Story Originated by Josephine Marcotty http://www.startribune.com/local/264929101.html
Photo Credits and Videos by Renee Jones Schneider
On a cool January day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Steve Ellis culled his sick bees. The only sounds were their steady buzz and the chuffing of the smoker he used to keep them calm as he opened the hives, one by one, to see how many had survived. The painful chore has become an annual ritual for Ellis, and, hardened now like a medic on the front lines, he crowned another box with a big rock to mark it.
Modern farm economics have created an enormously productive system of genetically engineered, chemically dependent agriculture. But it relies on just one domesticated insect to deliver a third of the food on our plate.
And that insect is dying, a victim of the very food system that has come to depend on it.
A rush of recent research points to a complex triangle of causes: pervasive pesticides, a flowerless rural landscape dominated by cash crops, and the spread of parasites and diseases. Together they inflict enormous damage on the honeybees that crisscross the country each spring and summer, like migrant laborers, to pollinate everything from almonds in California to apples in Maine.
Most consumers are insulated from the threat — as long as the aisles of America’s grocery stores are resplendent with apples, lemons, coffee, cocoa, peanuts, grapes, onions, cucumbers and watermelons. But not Ellis and his sometimes partner Jeff Anderson, a third-generation beekeeper from Eagle Bend, Minn., whose family has made the annual trek to and from the California almond bloom since 1961.
Ellis, courtly and rail thin, is entranced by the evolutionary role that pollinators have played over millions of years in the creation of flowers, color and scent. Without insects, he says, the world would be a place much more like Dorothy’s Kansas than the Technicolor Land of Oz that nature has produced.
“We would go back to black and white,” he said.
For the first time, Ellis and Anderson are thinking what was once unthinkable — perhaps the foraging grounds in central Minnesota, where they have made honey for decades, have become too barren and toxic for their bees.
Repercussions of the flowerless landscape
Springtime used to be a time of rebirth. It was the season when beehives grew fat and healthy on dandelions, wildflowers, and the sweet clover and alfalfa that farmers once grew to add fertilizer to the soil. It’s what once made Minnesota part of a Midwestern mecca for beekeepers and long one of the top five honey-producing states in the country.
But in the space of a few decades, the central Minnesota landscape around Ellis has been transformed into one that has no room for bees.
When he looks out over the edge of the old gravel pit near Elbow Lake where he keeps his hives, Ellis sees what he calls a vast agricultural desert of corn and soybeans — two plants that don’t need bees for fertilization. Synthetic fertilizers have replaced the natural ones, farming has become increasingly specialized and now about a third of Minnesota’s land — and much of the Midwest — is covered with just those two crops.
Almost all Midwestern crops are now genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide Roundup, so farmers can kill weeds efficiently without harming their yields — a major advance in productivity that has revolutionized agriculture. But the widespread use of herbicides has virtually wiped out the milkweed, clover and wildflowers from Minnesota’s vast farming regions. That doesn’t include the millions of acres devoted to grass in urban areas, another form of chemically intensive monoculture.
Insecticides are blowing in the wind toward the hive
Ellis sees it every year in May, when his neighbors crisscross their fields with massive planters that inject the pesticide-coated seeds into the earth. They have to use a talc to keep the seeds from sticking together, and as the air pressure in the machines forces the seeds into the ground, the contaminated powder escapes and drifts over the land.
But May is also the month when his bees work the blooming willow trees, shrubs and other flowers around the gravel pit, collecting pollen and nectar as they play their part in the seasonal reproduction of plants. And when wind blows the fine powders from corn seeds over the blooming plants around his yard, many of the bees that return to the hive come back and die.
The sight of thousands of bees twitching and convulsing in front of their boxes has become a near-annual event for Ellis and other beekeepers in the same predicament.
“Most farmers are smart enough to know you can’t kill all the bees going forward,” he said. “But we haven’t been asked.”
Unlike most other beekeepers, Ellis has complained repeatedly about his bee kills — to Minnesota regulators, to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and to the pesticide’s manufacturer, Bayer CropScience, a branch of the giant German pharmaceutical company.
Last spring, officials from Bayer determined that neonicotinoid exposure was one likely cause of Ellis’ bee kill, affecting most of his hives. While the bee deaths were “clearly undesirable,” the source of the insecticides was undetermined, and the die-off did not pose a serious threat to Ellis’ operation because the bees could get back to their normal numbers, the Bayer report concluded.
