29 August 2013 In the summer of 2012, bee enthusiast Megan O’Donald encountered a bumblebee in her mother’s garden in Briar, Washington. In the distant past, this would have hardly been noteworthy, but after the disappearance of bumblebees from Washington state, almost ten years ago, the sighting was an event. [1] In 2013, O’Donald saw another bumblebee in a goldenrod in the same garden. When Will Peterman, a freelance writer and photographer, heard about O’Donald’s sightings, he decided to “launch an expedition.” He identified several “patches of habitat” in small parks and unmown lots. Investigation of the first three sites yielded nothing but, at the fourth, he struck gold. [2] In Briar, Washington‘s Briar Park, he found and photographed several bumblebees. Several days later, Peterman returned to the park with a group of bee experts (entomologists) and, together, they located and photographed several bumblebee queens. It is estimated that the United States has lost almost half of its honeybee population in just the last seven years. However, the many species of the relatively petite honeybee differ in appearance, behavior, and habitat from that group of species called bumblebees. The relatively large and, somewhat, rotund bumblebee has also suffered a substantial disappearance in North America. Not long ago, the bumblebee was common throughout the Western United States and Canada. However, beginning in the late 1990’s, its numbers declined until it all but vanished from a vast area of its range extending from the Pacific Coast of California north into British Columbia. Mysteriously, bumblebee populations remained relatively unaffected in the mountainous portions of this same range. Unlike honeybees, bumbles are wild bees. They are not kept by beekeepers. However, their wild status makes them no less important to the agricultural industry. These bees are specially suited to pollinate a variety of cash crops including tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums and their unique style of pollination accounts for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year. Bumblebees are known for their characteristically loud buzz. However, unlike hive-dwelling honeybees, bumblebees don’t just buzz when they’re flying. They can, and do, produce that same buzz without moving their wings. And it is just the vibration from this flightless buzz that makes them uniquely valuable pollinators of certain crops. After landing in a blossom, the large bumblebee grabs the blossom and holds it tightly. While maintaining this tight grip, it strongly vibrates while remaining stationary. Nothing less than the bumblebee’s strong vibration will assure pollination by shaking loose sufficient quantities of the thick pollen produced by certain species of plants. No other bee could do this job as consistently or successfully. While the sighting of a few bumblebees in Washington state may not seem like much, Biologist Rich Hatfield, of the Xerces Society, believes that these few sightings hold the promise of a possible bumblebee repopulation of the their abandoned Western Range. [3] Also, these sightings came at a time when bee watchers needed some good news. Just a few weeks earlier, 50,000 bumblebees died, in mass, in an Oregon parking lot. The cause of the die-off remains unexplained. Even worse, these deaths came only one week before the beginning of the newly declared “National Pollinator Week.” The challenges to bumblebee survival grow out of its peculiar lifestyle. Unlike the petite honeybee, the bumblebee doesn’t maintain the familiar hive. Bumble queens locate their 12-inch wide nests rather opportunistically, in “clumps of dry grass, old bird nests, abandoned rodent burrows, old mattresses, car cushions or even in or under old abandoned buildings.” [4] Each bumblebee nest will be used for only a single year. And a colony will begin and end within that same year’s time. Each year, a new nest will be built and a new colony developed in a different location. Most colonies number only a few hundred bees, though rarely, numbers can reach as high as 2,000. The wild bumble’s nomadic lifestyle disburses its population. This works to their advantage by protecting them from the rapid, plague-like spread of diseases so common in the perennial and densely populated hives of the honeybee. Also, the freestyle foraging of this wild bee limits its exposure to systematically applied pesticides. Bumbles certainly suffer some collateral damage from pesticides and are vulnerable to certain diseases. However, pesticides and disease, the “usual suspects” in the disappearance of the honeybee, are less prominent contributors to the decline in bumble populations. Inspired by the honeybee colonies, human attempts to create similar domesticated bumble colonies led to one of the few documented disease outbreaks among these bees. When a few of the experimental, domesticated queens were imported from Europe to American, they brought