In 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.
“This one is G.A.D.,” he said. “Good as dead.”
Ellis, of Barrett, Minn., is one of some 1,300 commercial beekeepers from across the United States who migrate to California each year, along with nearly 2 million hives, for the single largest pollination event in the world. Below him in the sprawling valley, nearly 1,400 square miles of almond trees — three-fourths of the global supply — were ready to burst out into a frothy sea of pink and white. To grow into a nut, every single blossom would need at least one American honeybee.
Ever since the ominous phrase “colony collapse disorder” first surfaced in 2006, scientists have struggled to explain the mysterious mass die-offs of honeybees. But here in America’s food basket the escalating stakes are laid out as clearly as the almond trees that march in perfect rows up to the horizon.
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.
In the past several decades, the number of crops that depend on bees for pollination has quadrupled, even as the number of hives available to pollinate them has dropped by half. Every winter, beekeepers on average continue to lose a fourth to a third of their hives, raising fears that the gradual decline of these remarkably resilient insects will soon limit the production of foods that Americans now take for granted. (...)
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.
For bees — which need 150 million flowers to make enough honey for one hive to survive the winter — there isn’t much left to eat.
“This is supposed to be the land of milk and honey,” Ellis said.
What flowers remain are increasingly exposed to a new family of insecticides that, along with corn and soybeans, have exploded across the Midwest and the world: neonicotinoids. They come coated on virtually every seed planted in every major crop across the country — sunflowers, canola, cotton, soybeans and corn. Each spring when farmers take to the fields, some unknown quantity of the chemical escapes into the environment, especially in corn country.
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.
Farmers don’t have much choice in this transaction; 90 percent of the seed corn available to them comes precoated with neonicotinoids. It’s just one of the many chemical and genetic advances that have helped farmers double their production from 80 or 100 bushels per acre to up to 200 today, said Leon Johnson, who farms near Ellis in Barrett.
“It’s hard to argue with success,” he said, even though he recognizes that there is a downside to that abundance.
“Most farmers are smart enough to know you can’t kill all the bees going forward,” he said. “But we haven’t been asked.” (...)
Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, neonicotinoids have sparked a quiet revolution in agriculture. Because they are considered far safer than their predecessors, they won fast-track approval by the EPA and are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. Made from a synthetic nicotine, they are a neurotoxin to insects — but not for people, their livestock and their pets.
But it’s their delivery system that makes neonicotinoids truly novel.
As the chemical-coated seed germinates and matures, the insecticide moves into the circulatory system and grows with the plant. As a result, today all major crops — and even many of the geraniums and petunias at retail garden centers — are poisonous to insects, regardless of whether they need to be protected. It’s a built-in insurance policy.
“Making plants themselves toxic is a whole different thing than killing bugs with a toxin,” Ellis said. “It’s a game-changer.”
by Josephine Marcotty, Star Tribune | Read more:
“This one is G.A.D.,” he said. “Good as dead.”Ellis, of Barrett, Minn., is one of some 1,300 commercial beekeepers from across the United States who migrate to California each year, along with nearly 2 million hives, for the single largest pollination event in the world. Below him in the sprawling valley, nearly 1,400 square miles of almond trees — three-fourths of the global supply — were ready to burst out into a frothy sea of pink and white. To grow into a nut, every single blossom would need at least one American honeybee.
Ever since the ominous phrase “colony collapse disorder” first surfaced in 2006, scientists have struggled to explain the mysterious mass die-offs of honeybees. But here in America’s food basket the escalating stakes are laid out as clearly as the almond trees that march in perfect rows up to the horizon.
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.
In the past several decades, the number of crops that depend on bees for pollination has quadrupled, even as the number of hives available to pollinate them has dropped by half. Every winter, beekeepers on average continue to lose a fourth to a third of their hives, raising fears that the gradual decline of these remarkably resilient insects will soon limit the production of foods that Americans now take for granted. (...)
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.
For bees — which need 150 million flowers to make enough honey for one hive to survive the winter — there isn’t much left to eat.
“This is supposed to be the land of milk and honey,” Ellis said.
What flowers remain are increasingly exposed to a new family of insecticides that, along with corn and soybeans, have exploded across the Midwest and the world: neonicotinoids. They come coated on virtually every seed planted in every major crop across the country — sunflowers, canola, cotton, soybeans and corn. Each spring when farmers take to the fields, some unknown quantity of the chemical escapes into the environment, especially in corn country.
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.
Farmers don’t have much choice in this transaction; 90 percent of the seed corn available to them comes precoated with neonicotinoids. It’s just one of the many chemical and genetic advances that have helped farmers double their production from 80 or 100 bushels per acre to up to 200 today, said Leon Johnson, who farms near Ellis in Barrett.
“It’s hard to argue with success,” he said, even though he recognizes that there is a downside to that abundance.
“Most farmers are smart enough to know you can’t kill all the bees going forward,” he said. “But we haven’t been asked.” (...)
Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, neonicotinoids have sparked a quiet revolution in agriculture. Because they are considered far safer than their predecessors, they won fast-track approval by the EPA and are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. Made from a synthetic nicotine, they are a neurotoxin to insects — but not for people, their livestock and their pets.
But it’s their delivery system that makes neonicotinoids truly novel.
As the chemical-coated seed germinates and matures, the insecticide moves into the circulatory system and grows with the plant. As a result, today all major crops — and even many of the geraniums and petunias at retail garden centers — are poisonous to insects, regardless of whether they need to be protected. It’s a built-in insurance policy.
“Making plants themselves toxic is a whole different thing than killing bugs with a toxin,” Ellis said. “It’s a game-changer.”
by Josephine Marcotty, Star Tribune | Read more:
Image: Renée Jones Schneider
h/t Scott P.
