Did you know that the Kingdom of Bhutan, a nation that rarely hits the headlines, has a Gross National Happiness program? His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the Fourth Druk Gyalpo (I promise, I did not make that up) has proclaimed
“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product”
Bhutan sounds like my kind of place! But what has that got to do with bees? All will be revealed. Meanwhile, here are some figures that make for less happy news:
Loss of commercial honeybees in the UK since 2010 – 53%
Loss of wild honeybees in the UK since 2010 – 52%
Loss of solitary bees in the UK since 2010 – nearly extinct
Loss of bumblebees in the UK since 2010 – unknown
Loss of commercial honeybees in Europe since 1985 – 45%
Loss of commercial honeybees in the US in 2008 since 1947 60%
That all mounts up to very bad news for bees. What is true for bees is true for butterflies and other insects too. Which sounds alarm bells loud enough to warn us that the natural environment is ailing, in the UK, in Europe and in the USA, and urgent action is needed to restore health to nature and save our threatened food security.
It’s a complex problem but it is possible to identify three of the main factors in the frightening decline of bee populations:
The widespread use of pesticides, especially neonicotinoids
In the US, the practice of trucking bees around the country to pollinate crops
Industrial, and in particular monoculture, farming
All three are linked, of course. Neonics were covered in my last post, so on to:-
Trucking
I think it may have been in 2006, when CCD (colony collapse disorder) made its debut in news editors’ vocabulary of acronyms, that I first heard about the practice of trucking hives of honeybees around America. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. It sounded insane. Yet it was and still is big business. Hackenberg Apiaries, for instance, trucks 3,000 hives the length and breadth of the country each year. Scientific American gives us a neat summary of how bee-trucking works:
California’s almond orchards are the most important stop on a massive annual migration of around 1,600 of the nation’s beekeepers and their colonies. Today, many beekeepers make at least half of their annual income not from selling honey, but rather from renting their hives to farmers to pollinate crops nationwide.
After the almond bloom some beekeepers take their honeybees to cherry, plum and avocado orchards in California and apple and cherry orchards in Washington State.
Come summer time, many beekeepers head east to fields of alfalfa, sunflowers and clover in North and South Dakota, where the bees produce the bulk of their honey for the year. Other beekeepers visit squashes in Texas, clementines and tangerines in Florida, cranberries in Wisconsin and blueberries in Michigan and Maine. All along the east coast migratory beekeepers pollinate apples, cherries, pumpkins, cranberries and various vegetables.
By November, beekeepers begin moving their colonies to warm locales to wait out the winter: California, Texas, Florida and even temperature-controlled potato cellars in Idaho. The bees stay inside their hives, eating the honey they made in the summer and fall. Several decades ago beekeepers could let their colonies overwinter in a place as cold as Minnesota without worrying about too many bees dying. That’s no longer true; in the past 10 years, many American beekeepers have lost between 30 and 60 percent or more of their hives each winter.
Now I know very little more about bees than what is common knowledge: their legendary prowess at navigating and mapping in fine detail the area around their home hive. So even supposing being jiggled around in the back of a truck for thousands of miles and hours on end is not a big stress factor, what is surely going to be, is having their hive deposited in a strange spot in a bafflingly unfamiliar setting. And another thing we all know is that stress (whether for bee, human or any animal else) makes a creature much more vulnerable to parasites and disease. We hardly need scientists to tell us that, though their research is proving this is indeed the case.
Monoculture
I barely need to mention what is pretty obvious from Scientific American’s account of bee-trucking, that at each stop, the bees are feeding on a single crop at any one time. Take the Californian almonds. There are 810,000 acres of almond trees, and 700 billion almond flowers waiting for the bees in spring, almond flowers as far as the bee’s eye can see, and further. And nothing but almond flowers.
This is monoculture – only one crop grown intensively in the same place year after year. Monoculture brings so many negatives – soil depletion, increasingly heavy use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, to name a few. But focusing on what it means for the bees, it would be like you and me existing on nothing but bananas for two weeks, then moving on to a week of broccoli, morning, noon and night, followed by three weeks of peas, peas and more peas. Apart from being exceptionally tedious, a mono-diet would not be good for us, and it isn’t good for the bees.
So what needs to be done to restore bee health and numbers?
