A decade ago, people started panicking about the collapse of the honeybee population and the crash of our food supply. But today there are more honeybees than there were then. We have engineered our way to a frenzied and precarious new normal.
For the past seven years, as has been widely reported, honeybees have been
dying at an alarming rate. Yet today there are slightly more hives in
the [USA] than before the die-offs began. That’s because beekeeping [operations] have moved beyond panic and begun quietly
adjusting to a strenuous way of doing business, one that requires
constant monitoring, treatment, supplemental feeding, rapid replacement
of dead hives, and grudging participation in an agricultural system that
grows increasingly inhospitable to the bees it needs to survive. […]
For the vast majority of their history, beekeepers moved their bees in
order to make more honey, not to pollinate crops. In fact, pollination
itself is a phenomenon few farmers understood until relatively recently.
As late as the 1880s, some farmers banished beekeepers from the their
farms, believing that bees robbed pollen and killed fruit. It’s a
forgivable misunderstanding. The farmers didn’t realize that the bees
had evolved to be messy eaters, carrying pollen grains on their fur. And
with swarms of native bumblebees, orchard bees, and feral honeybees
always around, fruit happened with beekeepers or without. In a natural
ecosystem, or even a small multi-crop farm, there were always enough
plants in bloom at any given time to sustain a resident population of
pollinators.
But when farmers began planting
larger plots with one crop, the natural balance of pollination was
distorted. A monoculture, as it’s called, can’t sustain all the wild
insects it needs to pollinate it, because there’s nothing for the
insects to eat when the main crop isn’t in bloom. Monoculture farmers
noticed that their trees would flower abundantly yet produce hardly any fruit, which led to the discovery that many fruit trees are
self-sterile: To produce, they need to be planted in mixed varieties,
and they need insects to ferry pollen from one variety to another.
Honeybees provided a convenient solution. Whereas many bees native to
North America are solitary, fly only a few hundred feet to forage, and
have evolved to pollinate a single plant species, honeybees are
opportunistic eaters, fly more than two miles, and live in resilient,
easily transported hives. By the early 20th century, farmers were
signing occasional contracts with local beekeepers to pollinate
orchards. In 1918, the naturalist John Harvey Lovell concluded that “the
fruit-culture of the future must be largely dependent on the domestic
bee, the only agency in crossing which can be controlled by man.”
The dramatic transformation of our relationship with the honeybee, however,
began in the years following World War II, as the mechanization of
agriculture drastically increased the size of the nation’s farms and the
use of pesticides exploded. This marked the decline of many remaining
wild pollinators, and the beginning of the honeybee’s shift from a
semi-domesticated producer of honey to a living tool integral to
industrial agriculture. In the past several decades migratory
pollination has only become a bigger portion of the beekeeping industry,
surpassing revenues from honey sales sometime around 2007. The economic
shift from honey to pollination was a long time coming, but two things
finally tipped the balance…
(Disclaimer: The above button does not actually deactivate the bees and was placed here only for the emotional reassurance of any individual who may be afraid of bees. Once an individual has reblogged this post, the bees are activated and cannot be stopped.)
I have seen this cover many times before, and part of me desperately wants to buy this book and read it and tell everyone about all my favorite parts of it.
Krahka's OC and Meta Garbage-Palooza 