Why are the bees dying?

Your blogger has just moved to Switzerland. A little known fact about Switzerland is that it has the highest number of beekeepers per capita in the world. But the bees are not doing well lately. This year 22% of them failed to make it through the winter. This is strikingly similar to what is happening in the United States since 2006 with beekeepers reporting losses of between 30%-90%. A small percentage of bees die off each winter in Europe and the United States just as a small percentage of them fail to make it through the tough Indian summer. However, losses at this level are unprecedented.

The term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) or Fall-Dwindle Disease has been coined to describe these catastrophic losses and a number of possible causes are being studied. These include factors that have been around earlier too - climate change, diseases including a virus borne by the varroa mite, and poor food and water availability. Some of the possible causes are novel to our epoch – pesticides, contaminated water, mobile phones and stress due to travel! Bee numbers are going down even as the demand from fruit farmers for their pollination services is going up. As a result bee boxes are being trucked around more than ever.

Why should we care if the bees are dying? After all many species are disappearing literally every minute. If we can't have honey, we could survive with maple syrup or treacle. However, it will not be easy to replace the hardworking bees when it comes to pollination. It is estimated that one-third of our food comes from plants pollinated by the bees. No wonder, Einstein is reported to have said that f the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would only have four years of life left.

What is common to all the new factors that could be contributing to the bee deaths is our inability to let the bees be through our agriculture practices. Conversely, the single most important step we can take to save the bees is to change the way we farm. Using less pesticides and chemical fertilizers is a no-brainer but what is not so obvious is the need to rethink monoculture as well as beekeeping itself. If all you have are fields of wheat for miles around, naturally you will have to veil your bees, load the bee boxes into a truck and take them to where the mustard is. When the mustard finishes, you take the bewildered bees to the next 'feeding station'. An expert at the oldest honey bee keeping training centre in India told me that bee keepers from Punjab are taking their bees as far down south as Andhra Pradesh. In the U.S., bees from the Mid West are not uncommon in the almond fields of California. On the other hand if you cultivate biodiversity on the farm and you eschew chemicals, you keep the bees happy through the year and you meet your pollination needs locally and without expending hydrocarbons.

The bees with their unique social organisation are a measure of the health of our agrisystems. They are like the canary in the coal mine, dying to tell us that things are going to go horribly wrong. It is for us to take the message. Some of the things stressing them out to death seem to be uncannily familiar.

Amandeep S Gill, farmersfirst@gmail.com