David Fischer, Bayer’s chief scientist for ecotoxicology, says insecticide-related bee kills are rare. Fewer than a dozen have been reported across the nation’s 150,000 square miles of cornfields, he said. Nevertheless, Bayer is now working with a consortium of beekeeping organizations and scientists to devise new products that will minimize the airborne spread of planting dust.
Nonetheless, neonicotinoids have become the focus of a national fight that is raging over the fate of bees, largely because of a new and growing body of research showing that even at low doses, the compounds can have what scientists call “sublethal effects.”
Altogether, these features make honeybees the perfect super pollinator for modern agriculture.
But when bees are exposed to low doses of neonicotinoids, some scientists say, they falter. Like drunks, they can’t find their way home.
“They can’t remember who they are or where to go,” said Vera Krischik, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who studies insecticides.
In addition, researchers have found that neonicotinoids can undermine bees’ immune systems, making them susceptible to diseases carried by parasitic mites, the invasive insect that swept through American hives starting in the 1980s.
“They can’t remember who they are or where to go.”
“It’s a convenient story,” Fischer said, “but it’s a scapegoat.”
But something is wrong. In the past decade, in most states and especially in the Midwest, the amount of honey produced by each hive has crashed. That’s clear evidence that bees are seriously impaired, said Susan Kegley, a pesticide researcher in Berkeley, Calif., who works with beekeepers. In Minnesota, for example, production per hive has plummeted by one-third in the past decade.
“The Corn Belt states are getting hammered,” Kegley said.
And it’s not just beekeepers and scientists who worry about risks to the nation’s food system. Earlier this month, the White House promised to devote $50 million to resolve what it described as a “genuine threat to domestic agriculture.” General Mills Inc. is now working with its honey suppliers to increase the amount of foraging grounds for bees around growing fields, and it’s funding bee research at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere.
“We feel it’s important and urgent enough to do something,” said Tom Rabaey, senior scientist at General Mills’ agricultural research center in Le Sueur, Minn.
As honey production has dwindled, prices have skyrocketed. But it’s not enough for Ellis, Anderson and other beekeepers to keep up. Their expenses have doubled in recent years as they’ve come to rely on sugar water and artificial protein patties to feed their bees — at best a temporary substitute for natural pollen and nectar. Even the price of a new queen has nearly doubled in the past decade, to $20 or more.
Last fall, worried about their bees’ health, Ellis and Anderson sent their sickest hives to the deserts of Southern California in the desperate hope the warm nights and hot days would revive them. Despite all those efforts, still their hives collapse.
“I call it a death spiral,” Ellis said.
Fortunately, there are almonds.
Keeping the bees out of Midwest’s ‘killing yards’
When the ground was white with almond blossoms in March, beekeepers in the Central Valley loaded up their hives for the annual pollination treks across the country — melons in Texas, blueberries in Michigan and Maine, cherries and apples in Oregon and Washington.
Anderson’s family used to join them, but not anymore. The wide use of pesticides in fruit orchards is too hard on his bees, he said.
Instead, when almonds are done, he takes his hives up into the wild hills above the San Joaquin Valley. There, in company with Ellis’ bees, they can “detoxify” with clean forage. This is where they start splitting their hives and adding queens to build their numbers for summer honey production in Minnesota.
In every previous year, Anderson loaded his semitrailer truck and, along with his wife, kids, grandkids, dogs and cats in a caravan of RVs, headed east on a three-day trip across the mountains and prairies to the family compound in Eagle Bend.
Not this year. This spring, he left most of his bees behind.
On a windy, damp night at the end of April, his maroon semi truck growled slowly up the dirt road in Eagle Bend carrying only 250 hives and a lot of empty boxes. The rest, just under 3,000, he had left in California until after spring planting in Minnesota wrapped up. It meant cutting into his summer honey production but, he said, he just couldn’t face bringing his bees back to the “killing yards” of the Midwest.
Ellis stayed in California with his bees while the cold spring dragged on, delaying planting in Minnesota. In mid-May he was still there with his bees, a little homesick and trying to decide what to do.
“If I keep waiting it will make life a nightmare,” he said. “But why do I want to bring them back and kill them?”
