When the bees die out. Bees are dying off en masse

Honeybees are the glue of agricultural crops. About 30% of everything we eat requires insect pollination, and the vast majority of it is produced by honey bees. Interestingly, bees arrived from the Old World with early European settlers. The American Indians called them "white man's flies." None of the species of New World bees - wasps, hornets, bumblebees, yellow flies - none of them can compete with honey bees in terms of productivity and commercial value of their work.

From the almond orchards of Central California, where billions of honey bees from all over America arrive each spring to pollinate, to the blueberry fields of Maine, these insects, with their invisible labor, enrich the American agricultural industry by $15 billion every year. In June 2013, Whole Foods in Rhode Island temporarily removed all products that relied on insects to raise awareness of the bee problem and emphasize their importance. Of the 453 positions, 237 disappeared, including apples, lemons, zucchini, and pumpkins.

Around 2006, professional American beekeepers noticed something strange and raised the alarm: their bees began to disappear in huge numbers. The honeycomb, wax and honey remained in the hives, but not the insects themselves. As the number of reports from concerned beekeepers grew, scientists even came up with a special term - “colony collapse syndrome.” Suddenly, bees found themselves in the media spotlight, with the public fascinated by the mystical mystery of their disappearance.

Meanwhile, by 2013, a third of all colonies in the United States did not survive the winter: the bees either died or abandoned their hives.

This is 42% more than the amount of insect losses that beekeepers are accustomed to - it previously amounted to 10-15% of the total amount.

What is reducing the bee population?

Deadly pesticide

Of course, agricultural pesticides were named as the “first suspect”. Most of the suspicion has fallen on systemic pesticides belonging to the group of neonicotinoids, which appear to affect insects even when used in so-called “safe doses”.

Chenshen Lu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, published the results of his study on the effects of neonicotinoids on bees in 2014. Lu and his co-authors from the Worcester County Beekeepers Association studied the health of 18 bee colonies located in three different locations in central Massachusetts from October 2012 to April 2013. At each location, the researchers divided the six colonies into three groups: one with imidacloprid, one with clothianidin (both neonicotinoids), and one left without pesticides.

While the 12 pesticide-treated colonies in the current study experienced a mortality rate of 50%, The scientists noted that in their earlier 2012 study, bees in pesticide-treated hives had a much higher mortality rate from “colony collapse syndrome,” at 94%. This mass bee die-off occurred during a particularly cold and long winter of 2010-2011 in central Massachusetts, leading the study authors to speculate that colder temperatures combined with neonicotinoids were leading to high mortality rates among the insects.

Lu continued his research in this area and shared several of his findings at a seminar at the Institute of Public Health on August 14, 2014. According to the scientist, in the case of neonicotinoids, there is a chain of consequences. Beekeepers first introduce pesticides to bee colonies by feeding them high fructose corn syrup, a product made from corn that has been treated with these pesticides. Neonicotinoids have generally gained great popularity among agriculturalists: all crops are sprayed with them and all the seeds of these crops are treated, so contact turns out to be dangerous at any stage of plant growth and development. As a result, bees poisoned by pesticides lose the ability to fly in a straight line (beeline), fly into other colonies, leave the hives in winter, and demonstrate a number of other neurological abnormalities that lead to their death or disappearance.

In the presence of a tick

Immediately after the 2006 crisis, when scientists diagnosed colony collapse disorder or CCD, the search for its root cause began.

The Israeli research company Beeologics believed that the mass extinction of bees is primarily due to acute viral paralysis, which varroa mites “reward” insects. This company proposed to induce RNA interference in bees - a kind of “intracellular police”, which will be encoded to attack the proteins of these mites. In this way, the varroa will be destroyed, but the bees themselves will not be harmed.

Monsanto, one of the world's largest pesticide producers, lists solving the problem of bee extinction as one of the company's top priorities on its official website. However, American farmers do not trust Monsanto and the results of their experiments on the introduction of RNA interference: they believe that the major players in the market of pesticides and GMOs are only hiding behind concern for the environment. But in fact, Monsanto does not plan to preserve the bee population, but instead to create and introduce into use its own “robobees” that will be under their control and capable of performing all the same functions. Basically, turn all the bees in the world into private property.