with them a new fungal disease, which spread among some American bumblebees. In spite of this incident, and the plentiful speculation about the possible role of disease in declining American bumble populations, there is little evidence that any disease played a significant role in the massive North American disappearance. In fact, the healthy bumble population levels in the Western mountainous areas of North America and Canada argue against the disease theory. These unaffected populations suggest another cause — one more often associated with animals than insects: loss of habitat. Certain human activities have tremendously reduced the bumble’s natural habitat. Modern land management, agricultural and aesthetic, continues to eliminate the open, unmown grasslands and areas of brush that bumbles need for nesting. Over the past 40 years, agricultural planning and land-use have been revolutionized to provide maximum yields. But these modifications have destroyed vast areas of potential habitat — especially those close to sources of honey and, therefore, locations in need of pollinators. In the past, the typical farm included a substantial number of fallow tracts of land in which wild brush and unmown grass were allowed to grow. These areas provided breaks between fields to slow or prevent the spread of disease. Other uncultivated areas were buffers between different types of crops. This separation was intended to prevent bleed-over of one type of crop into fields dedicated to another. However, the practice of planting different types of crops was, again, a kind of insurance against the spread of disease. While one type of crop might fall victim to disease, another would be less susceptible and survive to produce a much-needed yield at harvest. And, finally, there was crop rotation. Some fields were periodically left fallow to prevent a loss of fertility. All of these uncultivated areas of the typical farm were ideal habitat for the bumblebee. However, advances in pesticides and herbicides have so reduced the incidence of crop damage and disease that a new style of agriculture, sometimes called “monoculture,” dominates farm planning and geography. The modern farm is a study in intensive land use and specialization. All lands are cultivated and, often, with a single crop. Any creeping wild brush or grass growth is eliminated, quickly and thoroughly, with extremely effective herbicides. Chemical soil fertilization is just as effective and has made crop rotation a thing of the past. The result is a modern farm with no place for bumbles. Beyond our farms, today’s increasingly urban world is also working to eliminate unsightly brush and unmown lands. Even road embankments and open park areas are regularly mowed. This creates a more pleasing cosmetic effect, but at the expense of bumblebee habitat. In notable contrast, the bumble’s habitat remains relatively intact in the less farm-friendly mountainous areas of the Western United States and Canada. And it is in just these areas, less touched by modern farming or systematic public landscaping, that bumble populations remain strong. At least one organization, the Xerces Society, named for the extinct California butterfly, Xerces Blue, is currently working to advance conservation of bumblebee habitat. The society focuses on several conservation issues including the preservation of native pollinators. In 2010, the society’s scientists developed a bee-friendly conservation strategy, the Yolo Natural Heritage Program, operated in Yolo County California. Alas, there have only been a few sightings, but let’s all keep our fingers crossed for the bumblebee’s return. 25 July 2013
Scientists at Harvard are working on the development the first robotic bee. They hope that their robo-bee will, someday, be able to pollinate flowers and crops just like the organic original: the honeybee. Beginning in 2009, Harvard’s “Micro Air Vehicles Project” has used titanium and plastic to replicate the functions, if not the appearance, of the familiar honeybee. The robo-bee pops up, complete with wings, from a quarter-sized metal disk. The the creators hope that, one day, “robo-bees” will be engineered to fly in swarms, live in artificial hives, and coordinate both their target locations and pollination methodologies. In fact, the researcher’s vision of the future “robo-bee” is so striking that one writer expressed the wish that the project’s spokesperson add the phrase “for the good of all mankind” to each progress report. Without it, readers might be reminded of all the movies “about technology that eventually destroys mankind.” In fact, the robo-bee may help save us or, at least, save our food supply. Bees have been dropping like (the proverbial) flies for over 7 years now. The current bee depopulation was termed a “disappearance,” then, a “die-off” and, now, is formally referred to as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The decline in bee populations continues at an