Healthy Mama Magazine Issue 1 - July 2014 | Page 44

The
vanishing
of the

P

bees.

icture this, one morning you wake up, stretch out and get ready for another day. You open your front door and
look out on to the street. Something is wrong. It is empty. There is not a single other soul around. No buzz of
traffic, no deep humming of life, no throbbing car engines. Nothing. You make your way to work through the
silence and enter your office. You are alone, except for the shuffling of a few elderly co-workers. Overnight the entire
population of your city has just simply disappeared. It sounds like the opening scene of a post-apocalyptic Hollywood
movie. But if you happen to be a honeybee this is exactly what is happening in your world right now. Seemingly all
of sudden, almost all adult worker bees have abandoned the hive, leaving stores of honey and larvae behind. Oddly,
there are no dead bees to be found, no piles of corpses to be studied. Its called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and
its consequences make the plot lines of a Hollywood blockbuster seem like a walk in the park.

There is no other insect in the history of human
kind that has garnered as much awe, mythologising
and worship as the bee.
The Ancient Greeks, Celts, Mayans and countless other cultures all created a folklore based around the bee. From the
Egyptian Bee Kings to Napoleon, the bee has represented immortality and resurrection and has long been a symbol
of regal dominance. Political theorists from Plato to Marx have employed the concept of the hive as a model for society. Linguistically the bee is exalted as a symbol of perseverance and hard work (as busy as a bee) and the divine. To
Virgil, honey was the gift of heaven; to the ancient Jews the word bee indicated the insect’s mission to give the “Divine
word, Truth”.
Ancient Irish folklore commands that bees be treated as one of the family and be kept informed of all news, particularly births, deaths and marriages. To stop “telling the bees” is to invoke their wrath and cause them to cease producing
honey. Even in today’s image obsessed culture, the bee and the hive is a symbol of wisdom, work and strong ethics.
But something is missing. The bee is no longer revered and respected as before. The wisdom of the hive is being
ignored and the bees of the world are not happy.
It is hard to understand the importance of bees when our lives are tucked away into neat little routines. Most of us no
longer get to connect with the natural world in any significant way and thoughts of the cycle of plants are minimised
by the convenience of the supermarket. The closest we come to the work of bees is spreading honey on our morning
toast. But were it not for the humble, hard working bee we would all be starving.

Of the 100 crop species responsible for providing
90% of food worldwide for both humans and
livestock, 71 are dependent on bee pollination.
A task that is valued at $200 billion globally. That’s a lot of bees being very busy. Worryingly, 10 million beehives
have been abandoned in the last six years.
The magnitude of what could happen if the incidence of CCD continues to increase is unthinkable; food insecurity
leading to widespread epidemics, low birth rates and conflict are just a handful of problems the world may face with
the demise of the bee.
Since 1984 there has been a significant increase in CCD and no one can agree on why. Scientists, beekeepers and
farmers all have theories but no conclusive reasons. Governments have been slow to react and allocate the resources
to research the problem. Combined with the increased planting of genetically modified crops, th e rise of mono-agriculture leading to a lack of diversity, rising temperatures, the use of chemical pesticides and changes in bee management, it appears that bees can no longer tolerate their important work being taken for granted.
Meanwhile, Big Agriculture has been quietly researching and developing products and drugs they hope to sell in order
to solve the problem. Interestingly, one of the largest and most controversial agriculture companies, Monsanto, has
recently purchased a bee research laboratory giving rise to speculation that they are intending on creating a modified
super bee, a claim that is disturbing but as yet unfounded.
Pavan Sukhdev, the author of the 2010 UN report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, succinctly outlined
the main obstacle to repairing the delicate balance between agriculture and apiculture. He says, “not a single bee has
ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from nature is free,
because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.”

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