STUNG BY BEES

A mysterious ailment of honeybees threatens a trillion - dollar industry and an essential source of nutrition.

For 3,000 YEARS, FARMERS IN CHINA'S SICHUAN PROVINCE POLLINATED their fruit trees the old - fashioned way ; they let the bees do it. Flower produce nectar that attracts bees, which inadvertently transfer sticky grains of pollen from one flower to another, fertilizing them so they bear fruit. When China rapidly expanded its pear orchards in the 1980s, it stepped up its use of pesticides, and this age - old system of pollination began to unravel. Today, during the spring, the snow - white pear blossoms blanket the hills, but there are no bees to carry the pollen. Instead, thousands of villagers climb through the trees, hand - pollinating them by dipping " pollination sticks " - brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters - into plastic bottles of pollen and then touching them to each of the billions of blossoms.


China's use of human bees is only one of many troubling signs of an agricultural crisis in the making. Bees the world over have been dying from a mysterious syndrome termed colony - collapse disorder, or CCD. U.S. beekeepers lost 35 percent of their hives this winter, after losing 30 percent the previous year. Similar but less well - publicized losses have occurred in countries as far - flung as Canada, Brazil, India and China, as well as throughout Europe. A recent survey of wild - bee populations in Belgium and France found that 25 percent of species have declined in the past 30 years. Several species of bumblebees common in the United States as recently as 1990 have disappeared. In Britain, the British Beekeepers Association has warned that honeybees could disappear entirely from the island by 2018, along with 165 million worth of apples, pears, canola and other crops they pollinate.
The treat is vast. Most crops - 87 of the world's 115 most important ones - require pollination to develop fruits, nuts and seeds, says agroecologist Alexandra - Maria Klein at Germany's University of Gottingen. Those crops account for about $1 trillion of the approximately $3 trillion in annual sales of agricultural produce worldwide. They also provide 35 percent of the calories consumed by humans each year, and most of the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Every blueberry, cherry, apple, grapefruit, avocado, squash, cucumber, macadamia nut and almond depends on the ministrations of bee for its existence. Even crops such as lettuce and broccoli need insect pollination to produce seed for the following year's supply.
Colony - collapse disorder is characterized by the sudden collapse of a full - strength hive in a matter of weeks, with adults leaving the hive and not returning, until the hive is deserted. " I found colonies that had just stopped living, " says Borje Svensson, a Swedish beekeeper. " They had given up live without any sign of struggle. " No one knows what causes it, but theories abound. U.S. researchers believe a previously little - known disease called Israeli acute paralysis virus is involved, while Spanish researchers suspect a fungus called Nosema. When France lost a third of its bees in the 1990s, beekeepers blamed Imidacloprid, a new pesticide that had been used on sunflowers in 1999 and expanded the ban to other crops in 2004, yet its bees have not recovered. Despite this ambiguous evidence, many beekeepers around the world continue to blame Imidacloprid - the best - selling pesticide in the world, with annual sales of nearly $860 million. Others have pointed fingers at malefactors ranging from cell phones to genetically modified crops, with little evidence. The leading theory is that colony collapse is caused by a combination of viruses, pesticides, the parasitic varroa mite, drought and stress triggered by commercial colonies' overwork and poor nutrition.
The meta-culprit is the shift to large-scale agriculture. When most farms were small family affairs, pollinators came from nearby wildlands. But the growth of massive industrial farm has put most crops out of the reach of wild insects. So farmers need to supply artificially large numbers of bees to pollinate their fields in the spring, The European honeybee is the only pollinator.

KING BEE: Farmers around the world rely too much on the European honeybee to pollimate their crops.

By. Rowan Jacobsen