It's Complicated

So, who is to blame for this situation? What kills bees - corporate pesticides or mites? Pesticides are cited as the most likely cause. It is believed that if pesticides are removed, the number of dying bee colonies will be much reduced. In 2014, the media massively picked up the results of the above-mentioned experiment by Chenshen Lu, the results of which also supposedly confirm the only correct version of this problem: it’s all about the harmful effects of neonicotinoids on bees. But the fact is that the scientist’s research was subject to a barrage of criticism from other entomologists and beekeepers.

What's the problem with Chenshen Lu's research?

To begin with, he was refused publication by a number of serious American publications, so Lu had to publish the study in the, to put it mildly, unpopular Italian journal The Bulletin of Insectology (the impact factor of this journal in 2015 was 1.075).

“We found that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for colony collapse syndrome,” Lu sums up his research.

Something needs to be cleared up. Neonicotinoids are a relatively new class of pesticides that are made from nicotine and actually affect the nervous system of insects. These pesticides are usually used to treat the seeds of future plants. Neonicotinoids have become popular because they are much more effective than older insecticides and less toxic to humans - they are widely used in crops such as corn, soybeans and canola.

For his experiment, Chenshen Lu fed two-thirds of the bees corn syrup to which these pesticides had been added. The remaining third were the "control group" who were not given neonicotinoids. We know the results: 6 out of 12 colonies that took pesticides were destroyed. But at the same time, other entomologists aware of the experiment complained that Lu used too much pesticide, incomparable to the amount that bees can receive in real life. This is the number: 135 to a billion, while even Bayer, the pesticide manufacturer, recognizes the figure of 50 to a billion as deadly to the life of bees. And in the wild, when collecting nectar from plants, bees can even encounter the value of pesticides amounting to 5 to a billion.

At the same time, there are, of course, falsifiers on the other side, who claim that pesticides are completely harmless - and this whole “bee apocalypse” is in fact a simple sensation inflated by the media and grant-eaters. For example, this side has Henry E. Miller, a renowned medical researcher and journalist who has written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He regularly publishes texts on the topic of the “bee apocalypse,” in which he mainly insists that this is all a myth, unsupported vanity, and so on. At the same time, already on the first page of Google, if you enter his name there, publications appear in the spirit of “Why you can’t trust Henry E. Miller,” where his previous achievements are consistently listed: the tobacco lobby, denial of serious climate change, protection of pesticides and the plastic industry .

Who to believe?

On the one hand we have Chenshen Lu, who feeds the bees inflated doses of pesticides, to prove their primary harm to insects. On the other hand, there are people like Henry E. Miller who urge people to stop panicking and not worry about the use of neonicotinoids at all.

The truth is, most likely, not on someone’s side, but, as usual, somewhere in the middle. There is research showing that exposure to certain fungicides and pesticides (including neonicotinoids) can make bees more susceptible to infection. Meanwhile, other studies show that even low doses of neonicotinoids can affect the performance of bees, making it difficult for them to return to their natal hives or become queen bees.

Against this background, it looks interesting, published in the journal Pest Management Science in 2012 by three leading honey bee researchers in France, Great Britain and the USA. Its authors note that the period of mass disappearance of bees (and the diagnosed “colony collapse syndrome”) is not necessarily associated with the use of pesticides.

For example, in California, bee colonies began to rapidly disappear in the mid-1990s, before the widespread use of neonicotinoids.

And after the start of their use in this area, the decline in bees decreased. A similar example is Australia, where neonicotinoids are also widely used, but bee colonies are not subject to mass extinction. Perhaps because varroa mites are not common there.

In general, it is difficult to single out the only correct reason. Rather, a combination of factors plays a role here. The deadly varroa mite has likely killed many bees over the winter. Viral diversity is most directly related to colony collapse syndrome. An important reason is also the poor nutrition of bees, which occurs due to the fact that open lands are turned into areas cultivated by farmers where crops they planted are grown. This deprives insects of a significant percentage of nutrition, and pesticides in new plants, of course, can only aggravate all these problems. In short, the problem is complex, with many sides.

