Bye Bye Bees

With the stock market as volatile as it is these days, coupled with the surge in prices at the gas tank, Americans are duly concerned about the cost of living and its impact on food prices. After all, as the cost of delivering food goes up, the cost of paying for that food at the grocery store goes up as well.

But there’s another factor that goes into the cost of food that may have escaped your attention, one that’s just as important and worrisome as the cost of delivering said food: the disappearing bee colony.

Bees are more than just honey makers. In fact, you may be surprised to know that without bees’ pollination of the various flowers and buds on fruit trees and vegetable plants, we’d be without approximately 80 percent of the foods we eat every day – from the every day apple to the occasional dish of ice cream (Haagen Dazs, an ice cream company that uses all-natural ingredients, says that 40 percent of the ingredients they use are ones that depend on bees’ pollination).

Bees are so critical to farmers’ crops, that some of the country’s biggest farm areas truck in tens of thousands of bees and release them to do their work. Were it not for these busy bees, the American economy would be in the red an additional $3.1 billion from lost natural crop production and $40 billion in lost food sales. Hard to believe so much depends on so small an insect!

As bee keepers and bee experts can attest, since 2006, bees by the colony have vanished – quite literally. According to some beekeepers, an entire colony will be working away in their hive one day; the next day, nothing left but the honeycomb they were assiduously working on. What’s particularly strange is that unlike in past bee die-offs, where dead bees could be found near their hive, this time there’s no sign of them at all. Nothing.

So the question, of course, is what’s causing this mass die-off of anywhere between 30 to 90 percent of beekeepers’ colonies? Scientists can’t be sure, but one of their working theories is the prevalence of fertilizers and pesticides in use today and the extreme toxicity they pose to bees. Scientists’ analysis of the honeybee genome indicates that their diminished tolerance to pesticides is likely due to their genetic makeup. By comparison, fruit flies’ genetic makeup is twice that of honeybees, making them largely immune to many pesticides.

While the researchers can’t be sure the culprit is pesticides – some discount the pesticide theory entirely, in fact – from my standpoint, the toxins found in fertilizers is a leading suspect in the mass die-offs, especially when you consider what pesticide run-off does to soil. But other theories for the vexing vanishing act include an as yet unknown strand of bacteria, a virus, or a virulent parasite known as nosema ceranae. Some think that American beekeepers are simply working their bees too hard.

If the case of the missing bee continues, it spells disaster not only for the price of our favorite foods, but for our very food supply. But fortunately, environmental advocates, companies and institutions are being busy bees themselves, hoping to find some solution through their donations to scientists’ projects. For instance, Burt’s Bees is contributing some of its profits to The Honeybee Health Improvement Project. Haagen Dazs, meanwhile, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to honeybee research projects at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honeybee Research Facility in California (University of California-Berkeley).

Keep an eye out for companies that are donating to causes such as these. Meanwhile, continue buying organic – as organic farmers are contributing to bees’ survival by not using the very thing that could be killing them off: pesticides.