alarming rate. However, bee die-offs are not just a part of modern life. There have been a number of die-offs in that last couple of centuries. The original European honeybee disappeared from Europe long ago. Its successor, our modern honeybee, was imported from Turkey into Europe and, then, into the United States. Bees get a lot of scientific attention because they are vital to American agriculture, which is vital to the American economy. Without bees, production of some of our most profitable crops would be impossible. Every few weeks, a news article announces the discovery of “the cause” of the threatened bee “extinction.” Blaming pesticides is almost fashionable. However, these sensational claims do little more than draw attention to particular studies, and the involved researchers. In fact, there probably isn’t a single cause. The current die-off seems to be the result of several factors working together. Sadly, our familiar honeybee may be gone long before the exact combination of factors can be found. The puzzle goes like this. A bee (1) has a parasite like varroa mites; (2) is exhausted by transport over long distances; and (3) is exposed to a particular pesticide. Alone, none of these factors would kill a bee. Even all of these put together wouldn’t kill a bee. However, all of these put together might weaken the bee’s immune system. Then, with a compromised immune system, the bee contracts, and dies from, a completely unrelated disease. That disease is the final cause the bee’s death. However, the underlying cause is an immune system compromised, not by one factor, but by a particular combination of several factors. For now, that combination remains a mystery. While science fiction films have portrayed the replacement of human beings with robots, films have never explored the possibly sinister side of robo-bee. Imagine a robotic “Stepford Bee” hiding quietly in the wings waiting for death of the last honeybee. And, then, a “brave new” technological world–without any bees at all! There is something a bit creepy about human-engineered bees pollinating crops grown from human-engineered seeds. One writer described the disturbing vision as “swarms of tiny robot bees . . . pollinating those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.” By the way, one developer of those “GMO cash crops,” Monsanto, sponsored a recent “Bee Health Summit” in Saint Louis, Missouri. A company spokesperson acknowledged that the beekeepers might have heard some “scary stuff” about Monsanto. The summit is the company’s effort to “introduce itself to the beekeeping industry” and “raise their comfort level.” And there was some discomfort with one beekeeping guest commenting, “I can’t believe I’m at Monsanto.” On the comforting side, Monsanto is after one of the oldest and most clearly identified factors in declining bee health, the parasitic varroa mite, which spreads a variety of viruses to honeybees. Researchers with Beeologics, one of Monsanto’s recent acquisitions, are planning to use RNA, a genetic regulator that determines how a plant or insect “works.” The RNA would be fed to the bee and, then, would be ingested by the mites. Once in the mite’s system, the RNA would “turn off” the mite’s virus transmitting gene. With this RNA intervention, and other technologies, our honeybees may yet be saved from relative extinction. Then, their robotic replacements would have to remain on the shelf. But hold on. Genetically engineering the mite is only one step closer to genetically engineering the honey bee. So, we may be saved from robotic bees by . . . GMO bees? Well, as our GMO bees pollinate our GMO crops, we can only feel a pang of sorrow for our robo-bee languishing in the shadows. With a revived, genetically engineered super-honeybee, where could a robotic bee go? What would it do? No problem. Harvard’s Micro Air Vehicles Project had that covered from the beginning. The project’s published reports also suggest potential military uses. So, robo-bee, with some market repositioning, becomes the world’s smallest drone. Well, if Monsanto “saves” the honeybee, who will be interested in our newly re-branded and repositioned mini-drones? Again, possibly Monsanto, which, at least once in the past, retained a private security contractor “to protect its GMO crops.” The “protection” was less exciting than it sounds. It was limited to the simple monitoring of public information. Still, what security company couldn’t use swarms of surveillance mini-drones? So, if Monsanto needs security in the future, robo-bee might play a part in the security provider’s services. Finally, we end up with yet another, unexpected vision of our future. Just picture it. We stand watching the setting sun as swarms of genetically engineered super-bees pollinate “dystopian fields of GMO cash crops,” while we, ourselves, are closely surveilled by swarms of robo-bees or, rather, “mini-drones.” Why does everything just keep getting weirder? The End? [Author’s Note: Actually, Robo-Bee is a long, long way from rolling off the assembly line and into the fields. Even farther away are the technologies and knowledge necessary to genetically engineer anything as complicated as an insect.] 13 March 2014