Human civilization is an extremely complex and fragile structure, standing on many pillars and honey bees can confidently be called one of the most important pillars. Every third product included in the human diet would not be on the table without these little workers. Insects are so important to nature that the extinction of bees will lead to the death of thousands of plant species, and this in a few years could lead to famine on a planetary scale. We simply won't have anything to eat.

In addition, bees are of enormous importance for the economy. The total value of agricultural products grown using their pollination is about $265 billion. What we are all accustomed to since childhood and take for granted will simply disappear without bees or, at best, will become an extremely scarce commodity. Apples, onions, pumpkins, as well as feed plants for livestock, allowing us to get as much milk and meat as we want. The following quote is often attributed to Einstein: “If bees go extinct, within a few years humanity will go extinct.” It is quite possible that he did not say this, but there is some truth in these words.

Why are bees dying out all over the world?

Honeybees are truly becoming extinct; millions of honeybee colonies have died over the past few years. Beekeepers around the world report declines in their numbers ranging from 30 to 90 percent. In the United States, the number of bee colonies has dropped from 5 million in 1988 to 2.5 million today.

Since 2006, honey bees in many countries have been experiencing so-called colony collapse syndrome. And scientists still find it difficult to answer what exactly causes it. But they know for sure that the situation is very serious.

The enemies of bees are mites

In the last few decades, bees have developed very dangerous enemies. In particular, bee mites, they are acarapis woody, which seem to have climbed out of a bad horror movie into reality. These are microscopic creatures that live in the trachea (respiratory tract) of bees. Here they lay eggs and feed on fluids produced by the victims’ bodies. They weaken the infected insects and spend their entire worthless lives in them.

No one has canceled the threat from traditional viruses and fungi not associated with ticks. But all the above-described dangers and horrors under normal circumstances can be curbed, and do not explain the magnitude and almost inevitability with which extinction occurs.

When wondering why bees are dying out, we should remember that recently it has become fashionable among agricultural producers to use a new generation of insecticides that are lethal to bees. This neonicotinoids, a chemical family related to nicotine, approved for use in the early 1990s as an alternative to DDT and other similar substances. They affects the nervous system of insects. Today they are the most common insecticides in the world. In 2008, they were sold for one and a half billion euros, which is equal to 24% of the entire market for these drugs. In 2013, 95% of corn and canola crops in the United States, as well as most orchards and vegetable crops, were treated with neonicotinoids.

Bees come into contact with the toxin while collecting pollen or through contaminated water. Often they carry it into the hive where it accumulates and slowly kills the entire bee colony. These insecticides harm insects in a variety of horrible ways. In large doses they almost instantly cause paralysis, convulsions and death; in small doses they are also extremely dangerous. They cause bees to lose orientation in space, as a result of which they fly away from the family, weaken and die. If this happens with enough frequency, regularly, the bee swarm may lose the ability to reproduce normally.

We know that neonicotinoids are deadly to bees and that we need to find alternatives immediately, but they generate billions for their producers, so these decisions are constantly delayed. Research sponsored by chemical industry giants miraculously shows that these drugs are far less toxic to bees than those conducted by independent laboratories.

What to do?

There are many more factors that can be considered a threat to the existence of bees, and all of them are quite serious. Too much genetic uniformity, use of monoculture technology in agriculture, lack of food, stress caused by human activities, other pesticides. All of them together, both described in detail and mentioned in passing, are probably responsible for bee colony collapse syndrome. Bees are becoming an endangered species of beneficial insects, and in the future it will clearly not be easier for them to resist so many enemies. If they lose this battle, the consequences will be catastrophic for all humanity and planet Earth.

This is a puzzle that we are forced to solve if we want to eat as we are used to - plenty and varied. Humanity is very firmly woven into this planet and connected with all living things on it. We must take better care of our surroundings. Not even for beauty and harmony in nature, but for the sake of our own survival.

Since the early 1990s, beekeepers began to notice mass disappearances of worker bees, especially during the winter months. Since then, the situation has only worsened - about 4 thousand species of honey bees have become extinct, and in 2006 the phenomenon was called “bee colony collapse syndrome.” No one knows for sure why bees are dying out, but what will happen to the world if they finally disappear? The magazine Popular Mechanics tried to evaluate the consequences of the extinction of bees.

