The large-scale disappearance of the humble honeybee threatens agriculture worldwide

At first sight, the fallout scene seems all too familiar. The victims stagger about in a daze, while others stare blankly in apathy, ready to die. Then the visitor is struck by an unsettling fact: Most of the population has simply vanished, as if the residents fled in panic. The site is well stocked with food and shows no signs of physical damage. Something has gone terribly wrong here, yet the once-bustling metropolis offers few clues to explain its collapse.

It might be a scene from a Star Trek episode, or a journal entry by an anthropologist describing some lost colony. But this mystery is much closer to home. The victims are honeybees, dying off en masse from an uncertain cause. Something like a quarter of America's honeybee colonies has perished in the past two years, threatening the world's multibillion dollar agricultural industry, which depends on bees to pollinate flowers and set fruit and vegetables. Some crops -- like almonds, watermelons and blueberries -- are dependent on honeybees. The mortality syndrome is a worldwide concern, destroying domesticated honeybees and threatening wild bees as well.

The victims and villains of this unfolding drama have been documented in several books already, among them Rowan Jacobsen's "Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis." Jacobsen is a food and environmental writer who takes up the plight of the honeybee by merging science with suspense to serve up an epidemiologic detective story.

Bees are nature's sexual go-betweens, spreading pollen from male flowers to impregnate the females and cause their ovaries to swell into fruit pods. Wind does the work for some plants -- scattering the love dust of grasses and pine trees -- but more evolutionarily advanced species are locked into an a complex interdependence with pollinator insects. Most wild insects will work a few types of flowers, but the honeybee is indiscriminate, a universal pollinating machine.

The bees aren't facing a single enemy. They are besieged by chemicals, pathogens and habitat destruction. The consequences of a bee-less world are already here, Jacobsen shows. Day laborers in Sichuan, China, are forced to hand-pollinate pear tree blossoms because the bees have been exterminated by insecticide. Vanilla farmers in Mexico must pollinate their vanilla orchid with the aid of a toothpick because the non-stinging local bees have been wiped out by deforestation. The passion fruit industry of Brazil today relies on humans to spread pollen by hand from passion flower to passion flower because the native carpenter bee buzzes no more.

Honeybees aren't accidental guests wafting with the breezes. The hives are trucked and flown all over this country and Europe, following the agricultural bloom cycle, not unlike the seasonal circuit of migrant farm workers. Beekeeping is a big business, and millions of these industrious creatures are leased out to farmers to perform their aerial mission to enable plants to reproduce.

Several years ago honeybees here and in Europe began showing disturbing signs. A beekeeper would open his hive and find plenty of honey, but the bees crawled about aimlessly, as if stunned and confused. Most of the bees were just gone. It's assumed their internal GPS systems went haywire and they never found their way home.

Afflicted bees exhibit dementia-like symptoms that suggest winged patients with advanced cases of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. When analyzed in an incubator, the sick honeybees sprouted fungus from their mouths and anuses. Scientists discovered the bees were infested with disease, and -- giving rise to the AIDS analogy -- they lacked immune systems. The list of suspected causes has included viruses and pesticides, parasites and miticides, fungi and fungicides, but the experts haven't been able to pinpoint a single source.


Source: newsobserver.com

Publication date: 1/21/2009

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