things that will happen if bees disappear. Because people’s enjoyment of a good panic is, as we all know, quite profitable.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping, varroa, colony collapse disorder