1. Honey will disappear. A product that humanity has been collecting for about 9 thousand years. It serves us not only for food, but also as a cosmetic and medical product. By losing bees, we will obviously be losing one of the healthiest and most versatile foods on the planet.

2. Many fruits and vegetables will stop growing. People who are far from farming have little idea how many plants bees pollinate. According to a UN report, about 100 plants represent 90% of the world's food diversity, and 70 of them are pollinated by bees. According to the BBC, without bees, at least half of the goods in grocery stores would disappear. Apples, avocados, grapes, peaches, watermelons... and worst of all - coffee.

3. People will have to pollinate the plants themselves. But only a few and with significantly less efficiency. This method is used in China, where there is a desperate shortage of bees. The pollen bucket and brush method may help offset bee decline slightly, but it is not a replacement.

4. Dairy products will disappear. Have you ever wondered what dairy cows eat? Their diet consists of more than just plain grass. Cows require alfalfa, a plant pollinated only by bees. Sheep and goats, too, by the way. Without it, you can forget about both milk and any derivative products.

5. The cotton will disappear. And along with it, over time, all the clothes made from it, which, to put it mildly, are quite a lot. Yes, we have learned to make a synthetic replacement, for example, polyester, but in a world without cotton, the price for it will increase significantly.

6. Food variety will be reduced. Without bees, humanity will lose part of its usual diet, although some, of course, will remain. Pigs and chickens do not require feed produced from pollinated plants. Wheat, soybeans, corn and rice grow without pollination. Tomatoes, potatoes and carrots require very little of it. But another problem will arise...

7. The price of food will skyrocket. And this is not an unfounded assumption. In the winter of 2012 in Scotland, for example, a third of all beehives were destroyed, which led to a sharp increase in prices for scarce products. It's best not to imagine how much a cup of coffee would cost in a world without bees.

8. Malnutrition will become a real problem. Man is a complex organism that requires balanced nutrition. And in many ways, our vitamins come from foods pollinated by bees. A 2011 study found that bee plants provide us with calcium, fluoride, iron, and vitamins A, C, and E. Without them, our health would decline significantly.

9. The world economy may collapse. At the very least, the blow to it will be monstrous. The cotton, milk and coffee industries, as well as many food and medical enterprises, will be under threat. Losses would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars across the globe, and it would take a miracle to avoid catastrophe.

10. Famine will begin in many countries. Switching to low-pollination plants like soybeans and rice will take a lot of time, which some developing countries may not have. Such a problem will arise only if the bees die out tomorrow, but gradual extinction will also bring many troubles.

With Wired about the problem of the extinction of bees, which in many ways maintain the balance for the existence of agriculture around the world.

“If bees disappear on Earth, then in four years people will disappear too. If there are no bees, there will be no people.” This phrase is erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein, despite the fact that it first appeared in print only 40 years after the scientist's death. And although it was uttered not by a great physicist, but by another person, no one denies its essence. Indeed, the death of bees can significantly affect human life.

Today, bees are responsible for a third of the world's harvest, and this applies not only to honey. The Times and Business Insider claim the following: if insect mortality is high, beekeeping will become unprofitable, because of this, people will stop doing it, and the statistics will get even worse.

Without beekeeping, crop failure may occur, which will lead to higher prices for remaining food and even starvation. Vegetables and fruits will disappear, as well as some plants, without which some animals, in turn, will not be able to exist. This can cause a shortage of milk, cheeses, yoghurts and meat.

In addition, bees pollinate cotton, which means that people may have problems with clothing. A person can replace cotton with synthetic fabrics, for example, polyester, but the price will increase significantly.

Thus, the entire world economy could collapse - the cotton, milk and coffee industries will be under threat, and many food and medical enterprises will also suffer losses. And it's not hard to imagine. For example, in Scotland, almost a third of all beehives were destroyed in 2012, causing food prices to soar.

Why are bees dying?

In 2006, a mass disappearance of bees from hives was recorded in the United States. Scientists have dubbed the phenomenon “colony collapse disorder” or CCD (colony collapse disorder).

In parallel, scientists from the Israeli research company Beeologics, led by President Eyal Ben-Hanoch, saw the cause of local CCD in the growing epidemic of acute paralysis of bees (Israeli acute paralysis virus - IAPV), which is spread by Varroa mites.

