Balancing conservation and industry? Maybee

          Humans have been maintaining honeybee colonies for thousands of years. But long before we used honeybees as pollinating tools, they were foraging in dense, tropical forests, evolving the traits that made them so useful in agriculture: a social structure through which each colony behaves as a sort of super-organism and a communication system of waggle dances that convey information about flower resources. Today, we might be out of touch with that idea of a honeybee as a wild creature: since the European honeybee was introduced to the Americas during European settlement, our agricultural landscape has shifted towards plains of monoculture-after-monoculture where domestic honeybees trucked in by beekeepers sit in white boxes during flowering seasons [1]. These days when we think of bees, especially after a decade of intense media attention to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), we’re thinking of a pretty far cry from their ancestors in Asian tropics. For example, it’s easy to imagine how, for bees surrounded by vast seas of almond trees or raspberry plots, the communication system that once helped them locate good foraging spots may now be close to obsolete.

    Almond farms rely on honeybees for crop pollination [1]

But as precipitous honeybee declines – last year’s colony losses standing as the second-worst on record – are calling attention to the need for conservation measures, it might be useful to keep in mind that they are once-wild animals that we use in the service of efficient food production, and the food production industry didn’t create them. This means that what bees do doesn’t always map onto that rapidly changing industry in the ways that either agribusinesses, activists, or conservation lawmakers would like. Honeybees present a set of conservation difficulties we haven’t dealt with yet; they’re so tightly bound to the agriculture that their protection is an economic necessity, but what’s good for the agricultural economy might not always be good for bees and protections might be difficult to implement.

I worked on a honeybee farm during a couple of my high school summers, moving hives to and from different crop farms that basically rented our bees for pollination. Wanting the best for her bees, the beekeeper I worked for agreed to “lease” her bees to farms that didn’t use pesticides known to contribute to CCD, like neonicotinoids. But the foraging radius of a honeybee colony can extend to 6km, well beyond the boundaries of one organic monoculture [2]. Bees often foraged in the non-organic monoculture across the road, accumulating the pesticide buildup we tried to avoid. There are limits to the protective measures beekeepers can take for their bees simply because bees cross the farm/county boundaries by which the rest of the agricultural industry abides. Regulations intended to conserve bees can vary between counties, farms, and crops, and they don’t work if they assume that bees live and work within those lines of jurisdiction.

Besides being efficient pollinators, honeybees are also adorable [2]

There are other points of clash between the biological and economic demands of bees: colonies need botanic diversity for good nutrition, but most crops in America are grown in monocultures. While preserving areas of wild land near farms and transitioning away from the monoculture system might help honeybees, financial costs to farmers and consequences for the food market make those things difficult, even unlikely. And the cultivation of honeybees following years of population decline definitely depends on a stable agricultural system with beekeepers who know how to take care of them. 

                                                                        

So as we attempt to create conservation solutions that balance food production with the health of bees when the two are in tension, we should be thinking carefully about exactly what we’re trying to conserve. As organisms not born from American agriculture, bees need conservation policies that see their flight habitat as independent from one farm or one county, their nutritional needs as beyond what a monoculture provides, and their bodies and social organization as sometimes unequipped to handle all the consequences of industrial growth. Modern agriculture hasn’t been around for that long considering that honeybees evolved over millions of years ago in a different environment, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to adapt and change at the rate of the industry. As agriculture pushes against the limits of what a natural ecosystem can accommodate, we may also discover the limits of the extent to which bees can be used in the service of a human project.

Further reading

[1] Horn, T. 04/11/2008. “Honey Bees: A History.” New York Times.

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/honey-bees-a-history/

[2] Visscher, P., and Seeley, T. (1982). “Foraging Strategy of Honeybee Colonies in a Temperate Deciduous Forest.” Ecology 63, 6: 1790-1801.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1940121

Media Credits

[1] Public domain image.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AlmondFarm.jpg

[2] Public domain image courtesy of USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Honey_bee,_f,_side,_DC_2014-04-24-21.15.03_ZS_PMax_(14189134372).jpg