Researchers are asking a lot of questions about animals lately. Are animals self-aware? Do they think? And these questions are reaching beyond animals to insects as well. Do bees have personalities? And, now, do bees have feelings? It’s no surprise that this type of research tends to raise more questions than it answers. Tests seem to show that bumblebees have no individual personality. But even if bumblebees are conformists to a fault, could honeybees be non-conformists? And, even if honeybees don’t have individual personalities, could hives or even swarms of bees have distinct personalities? The idea of a group of bees having a personality seems “way out there” until you find out that beekeepers have always reported that, as a group, the bees of different hives, in many ways, behave quite differently from the bees of neighboring hives. But the question of bees having feelings seems like a tough one to test. However, finding out whether or not bees become moody may not be as tough as we thought. It turns out that when human beings and animals are in bad moods, they tend to make negative judgments. In other words, we’re all a bit pessimistic when we’re in a bad mood. But let’s begin at the beginning. One characteristic of feelings is that they change. If a person or animal always feels exactly the same way, they can’t really be said to have feelings. Now, let’s substitute the word “mood” for feeling. Why? Moods, by definition, change. So, the word “mood” is a little more precise than the word “feeling.” Now, how can you tell if an insect has moods? Maybe, by using the same test that is used with animals. The trick of the test involves negative judgments. Human beings and animals evaluate and react to situations differently when we’re in a good mood than when we’re in a bad mood. A good example is a decision based even odds – a coin toss. Would you bet on a toss of a coin? Your odds are exactly as good as they are bad. I’ll guess that if you’re asked to bet money, but trying to be frugal, going through hard times, and are a bit short of cash, you’ll pass on the bet. On the other hand, if you’ve got plenty of money and have just had a few really good breaks, you might just take the bet. Why? Your mood. You’re feeling lucky. So, for our test, we need four things. First, we need to find the equivalent of a coin toss for bees. Second, we have to offer the bet to the bees and see how many take the bet and how many refuse the bet. Third, we have to find a way to change the bees’ moods. And fourth, we have to offer those same bees the same bet, again, and see if their changed moods affects their willingness to take a chance.. As tough as all this sounds, Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the UK found a way. Bees have an excellent sense of smell and are quickly and easily trained to associate particular smells with particular things. Wright’s team, headed by Melissa Bateson, first, found something honeybees love, surcose (sugar), and something bees hate, quinine. Then, they found two substances with very different smells, octanone and hexanol. The octanone was paired with the much loved sugar and the hexanol with the hated quinine. The bees were trained to associate the smells with the substances that they loved and hated. Then, the researchers combined the chemical smells. When the well-trained bees were exposed to a combination of half octnone (lovable sugar) and half hexanol (hated quinine) half the bees “took a chance” and tasted what they hoped was sugar. The other half passed, not willing to risk licking the hated quinine. The researchers had their “coin toss” – a choice with even odds. Now, that the bees’ reaction to the half and half solution was known, the next trick was to put the same bees in a bad mood. This isn’t as hard as it sounds because there are different types of bad moods. It wasn’t necessary to depress the bees by having them watch a sad movie. Substantial stress will produce a bad mood more surely than anything else. Labs have chemical mixers mounted to benches. These mixers are machines that violently vibrate/shake containers to mix their contents. With the menacing name, vortexer, I get the impression that these machines are a bit like paint mixing machines at the local hardware store. Few could disagree that shaking a group of bees in a container in one of those mixers would leave the insects quite “stressed” – a very bad mood. After a stay in the mixer, the bees were presented with the half and half solution again. Many more bees passed on the “chance” for sugar than had before. So, changing the bee’s mood, changed their “feelings” about taking a 50/50 chance to get some food. After the “mixing,” the bee’s weren’t so