However, American beekeepers, on whose bees the Monsanto company is now conducting similar experiments, do not trust the research results and fear that the pesticide manufacturer wants to ruin the bee genome and create something like a “robobee.” As you can see, behind the stories about drone bees from Black Mirror there are real discussions about the survival of these insects, important for the entire ecosystem.

“Show your fists,” Jerry Hayes begins his speech at an eco-conference in 2014, timed to coincide with the famous major music festival South by Southwest in Texas. Several dozen people raise their fists.

Under a microscope, the Varroa mite looks terrifying: an armored and hairy body, eight legs, a sting, and a sucking mouth. The tick spread to the American continent from Asia in 1987. American bees have not yet developed immunity to this pest.

Beekeepers are forced to use toxic chemicals in their apiaries to kill mites. Otherwise, they risk being left completely without bees for two to three years. About a third of America's bees have died each winter in the last ten years, and Hayes believes the main culprit is the Varroa mite.

But the audience present in the hall thinks differently. SXSW-Eco is a conference for environmentalists who are reluctant to blame bee problems on unknown arthropods. But they are ready to criticize Hayes himself, who has recently been working for Monsanto, a giant agricultural company located in St. Louis.

Beekeepers believe that a new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, which the company distributes, is to blame for the death of bees. Despite Hayes' attempts to defend his position by citing survey results, collected data and independent expert research, conference participants interrupted him with cries of "You just want to make money from this and kill all our bees!"

The story of beekeeper Jerry Hayes

Before he became the enemy, Jerry Hayes was the hero of all beekeepers. Many of them turned to him for advice, since Hayes had written the “Classroom” column for America’s oldest bee magazine (American Bee Journal) since 1980. He told how to catch a swarm of bees, how to polish shoes to a shine using beeswax and much more.

Jerry Hayes

Eight years before joining the Monsanto team, Hayes headed the Florida Apiary Inspection Section, which regulates all of the state's bees and their keepers. More than three hundred of Florida's four thousand registered beekeepers move their hives in-state during the winter, while when spring arrives, they load them onto trucks and haul them north and west to pollinate almonds, cherries, apples, blueberries, cranberries, and grapes. , drupes, onions and legumes, generating more than $15 billion in U.S. revenue per year.

By late summer, the trucks return to Florida, bringing back not only bees, but also viruses, bacteria, mites, ants and fungi that the insects pick up along the way. The mission of the bee inspectors under Hayes was to intercept these pests and any pathogens before they spread to all the bees of the state and then the country.

In 2006, he was elected to the position of President of the US Inspectorate. That same year, Florida commercial inspector David Hackenberg announced the disappearance of his seemingly healthy bees. Similar complaints have been received from other beekeepers. Overall, America lost a third of all its bees during the winter of 2006.

By the following year, the Internet was full of rumors about dark environmental conspiracies that caused CCD—from cell phones that interfere with bees' navigation to genetically modified corn syrup and neonicotinoid pesticides. But no one knew for sure about the real reasons.

Bee gene modification

Around this time, Hayes found himself attending a seminar on a genetic modification technique called RNA interference. It is known that the double-stranded DNA molecule is responsible for the transmission of genetic information. DNA determines everything about our body - for example, eye color or a tendency to develop cancer. But the genome also depends on RNA, a single-stranded molecule found in cell proteins.

Researchers at the workshop talked about using RNA interference to combat mosquito-borne malaria. But why can't the same technique be used against ticks?

The Israeli company Beeologics took this idea into development, contacted Hayes and entered into a collaboration with him. Moreover, specialists from Beeologics have already tried to carry out similar experiments in connection with the growing epidemic of Israeli acute viral paralysis of bees, which is also carried by Varroa mites. It wasn't long before their work was noticed by Monsanto, which was working on developing RNAi-enhanced corn seeds to combat the Western corn rootworm, which was eating the entire crop.

Traditional pesticides work very roughly, killing not only the immediate target - bugs, weeds and viruses, but also harming the “good” insects, birds, fish, and people. RNA interference, on the contrary, is designed to combat a specific gene as precisely as possible.

