By Christina Cheng
Take a bite of food. Now take two more. Chances are one of those bites depended on honeybees for its existence. Chances also are that food on your plate might be in jeopardy and pesticides may be part of the reason.
Honeybees fulfill 80 percent of US agricultural pollination needs, playing a hand in one third of our food supply. But since the fall of 2006, a mysterious phenomenon, called Colony Collapse Disorder, has been decimating the bee population in Texas and several other states in the country, and these vital insects have been disappearing from their hives. Bees leave to forage for pollen and nectar and just never return.
Texas ranks eighth in the nation for honey production, yielding 5.7 million pounds in 2006, but it is the effect on agriculture, the state’s second-largest industry, where the absence of honeybees will be especially damaging. When people think about honeybees, that golden sweetener in the cute honey bear container is what most commonly comes to mind, but bees are responsible for pollinating the crops of countless fruits and vegetables. Should something happen to our primary pollinators, it could have a devastating effect on our economy and food supply.
“If the bees continue to decline as we’ve seen in the last number of years, it’s gonna be a real crisis,” said Baxter Adams, an apple grower in Medina, Texas whose fruit harvest suffered due to a drastic decline in his orchard’s honeybee population. The bees began disappearing in spring and, by midsummer, their numbers had dwindled to zero.
This recent bout of honeybee disappearances has left entire hives empty of adult working bees that keep hives thriving, and beekeepers, farmers and scientists are left concerned and scratching their heads.
“We all have lots of questions and still not a lot of answers,” said Jimmie Oakley, program chair for the Williamson County Area Beekeepers Association.
Most beekeepers and scientists, including Dr. Paul Jackson, chief apiary inspector of Texas, believe there is a combination of factors culminating in a perfect storm that results in this strange and unprecedented disorder.
“They say it’s a virus, but what type they don’t know; it could be pesticide poisoning to some degree,” said Jackson. “Or it could be poor nutrition.”
Clint Walker of the Walker Honey Company in Waco, Texas operates about 2,000 colonies of bees, primarily to produce honey. He took 500 hives to West Texas to make honey and pollinate cotton fields and 80 percent of his bees disappeared. “It was about a $30,000 to $50,000 hit on my bottom line last year,” he said.
Walker believes that his bees disappeared because of the systemic pesticides, such as Imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid, found in the cotton fields his bees pollinated, a belief that echoes the suspicions of several other beekeepers and scientists in the industry. These widely used pesticides, banned in France since the 1990s due to its implication in that country’s own bee die-offs, act as a neurotoxin in insects and are known to cause disorientation in bees at higher concentrations.
“What it’s supposed to do is make it stop eating, stop mating, forget where it lives,” Walker explained of the effect these pesticides have on the insects they target. “Or its immune system gets compromised.”
Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who was one of the first to lose hives because of CCD, sent a letter earlier this year to all his pollination customers in which he said, “Beekeepers that have been most affected so far have been close to corn, cotton, soybeans, canola, sunflowers, apples, vine crops and pumpkins,” adding that he’s convinced this class of pesticides is playing a major role in this disorder.
As a preventative measure, many beekeepers are opting to avoid crops treated with the pesticides. National honey production per colony averages nearly 65 pounds, though Texas’ colonies average 70 pounds. Weaver notes that bee losses in Texas were not as widespread or intense as in other states. One possible reason may be Texas’ expansive wildflower fields, though our mild winters are also a contributing factor.
“We lost our bees in 2006, so in 2007 we stayed away from all cotton and road crops,” Walker said. Instead he only made honey with Texas wildflowers this year, a move that could potentially harm the honeybee-dependent agricultural industry.
Beekeepers rely on agricultural pollination to supplement their incomes, but if beekeepers are avoiding crops because of fears of pesticide poisoning, the agricultural industry could be the most damaged.
Agriculture contributes $73 billion to the Texas economy every year and relies on honeybee pollination to boost crop yield and quality. Texas cattle, the state’s largest agricultural commodity, could also suffer: one third of cattle feed is made of protein-rich alfalfa and clover, which also need pollination to grow properly.
Honeybees are the thread that ties the agricultural industry together. Without pollination, apples aren’t round, cucumbers aren’t straight and melons aren’t sweet.
“Last year we really suffered in the quality of the fruit from lack of good pollination,” said Adams, the Medina apple grower. “A lot of apples fell off the trees that normally would’ve grown and been part of our crop.” Adams had to resort to hand-pollinating his apple trees, a method that is both time-consuming and expensive.
Ninety Texas crops are pollinated by honeybees, and according to the Texas Beekeeper’s Association, without their help, Texas crops would lose about $587 million every year. Seeds also can’t be produced on many plants without the helpful aid of a pollinator, which also takes away profits from farmers who would need to purchase seeds for the next year’s crops.
If beekeepers refuse to pollinate our pesticide-laden food crops, there will be disastrous results in terms of our economy, our nutrition and the diversity and quality of our favorite foods. Unless the agricultural industry changes its pesticide practices, it leaves beekeepers little recourse than to simply avoid those crops as much as possible.
“In the short term, we can’t change the chemical situation over night,” said Walker. “That’s something that will take the federal government, the EPA,” and a lawsuit rivaling that against the tobacco industry.
