Are B.C.’s bee colonies the latest to die off?
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/laracee/201610727/
What’s happening to the bees? The fuzzy little honey-making critters are dying off like the dinosaurs, and no one knows why. In the U.S., according to a congressional report updated in June, up to 36 percent of 2.4 million bee colonies were wiped out last winter. Canadian beekeepers reported losses of one-third of this country’s bees during the winter, including a 23-percent loss in British Columbia.
Scientists have dubbed this bee Armageddon “colony collapse disorder”, and it’s provoking worldwide alarm. CCD doesn’t just mean there’ll be less honey or lower chances of getting stung. The bee pandemic is “the biggest general threat to our food supply”, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That’s because one of every three bites of food we eat comes from bee-pollinated plants: peaches, blueberries, strawberries, melons, citrus fruits, apples, broccoli, squash, cucumbers–you name it. The little insects are worth $15 billion annually to U.S. farmers and $1 billion in Canada–$300 million in B.C. alone.
Pulitzer Prize–winning entomologist E.O. Wilson told the Associated Press last May that the honeybee is nature’s “workhorse–and we took it for granted. We’ve hung our own future on a thread.” If the bee collapse continues, added Kevin Hackett, head of the USDA’s bee and pollination program, we’ll be “stuck with grains and water”.
The alarm isn’t due just to the sheer number of bees lost. It’s also because the cause is still a mystery almost a year after CCD hit the headlines. The finger has been pointed at everything from powerful new pesticides to genetically engineered crops, weather, mites, stress, bad nutrition, microbes, even cellphones and, you guessed it, aliens. The search for the culprit is opening a window onto the dark side of how big agribusiness gets food to our tables.
In Canada, there’s another twist. Most of the Canadian beekeeping industry says the huge bee die-off here actually had nothing to do with CCD. Instead, it was simply caused by a harsh winter and an outbreak of Varroa destructor mites, a pesky little parasite that is the bane of beekeepers.
“CCD is simply not here,” said Paul van Westendorp, the provincial apiculturist at the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. Van Westendorp is the man in charge of inspecting beekeeping operations for disease control. “Up to this point, I can say with confidence that we have not experienced CCD.”
This wasn’t the catastrophic 80- to 100-percent loss that some U.S. beekeepers had seen, but what scared Le Dorze was that he didn’t know the cause. It was enough to convince him not to truck his bees to Alberta for honey production as he had planned. “I brought them all home.”
Asked about Le Dorze’s losses, van Westendorp acknowledged he had heard “anecdotal” reports about “CCD–like” outbreaks in B.C. He said they had occurred at “less than five” beekeeping operations. “We leave open the possibility that CCD exists in B.C.,” he said. “The reason I’ve refrained from talking about CCD is the causes are still unknown.”
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