Wednesday, 1 October 2025

Bees : Where have they gone 2025

 





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Bees : Where have they gone



 
Why are they dying?
Wayne Ellwood investigates the case of the missing bees.
The Bees' Knees - The Facts
Facts and figures on bees, honey & the food connection.
Honey is life
Gathering wild honey is an age-old tradition in South India. Mari Marcel Thekaekara and her husband Stan see how it’s done.
10 ways to help save the bees!
Illustrated by Scott Ritchie.
Backyard beehives
A walk on the wild side with Hadani Ditmars.
A stressed world
Extinction is forever. Can we stop the slide in bio-diversity?
Looting of a small planet
It won’t be easy but Philip Chandler argues that beekeepers themselves need to lead a revolution in sustainability.
 
 

Why are they dying?

Every third bite of food we consume depends on pollination by bees. But they’re disappearing and no-one seems to know why. Wayne Ellwood looks for clues.

A photo of a bee.
It’s safe to say that the late John Muir would not recognize California’s vast Central Valley were he to visit today. When the intrepid Scots-American naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club travelled by foot through the region in the 1860s and 1870s he was astounded by the richness and diversity of the plants and flowers which carpeted the valley bottom and surged up the mountain slopes. In rapturous prose he described what he called the ‘bee pastures’:
When California was wild, it was one sweet bee-garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean... The Great Central Plain, during the months of March, April and May was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvellously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and innumerable compositoe were so crowded together that, had 99 per cent of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky...1
Fast forward a century and a half and you’re presented with a very different scene. Twelve-lane super highways weave through valley bottoms edged by suburban sprawl. Houses in serried ranks march up the hill sides. In the areas left untouched by strip malls and industrial parks, thousands of acres of tomatoes, peppers, beans, strawberries and lettuce are tended by Mexican workers in irrigated fields drenched with pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. 
Pollinators, especially bees, are what pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson called a keystone species, at the very centre of the entire food web. Remove the keystone and the whole edifice collapses
But in the unique micro-climate of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, fruits and vegetables give way to another cash crop – almonds. John Muir’s ‘bee pastures’ have been extirpated, replaced by 700,000 acres of almond trees. Eighty per cent of the world’s almonds are grown here. The state exports more than a billion dollars’ worth a year; the nuts are twice as big a money-spinner as the vaunted California wine industry. In February, a canopy of white blossoms extends to the horizon. The irony is that almond trees still need to be pollinated to produce fruit. But the crop is so large and so intensively cultivated that the few wild bees that remain can’t do the job. Apart from a few weeks of almond blossoms, the area is a floral desert. Where there is no nectar or pollen there are no bees.
Instead, growers rent honeybees from commercial beekeepers for a fee of $150-$200 per hive. The massive almond mono-forest requires nearly two million hives, which are trucked in from other parts of the US. Bees are stacked on pallets, hauled thousands of miles from more than 38 states, unloaded by forklift and scattered though the almond groves. Big beekeepers now make more from selling ‘pollination services’ than from honey. Of the three million commercial bee colonies in the US, more than two-thirds travel for pollination every year.2 
It is one long tour of duty covering the entire growing season. And it happens across North America. Honeybees are the migrant farm workers of the insect world. They’re critically important for almond growers – there would be no crop without them. And it’s good business for the beekeepers. But for the bees it’s another matter. They keep dying and no-one knows exactly why.
News of a mass die-off of bees first broke in 2006. Dave Hackenberg is one of Pennsylvania’s biggest beekeepers. He makes most of his income from renting out his bees. In October 2006 he trucked a batch of his hives to Florida to feed on Brazilian pepper (a widespread imported ‘exotic’ that now blankets much of the state) after they’d worked the blueberries and pumpkins up north. When he checked the bees a month later he was stunned. Most of the hives were ghost towns: honeycomb, a few nurse bees and the occasional queen remained, but little else. Hackenberg had 400 hives on the site and all but 32 had collapsed. And the puzzling thing was there were no dead bees in sight. It was like they had simply disappeared, vanished. Not only that, but opportunistic raiders (moths and beetles) that usually invade a hive after it’s in trouble refused to go near the dead zones. The syndrome was quickly given a new name: colony collapse disorder (CCD).3
It wasn’t long before other beekeepers across the US were reporting similar losses. By the spring of 2007 it was clear that CCD was widespread. A quarter of all US beekeepers had suffered losses and more than 30 per cent of all bee colonies in the country were completely wiped out. Eerie reports of huge die-offs also came from Australia, Canada, Brazil, China, Europe and other regions. In Britain, losses averaged more than 30 per cent over 2007-08. But nowhere did they approach those in the US and nowhere else was the term CCD applied.
Pumping pesticides in Senegal. The routine use of agro-chemicals is causing havoc among global bee populations. Photo by: Jacob Silverberg / Panos












