Wiki Home   >   honeybee

honeybee

The Honeybee and our interdependence

Apis Mellifera, the Western honeybee,  has been a source of interest and food to human beings for as long as 10,000 years.

It is estimated that one third of our diet is currently dependent on pollination by the honeybee, including nuts, soya beans, onions, oranges, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, melons, avocados, peaches, carrots, broccoli, sunflowers, apples, and even cattle feed like alfalfa and cotton for our clothes.

A foraging honeybee will visit 1500 flowers to collect one load of pollen. A colony of bees will together make a total of 45,000 trips per day involving 280,000 miles of flying.
Honeybees are estimated to contribute £165 million pounds to the UK economy through their pollination and produce 5000 tonnes of honey, with a market value of £12 million.

It is not clear how we would do without them. They are a prime indicator of our human dependence on the complex ecosystems that support life on the planet. Some say the honeybee is like the canary in the gold mine, a first warning of our destruction of the ecosystems on which we depend.

Bee populations are notoriously unstable and many factors affect their health. Yet recently there has been an extraordinary degree of loss. It began in the US where for two years running a third or more of all honeybees have mysteriously died. A similar phenomenon now seems to be taking hold in Canada, Europe, Asia and South America.  Colony Collapse Disorder, as it has been called, is simply marked by the disappearance of the bees.

There are various possible causes. Some blame the loss of genetic diversity of the honeybee. Our Apis Mellifera is now so inbred that it may be unable to resist disease.
Others point the finger at pesticides like the neonicotinoids that are widely used in agriculture and are thought to upset the bees ability to communicate with each other. The neonicotinoid known as imidacloprid, has been blamed for such a ‘mad bee’ disease in France. It appears that this new pesticide, which is used on sunflowers, also kills some birds and is also highly toxic to earthworms.
In addition to all this there are various bee diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) and Varroa mite infestation. The Varroa mite is endemic in the US and throughout Europe. It could lower resistance to viruses like IAPV.

Bee husbandry is also likely to be a major contributor to this problem.  Each year hives of bees are shipped to California from all over the US and even from Australia. Around 50% of all the bees in the US take part in this process. Driven for thousands of miles on trucks stacked four hives high, they are released to perform their pollination tasks among the 60 million almond trees that stretch over 400 miles of country. It is a carefully coordinated process. Bees are booked months in advance. Each set of hives pollinates a particular area. The bees then go off on their travels to spin more money for their owners. Many will go next to Florida to work the citrus plantations, then on and on and on…The area set aside for the Almond industry is growing each year and more and more bees are required to take part in this industrial process. When you consider this lifestyle, the potential for the spread of disease between hives from different places and the sheer stress placed on the bees, perhaps Colony Collapse Disorder is no real mystery. Yet this industrialisation of pollination is not so severe in other countries, which are also experiencing loss, such as the UK.

Source: A World without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum
It would be very good if a beekeeper could amend or add to this wiki piece.