The Secret Death of Bees

Wagner Institute's Westbrook Lecture reveals the plight of the pollinators.

by Lauren F. Friedman

archives of the wagner free institute of science

When Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) first came to light, it was hard to pick up a magazine without seeing a sci-fi-worthy headline. "Mystery Bee Disappearances Sweeping U.S.," shouted National Geographic in 2007. "Where Have All the Bees Gone?" asked The New Yorker.

May Berenbaum, one of the country's foremost experts on pollinator decline and a Levittown native, will deliver this year's Westbrook Lecture at North Philly's Wagner Free Institute of Science. "[CCD is] the mysterious disappearance of a substantial number of America's honeybees," says Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Beekeepers whose colonies are affected, she explains, find empty hives with no pest invaders, no corpses in sight and no explanation for the thousands of bees that have vanished without a trace.

But the pollinators aren't the only ones at risk. "I had a lot of sleepless nights," says David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who first sounded the alarm about CCD in 2006, when all but 36 of his 400 hives collapsed. One of the major concerns, Berenbaum says, is that beekeeping may follow suit. "It's entirely possible that beekeepers will go extinct," she says, noting that as colonies continually have to be resuscitated, beekeeping may no longer be economically feasible. "We're so utterly dependent on this one species whose management has become very challenging," she warns.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania's acting state apiarist and president of Apiary Inspectors of America, alternates between despair for dying bees and beleaguered beekeepers and delight at how much attention this issue has focused on American honeybees. "The public has latched onto this story," vanEngelsdorp says. "People seem really concerned about bees."

It's partially the public's attention to CCD that moved Wagner director Susan Glassman to choose Berenbaum for the Westbrook Lecture — which aims to "encourage open discourse on science subjects." But not everyone is on board. After all, swapping sugar for honey in tea hardly constitutes a crisis, and leading entomologists agree that this managed, semi-domesticated species is unlikely to disappear entirely. ("It would be like cows going extinct," says Berenbaum.) So what's the big deal?

"It's not that we think bees are going to go extinct, and it's not honey," explains vanEngelsdorp. "It's that we need this pollination service to keep producing fruits and veggies in this country."

At a time when technology and innovation are taken for granted, it seems quaint and almost unbelievable: Much of the nation's agricultural output is still largely reliant on boxes of live bees that are packed into trucks and driven from farm to farm, all over the country.

Demand for local food is on the rise, but with bees in short supply, pollination doesn't come cheap. "For a long time, the value of pollinators was not integrated into the cost of food," Berenbaum says, "and people took it for granted."

Hackenberg, whose bees pollinate local apples, cherries, pumpkins and vegetables year-round, echoes that sentiment. "The public has no idea why we're doing what we do — they don't know that this is what's putting food on their tables."

Moreover, if bees continue to vanish, the price of American produce could skyrocket. "I'm not an economist," says Berenbaum, "but we really don't need this right now, on top of every other kind of economic crisis."

On the upside, the uproar over CCD has vastly increased the level of interest in and funding available for apiology. The 2008 Farm Bill includes specific provisions to encourage pollinator-friendly plantings and funding for studies on pollination, and research is already moving forward at a rapid clip. In October 2006, the honeybee genome was sequenced, and this has proven invaluable to scientists investigating CCD and its causes. Berenbaum explains that the three major theories currently being explored focus on pathogens, pesticides and nutrition. "More has been learned in the past two years about honeybees than in the last 20," she says.

"Bees are very complicated, and a lot of things impact them," says vanEngelsdorp. With so many possible explanations, no one has found a silver bullet yet.

In the meantime, America's pollinators continue to disappear.

(lauren.friedman@citypaper.net)

"The Case of the Disappearing Bees," Sat., March 28, 1 p.m., free, Wagner Free Institute of Science, 1700 W. Montgomery Ave., 215-763-6529, wagnerfreeinstitute.org.