A significant portion of our food supply depends on pollination by honey bees. The honey bee population seems to be collapsing. Scientists don’t know why.

Wild honey bees have almost completely disappeared. The only remaining honey bees are kept in colonies by beekeepers. The beekeepers maintain the bees in hives – frequently numbering in the hundreds - and travel all over the country renting the bees to farmers. Honey is of minor importance. The bees are released into fields to pollinate commercial crops.
Lately, beekeepers have been reporting that their honey bees have been dying at a dramatic rate, or simply vanishing without a trace. The dying honey bees appear overwhelmed by some catastrophic illness, their insides turning to black mush. When the bees disappear, they leave hives full of honey that other bees will not touch. It’s called “Colony Collapse Disorder”, it’s appearing in both the U.S. and Europe, and no one knows the cause or the cure.

Honey bees are necessary pollinators of about one-third of U.S. crop species. For some crops, such as apples, blueberries and almonds, honey bees are essential. Without them, the crops would not exist. For other crops, honey bees are merely extremely important. Without them, shortages would exist and prices would skyrocket. The consequences of Colony Collapse Disorder could be enormous. In prior years, the big problem has been parasitic mites that have developed pesticide resistance. Mites are believed to be what has practically killed off the wild honey bee population.

Colony Collapse Disorder is caused by something different, and far more lethal. But what?
Some scientists think it’s the result of a newly introduced Asian mite or a mutated virus. Others suspect pesticides, such as a widely used nicotine-based neurotoxin or a long-lasting pesticide banned in France but used heavily elsewhere. Still others suspect that genetically modified plants with built-in pesticides, common in agriculture, affect bees directly or disable their immune systems. Some believe bees are suffering from severe stress caused by constant travel packed in large trucks and lack of nutritional diversity – in winter bees are fed corn syrup instead of honey and in summer bees feed on nectar from one type of plant on giant farms.

Difficulties in finding a solution include the lack of data concerning the abundance and diversity of alternative pollinators, if any, and insufficient information about adverse effects of modern chemical-dependent farming practices. As one commentator put it, there has been a “benign indifference to the precarious nature” of the balance of nature.

About twenty thousand species of bees have been identified. Beekeepers in the U.S. and Europe rely on a single species of bee, the western honey bee, to pollinate all food crops. In addition, beekeepers must make annual purchases of queen honey bees to make up for bees that have died or disappeared. The purchased queens come from a small number of “breeder queens”, further limiting the genetic diversity of the bee population. Scientists believe that dependence on one species of bee and a small pool of breeder queens create significant risk to our food supply. The weakness of one bee is a weakness of all.

Honey bees are desirable pollinators because they are generalists – they are attracted to a large variety of flowering plants – and because they form huge colonies that can be moved to where pollination is needed. They overwhelm with numbers, and they return to the hive when their work is done. Other pollinators are more selective and less social - less amenable to collection and transport to crops, and less likely to return once released. We have relied on honey bees for so long, and have changed the landscape so much, that suitable replacement pollinators may be difficult to find.
According to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science, “Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world.”
Could Colony Collapse Disorder signal the beginning of a biological meltdown, or will it turn out to be something easily addressed? No one knows. Albert Einstein is said to have offered the following observation: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

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