Good old Scientific American frames its solution in terms of dollars, a language farmers understand: a cost-effective process of encouraging more native bee species (the honeybee is a European import into the US). Report writer Ferris Jabr explains:
The more native bee species pollinate our crops, the less we depend on honeybees, which means less migration [trucking] and less disease spreading; the more wildflowers we sow, the more both native bees and honeybees have to eat. It all adds up to healthier bees. Farmers can restore wild habitat by planting a mix of native flowering shrubs on fallow fields near croplands for around $600 per acre. Scientists have shown that such newly planted wild habitat attracts native bees, which increases crop yield by 10 to 15 percent and makes honeybees themselves more efficient pollinators. And the increased yield is high enough for farmers to recoup the cost of setting up new habitat in a few years’ time. Now that’s the kind of math that could save the bees—and our food.
Bee-truckers may not be so keen on the plan!
Better by far though, is organic farming. “Organic farms support 34% more plant, insect and animal species on average compared with conventional farms, according to Oxford academics,” after reviewing UK data going back 30 years. And, “on average, non-organic farms have about 50% fewer species of pollinators, such as bees, than organic farms.”
Organic farms, apart from being free from noxious pesticides, herbicides and artifical fertilisers, offer the perfect habitat for bees. On organic farms you are likely to see rotation of crops, sowing of cover crops, mixed hedgerows, and field margins left uncultivated – all providing rich pickings for foraging honeybees, wild bees, butterflies and insects of all shapes and sizes. Organic farming yields, “significant benefits for biodiversity” says lead author of the UK study from Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, Sean Tuck.
And this is where Bhutan’s program for Gross National Happiness makes its entry. The program has “Four Pillars” and one of them is Environmental Conservation. That includes eradicating pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers from their food production, which makes Bhutan the first ever organic nation. The Bhutanese bees are happy bees. You could say Bhutan is the bees’ knees!
So, short of emigrating to Bhutan, what can we do to make our own personal contribution to bring back the bees?
Here is my own Gross Bee Happiness program
(I promise, every single step is easy to do and, apart from the first which is longer term, can be done in the blink of an eye, and a few taps on the smartphone or laptop keys)
Sign the Let’s Eat Better Together Pledgeand help save bees with every mouthful. “To protect our bees, we need to change what we eat. It’s simple: less meat, less junk, and more plants” Friends of the Earth
Add your name to the Greepeace campaign – sign here
Stop Bayer suing the EU for saving the bees – sign here
Buy organic – “Consumers can rest assured that every time they purchase an organic product, they are supporting pollinator health,” says Dr. Jessica Shade, Director of Science Programs, the Organic Center
Make our own bee hotel – the five star luxury of the Grand Beedapest is NOT required! Friends of the Earth 4-step instuctions here and video here
Join the Grow Wild campaign, an initiative to cover the UK with native wild flowers for the butterflies and bees. Order your free pollinator-friendly wild flower seeds here. “Any space can be transformed – from balconies to old boots, streets to shared spaces, boxes to buckets. Anyone can sow and grow wild flowers – it’s quick, easy and fun” and “small actions lead to big changes,” say organisers the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Excellent article. The decline of bee populations is disturbing news, the culprit as always is capitalism or at least human greed. Though the problem with bees is now recognised nothing is done and never will be while profit for the few is all that matters. Bhutan has the right idea but there society is not motivated by greed.
I like your gross bee happiness program in particular the idea of growing wild flowers anywhere and everywhere and at one time fields growing crops in our locality had boarders of wild flowers. Some of the grass verges have also been planted with wildflowers which not only help bees but enhance our environment with an attractive display.
Thank you x. Sadly our government can see no further than business profits. If we could get Jeremy Corbyn into power as PM we might see quality of life moving up the agenda and better protections for animals and the environment. But just now I’m trying to find a good place to sow my wildflower seeds!
Excellent article. The decline of bee populations is disturbing news, the culprit as always is capitalism or at least human greed. Though the problem with bees is now recognised nothing is done and never will be while profit for the few is all that matters. Bhutan has the right idea but there society is not motivated by greed.
I like your gross bee happiness program in particular the idea of growing wild flowers anywhere and everywhere and at one time fields growing crops in our locality had boarders of wild flowers. Some of the grass verges have also been planted with wildflowers which not only help bees but enhance our environment with an attractive display.
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Thank you x. Sadly our government can see no further than business profits. If we could get Jeremy Corbyn into power as PM we might see quality of life moving up the agenda and better protections for animals and the environment. But just now I’m trying to find a good place to sow my wildflower seeds!
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