In 2011, Monsanto bought Beeologics and all of its RNAi efforts, continuing to test the results on bees from Hayes's own apiary, and the company also offered him a job as its chief bee consultant. The former beekeeper agreed: after all, the cause of the Israeli virus was the same Varroa mite.

“If we eliminate this mite, we will solve the problem of eight or nine different viruses in one fell swoop,” Hayes said.

Bees against Monsanto pesticides

Most beekeepers see Monsanto and other similar giant agricultural companies as enemies who spray poison and kill the bee honey - the prey that bees bring to the hive (honey, bee bread, bee glue). Among environmental activists, the company is even called “Monsatan”.

It ranks high on the list of the world's most despised corporations. Several striking documentaries with telling titles “Seeds of Death” or “GMO OMG” were shot about her activities. The hashtag #monsantoevil was created on Twitter (Monsanto is evil); Activists against the corporation are carried out by activists from the Occupy Monsanto and Bee Against Monsanto movements.

There are rumors in the media and among beekeepers about Indian farmers committing suicide due to corporate GMO products, as well as extremely popular stories about a corrupted gene pool, hounded scientists, journalistic canards and the all-powerful influence of the government.

It is worth noting that the company does not produce insecticides, which, according to beekeepers, cause bees to die out and fly away. Their number one product is Roundup Glyphosate (a weed killer). The second most popular product is seeds that are already infected with this glyphosate, allowing future seedlings to resist the Roundup spray.

When neonicotinoids first came to market in the 1990s, they were widely accepted by farmers because they were considered less harmful than other toxic pesticides. Some researchers were concerned about the sub-lethal effect that the new compounds had on honey bees - disrupting bee navigation, reproduction and the immune system. However, extensive research conducted in this area has refuted such fears.

Neonicotinoids, Hayes himself admits, of course, can harm not only honey bees, but also other living beings. They are widely used on farms and gardens, in flea collars for dogs and cats, and in various pest control products such as mouse poison.

They persist in the environment for many months and even years. But neonicotinoids aren't the only chemicals bees have to contend with: It's just one of 118 different pesticides in the bees' environment.

And yet, the bees endure. When a bee colony dies, beekeepers separate the remains of the bee colony, buy new queen bees and grow the population again. Despite ongoing losses, the number of bee colonies remains stable globally.

Moreover, one stubborn fact speaks for itself: over the past five years of neonicotinoid use in the United States, not a single symptom of acute bee colony collapse has been recorded. So what happened in 2006 is more like a short viral infection caused by Varroa mites.

Confrontation of cultures

When Jerry Hayes took office at Monsanto, his former fellow ethnologists turned their backs on him, presenting him with a red Jedi sword at his final Inspectorate meeting on the occasion of his departure as a sign that “he had gone over to the dark side” and had “sold out” to the corporation.

The latest research on the product was conducted in one of 425 laboratories on one of Monsanto's Chesterfield campuses, which covers an area of ​​one and a half million hectares in the suburbs of St. Louis. In addition to laboratories, there are 26 greenhouses and 124 growing chambers for seed germination. In tests with ticks, Hayes' team quickly identified genes that could be turned off using RNA interference. This is very easy to do in laboratory conditions.

You can kill ticks all day long in laboratory vessels. But in the field, the modified RNA molecule does not remain intact long enough to react first with the bee's body and then be directed into the mite protein.

Scientists estimate that they destroyed only 20% of the ticks, but this is not enough. And although the US Department of Agriculture already approved Monsanto's RNAi-modified corn in 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and some environmental NGOs are still wary of the potential risks from these products.

There is still widespread mistrust among beekeepers and labor organizations about the technology used by Monsanto. Despite Hayes' attempts to create a common forum to discuss mites, the dwindling and disappearing bribes and a number of other issues, most environmental activists joining the debate want to talk only about pesticides.

And honey bees in this context have already become a political issue, like GMO foods or vaccines. Anti-globalists are fighting technologies promoted by large corporations.

The launch of large-scale production of a drug to combat Varroa mites is still at least six to seven years away. The largest field experiments are currently being conducted - more than a thousand bee colonies are involved, dozens of beekeepers are using the RNAi product in ten states of America, and third-party observers are involved in monitoring. This is the beekeeping industry's largest field trial ever.