anxious to take the risk. This seems to indicate that bees have moods – feelings. Of course, there are a lot of questions about the reliability of the results. Could the apparent “mood” be an automatic response based on hormonal changes or hard-wired neurological reactions? These researchers, however, expressed cautious confidence in their results. Also, the researchers made a surprisingly compelling argument that much of the doubt about the “feelings” of bees may be the result of a subtle prejudice. The researchers pointed out that if, instead of bees, the subjects of the experiment had been dogs, cats, horses, parrots, cows, or pigs, the conclusion that the experimental subjects had feelings would have gone unquestioned. Why? Well, when testing animals with which human beings have had a close historical relationship, not only are results indicating emotion and intelligence readily accepted, but researchers are willing to make far reaching assumptions based on little more than their personal instincts about particular behaviors. Jason Castro in his excellent article, Do Bees Have Feelings, refers to this argument as a plea for consistency. We often ascribe emotions to dogs, such as happiness, fear, or anxiety with little, or only intuitive, “evidence.” However, even strong evidence indicating that an insect has feelings is met with hairsplitting reservations. The conventional wisdom has always been expressed as follows: Unless we discover a way to speak directly with animals, we can never be sure if animals experience emotions in the way that human beings do. However, whether I am in a good mood or a bad mood, I’m less pessimistic about finding the answer to the question of animal and, even, insect emotion. I think that there is a preponderance of evidence sufficient to accept the hypothesis that certain animals experience certain emotions. And, although more research is needed, these first tests, alone, strongly argue that insects, honeybees, experience moods. 13 March 2014
In an effort to maintain the population of bees and other pollinators, the United States Department of Agriculture has budgeted $3 million. Most of the money will go to ranchers, farmers and beekeepers in a conservation effort to preserve and expand pollinator habitat. WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THE BEES? Bee populations have been declining for over 7 years now. First, termed a “disappearance,” then, a “die-off.” the continuing depopulation is, now, formally referred to as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The continuing decline has been both rapid and widespread affecting perhaps the entire world. Bees get a lot of scientific attention because they are vital to American agriculture, which is vital to the American economy. Without bees, production of some of our most profitable crops would be impossible. Every few weeks, a news article announces the discovery of “the cause” of the threatened bee “extinction.” In fact, there probably isn’t a single cause. The current die-off seems to be the result of several factors working together. The puzzle goes like this. A bee (1) has a parasite like varroa mites; (2) is exhausted by transport over long distances; and (3) is exposed to a particular pesticide. Alone, none of these factors would kill a bee. Even all of these put together wouldn’t kill a bee. However, all of these put together might weaken the bee’s immune system. Then, with a compromised immune system, the bee contracts, and dies from, a completely unrelated disease. That disease is the final cause the bee’s death. However, the underlying cause is an immune system compromised, not by one factor, but by a particular combination of several factors. For now, that combination remains a mystery. A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE Modern agriculture has come to be dominated by a particular style called monoculture. The modern farm is a study in intensive land use with about every square foot of available soil used for the continuous cultivation of crops – or more precisely a signal crop. This modern style has little in common with the traditional agriculture of even a generation ago. In the past, the typical farm included a fair number of fallow (unplanted) tracts of land in which wild brush and unmown grass were allowed to grow. These tracts served several purposes. They provided “breaks,” uncultivated buffer areas between cultivated fields of crops. First, breaks slowed or prevented the spread of disease from field to field. And, second, breaks prevented the seeds of one kind of crop from creeping into fields planted with another. The third purpose of keeping some land fallow (unused) was to prevent soil depletion. The practice of letting some fields "rest" for an a season was called crop rotation, which helped prevent a loss of, or restore, fertility to tracts of land. Traditional agriculture had always avoided modern monoculture’s practice of planting only one kind