Natural Perspectives:

Vic and I have written previously about colony collapse disorder. It’s time to take another look at this dread syndrome that has caused losses of a quarter to a third of commercial beehives in the U.S. over the past several years. Many of California’s agricultural products, from almonds to apples to wine grapes, depend upon the pollinating services of honeybees.

One bite out of every three that we put into our mouths depends, one way or another, upon pollination by honeybees. It isn’t just fruits and vegetables that require bees for pollination. The alfalfa that feeds dairy and beef cattle as well as poultry and hogs needs bees for pollination too.

We’re now at the end of commercial bee season. It’s time for those huge commercial beekeepers to stop trucking their hives around the country and take them back to winter quarters. This is the time of year when their bees generally start disappearing.

But the beekeepers probably won’t know if this winter will bring a repeat of the die-offs of the past few years until they check their hives in February, when they once again begin trucking their hives around the country to pollinate next year’s crops.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Apiary Inspectors of America recently completed a survey of colony losses over the past few years. Beekeepers were questioned about losses of colonies without the presence of dead bees, which is symptomatic of colony collapse disorder. The time period covered was from September to April, which is when colony collapse disorder is generally observed. During 2008-09, losses from colonies with symptoms of CCD were 29%. This is only a slight improvement over losses of 36% during 2007-08, and 32% during 2006-07.

Commercial beekeepers cannot sustain such losses and remain in business. If we lose our pollinators, our nation’s food supply will suffer and prices will rise precipitously in the face of crop losses. Beekeepers are still losing bees and a definitive cause has still not been found. But researchers are working on it, looking mainly at bee parasites, viruses and fungal infections.

I picked up a fascinating book in the Huntington Beach Central Library’s new book section a few weeks ago. Michael Schacker has written a scathing indictment of the pesticide industry in his 2008 book, “A Spring Without Bees: How colony collapse disorder has endangered our food supply.” This book may be to insecticides and bees what Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was to DDT and birds in 1962.

Schacker points the finger at a new class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. He makes a very strong case for their role as a neurotoxin that suppresses appetite in bees at sub-lethal doses, and prevents them from returning to the colony. He points out that colony collapse disorder showed up first in Europe, where neonicotinoids were first used. After a massive die-off of bees in France, French beekeepers revolted and had neonicotinoids outlawed. The Germans followed suit in 2008.

It took several years for the pesticides in the soil to degrade. In France, the bees quit dying off several years after cessation of use of these pesticides. But the U.S. seems to remain in the dark about the cause, looking at everything except this new class of pesticides.

Schacker blames the USDA and Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration for being too closely aligned with the pesticide producers.

“In the Bush era, pesticides were basically deregulated in many key ways, including arbitrarily raising the ‘tolerance level’ for many different chemicals,” he writes. “A dramatic increase in the amount of pesticides sprayed on the nations’ food was the end result.”

But at least in California, agricultural use of pesticides has remained fairly steady in recent years.

One factor that Schacker points out in his book is the low number of genes that honeybees possess for detoxifying chemicals. That makes them particularly susceptible to pesticides. Another point he makes is that industry often only looks at lethal doses, not investigating the effects of sub-lethal doses. Schacker claims that sub-lethal doses of neonicotinoids act as a neurotoxin to honeybees, and that is what is causing honeybees to fly away from their hives, never to return. A honeybee on its own at night dies without the warmth of its hive, so to not return is fatal.

Mostly, Schacker focuses on the pesticide imidicloprid, or IMD. He cites evidence that the amount of IMD applied to crops each year in California jumped over a 10-year period from 5,178 pounds to 163,618 pounds, particularly on wine grapes and almonds. Even in fairly urban Orange County, pesticide usage in 2000 totaled more than 1.6 million pounds, with 455 of those being IMD. IMD is also found in many popular “weed and feed” products that are used on golf courses and home lawns, and is used to control termites, fleas and ants.

Some of the things that Schacker recommends are to buy organic foods, go organic in the yard, plant bee gardens, and support legislation that outlaws neonicotinoids in general, and IMD in particular. He calls this Plan Bee.

Vic and I try to maintain a bee-friendly yard by not using pesticides, using organic fertilizers and remedies, and planting flowers that provide pollen for local honeybees. This summer, we were fortunate to have honeybees all over the yard, particularly on our sunflowers, rosemary, lavender and sages. We found that native bees such as carpenter bees were especially fond of our scarlet runner beans. Many California native plants, such as yarrow and buckwheat, also attract bees.

For more information on California plants that attract bees, visit nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/list.html. And definitely read “A Spring Without Bees.” Schacker may not have the whole answer, but his book will surely give you something to ponder.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.