No more free-bees!

There is the joke that even the bees are on strike – they want shorter flowers and more honey.

Unfortunately, the Americans are finding their drastic losses of bees no joking matter. Over the past 30 years, over half of US honeybees have been lost in what is being termed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Bees have been destroyed by pesticides, varroa mites and Nosema Disease. The US Department of Agriculture has identified 58 pesticides that are “highly toxic” to bees, including aldicarb, diazinon and malathion. Bee specialist, Maryann Frazier said pesticides had been shown to impair the learning abilities of honey bees and to suppress their immune systems.

The US has resorted to migrant-labourer bees - transporting one billion “guest worker” bees from Australia to pollinate American fields and orchards. One website calls this "junk food" for bees.

In Terrain magazine, Gina Covina writes that the survival of Earth’s bees depends on a change from industrial agriculture to biodiverse ecological farming.

The loss of bees may have an even greater impact than rising fuel prices on food production. One farmer, Robert Edwards, said he had to reduce his acreage of cucumbers by 50 per cent - not because of rising fuel prices, but because he was not sure he would be able to "rent" enough bees to pollinate his crop.

Commercial beekeeper, Steve Godlin, said his 5 000 colonies plummeted in the space of a year to 2 500. His bees forage from crops that are mostly treated with pesticides.

Dave Mendes, a commercial beekeeper with over 7 000 colonies conducted a research project following his bees from Florida to California. 18 hives started the journey but after only 10 months only four finished, and only one was strong enough to travel to California to pollinate almonds.

It seems that the work of the migrant-labourer bee or "rent" bee has only just begun. As natural habitat is destroyed and pesticide-intensive monocultures persist, the precious labour that humans took for granted from the busy bee will be over. No more free-bees!