of crop. The traditional reason for planting several different kinds of crops was, again, a sort of insurance against the spread of disease. While one kind of crop might fall victim to disease, another would be less susceptible and survive to produce a much-needed yield at harvest. What happened to traditional agriculture? Advances in chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides have dramatically reduced the need for crop rotation and fallow tracks of land as buffers. But this created another problem. The modern farm needs bees just as much as the traditional farm it replaced. And bees need habitat. DO BEES NEED HABITAT? When we think of bees, we tend to think of the hive-dwelling honeybee. The honeybee seemed to fit in perfectly with modern monoculture. Like everything else needed by the modern industrial farm, when you need bees, you just order them “brought in.” Beekeepers truck bees, sometimes hundreds of miles, to various locations during pollination season. Then, the bees are trucked out when pollination is over. At least, that was the plan before CCD and honeybee depopulation became a reality. But, with or without depopulation, what’s with “habitat?” The only thing honeybees need is a hive, a beekeeper, and the beekeeper’s truck. Right? Well, not quite. Honeybees aren’t the only pollinators. Worse, honeybees can’t pollinate some cash crops including certain varieties of tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums. For these crops you need bumblebees. So, why not truck-in some bumblebee hives? And there’s the problem. Bumblebees don’t live in hives. The plump bumblebee is the nearest thing to a loner within its social species. Bumblebees don’t build permanent hives. They build nests that are deserted for a new location on a yearly basis. The bumblebees don’t forage (search for and find food) in swarms, but wander alone from flower to flower in open grasslands. On the traditional farm, these wild bees made their nests in fallow tracks of grass lands or break areas between cultivated fields. Because the bumblebee’s service as a pollinator is only needed seasonally, these bees survived during the rest of the year by foraging in the same wild grasslands in which they built their nests. THE HABITAT VANISHES Monoculture changed all that. Fallow tracts, breaks, and buffers vanished with every yard of available soil planted with a crop. Even the small islands of wild grass along the farms paths and roadways were pressed into service. And the bumblebees left. What did we lose? A lot. The bumble’s unique style of pollination is required, and accounts, for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year. Fresh off the farm, the bumblebee made its way to the city or, at least, to more populated areas to find the welcome mat missing. Modern urban and highway landscaping favors a neatly manicured look that requires the elimination of the wild grasslands required by the bumblebee’s lifestyle. In parks and even around highway overpasses, that great enemy of bumblebee habitat, the lawn mower, doesn’t destroy the grass, but prevents the appearance the blooms and blossoms on which the bumblebees depend for food. And worse, the lawn mower is the arch-enemy of bumblebee nests. When the habitat vanished, so did the bumblebee. Beginning in the late 1990’s, these bees all but disappeared from a vast area of their range extending from the Pacific Coast of California north into British Columbia. Only recently have there been sightings of even a single bumblebee in several states that once supported an enormous population. THE MOUNTAIN BEE? It is said that those who felt uncomfortable in "civilization" used to become trappers and wander into the mountains -- earning the name “mountain men.” Well, maybe bumblebees did the same. As these bees almost completely disappeared from their lowland range, their numbers were, and are, unaffected in the North American Rockies where they continue to live and thrive. Mountains are not favored for agriculture and the rough beauty of mountainous areas is only enhanced by wild growing grasslands. The mountain habitat is well within the bumblebees comfort zone. THE USDA & A CHANGE IN ARGI’S “CULTURE”? With all the developments in the efficiency of modern agriculture, it is a little surprising to read of a USDA spokesman discussing the use of cover crops, rangeland, pasture management and other practices that dropped out of modern agriculture decades ago. But the purpose behind the reintroduction of crop rotation, breaks, and buffers makes sense if the purpose is to preserve native pollinators, most prominently the often forgotten bumblebee. Without effective pollinators, there will be no harvest in spite of the most intensive and efficient use of the available land. The USDA spokesman explained that these “new” practices “are expected to provide quality forage and habitat for honey bees and other pollinators, as well as habitat for other wildlife.” |