Bees in one basket
It’s not unusual for bees to die in large numbers. Cold weather, deadly mites, bacteria, viruses, parasites, pesticide poisoning and fungal infections are common. Northern beekeepers often lose 10 per cent of their bees over the winter. So, you might be wondering, what’s the big deal? There are still lots of bees around, beekeepers can rebuild their hives – and maybe it’s not such a bad idea if some of those almond orchards are converted back to pasture. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Apis mellifera, also known as the European honeybee, accounts for nearly all the bees managed by beekeepers in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. They are the one true global bee and they’ve become essential to modern industrial agriculture. It’s as if we’ve put all our bees in one basket.
Honeybees are generalists. They’ll feed on just about anything that’s blooming. According to the International Bee Research Association, a third of our diet comes from flowering crops and honeybees are responsible for pollinating about 80 per cent of them. They are essential in the production of at least 90 commercially grown foods. Apples, pears, apricots, melons, broccoli, garlic, onions, peppers, tomatoes and coffee – they all rely on bees for pollination. Trying to put a dollar value on ‘pollination services’ is a bit like trying to put a price on fresh air or clean water. Pollinators are more important than that. Bee-pollinated forage and hay crops like alfalfa and clover are also used to feed the animals that supply meat, milk and cheese. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a vegetarian or a meat-eater. Bees put food on the table. A report by the National Research Council in Washington hit the nail on the head: ‘Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape of the terrestrial world.’4 
Pollinators, especially bees, are what pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson called a keystone species, at the very centre of the entire food web. Remove the keystone and the whole edifice collapses.
To complicate matters, there is mounting evidence that native bees (bumblebees, alkali bees, mason bees, carpenter bees, sweat bees, etc) and other pollinators like moths, butterflies, bats and humming birds are also in steep decline. In Britain, more than half the native bumblebees have become extinct or will face extinction in the next few decades. In some parts of Holland, bee diversity has declined by 80 per cent over the past 25 years. In Canada, researcher Sheila Colla found that three species of bumblebee formerly common in southern Ontario and the northeastern US have disappeared since the 1970s. And in the US, the Oregon-based Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has placed four bumblebees, including the rusty-patched bumblebee and the Franklin’s bumblebee, on its list of most endangered insects.
Disease is the main suspect in the decline of the North American bumblebees. Dr Laurence Packer, a world expert in wild bees at York University in Toronto, believes US greenhouse growers are the most likely culprit. Bumblebees are widely used for ‘buzz pollination’ of greenhouse crops like tomatoes and peppers. In the 1980s growers sent bees to Europe to perfect breeding techniques. The bees returned infected with nosema ceranae, a single-celled protozoa originally from southeast Asia, which destroys the bees’ digestive tract. Before long the disease had spread to wild bumblebees.
The globalization of the bee industry has helped spread pathogens around the world – mites, bacteria, fungi, parasites and a whole host of deadly viruses. But there is consensus among scientists that habitat loss, the intensification of agriculture and the routine use of agro-chemicals are also playing havoc with bee populations and opening the door to disease. Bees need a varied diet to thrive. No single pollen source contains the vitamins, proteins, minerals and fats necessary for good nutrition. That’s exactly what they’re not getting with today’s massive mono-crops and rampant suburbanization.
The globalization of the bee industry has helped spread pathogens around the world – mites, bacteria, fungi, parasites and a whole host of deadly viruses
Many cash crops – like blueberries and sunflowers – have low-protein pollens. Farmers plough fields to the margins, hedges are grubbed out, verges mown and wildflowers (aka ‘weeds’) doused with herbicides. Meadows, prairies and wetlands have been paved and drained. In England, for example, flower-rich grasslands have declined by 97 per cent in the last 60 years. This loss of ecological diversity has a knock-on effect in the insect world. When bees can’t get the nutrients they need they’re malnourished, weakened and more prone to disease. 
Pesticides are another danger, especially a new group of insecticides called neonicotinoids – a synthetic form of nicotine which is soaked up by the plant’s leaves, stems and roots. Bugs take a bite and these deadly neurotoxins do their work. Imidacloprid, the biggest seller of the ‘neonics’ is approved for use on 140 crops in more than 100 countries, a bonanza for the German chemical giant, Bayer.5
These chemicals are not supposed to form lethal concentrations in pollen or nectar but the French are taking no chances. The country banned their use on sunflowers in 1999 shortly after they were introduced and honeybees began to die en masse. Bee populations gradually increased again after the ban. Since then ‘neonics’ have been withdrawn in Germany, Italy and Slovenia.
Elsewhere the pesticides are still in wide use even as researchers continue to study them. So far two things are clear. At high levels ‘neonics’ can disrupt the bees’ nervous system causing disorientation and eventually death.  And second, the chemicals have been found at ‘sub-lethal’ amounts in pollen, the bees’ main protein source. The real question is how many sub-lethal doses does it take to become lethal? No-one knows. The other unknown is how the hundreds of agro-chemicals now in use combine in the environment to become toxic. The chemical companies don’t test for the interaction of different chemicals and governments don’t demand they do. A recent study of CCD-afflicted colonies found more than 170 different chemicals in bees from the affected hives, including fluvalinate and coumaphos, commonly used by beekeepers to combat varroa mites.6 It seems the lessons of Rachel Carson’s classic work on pesticide poisoning, Silent Spring, have been slow to filter through.
No smoking gun
All of these factors can lead to what University of Guelph pollination biologist Peter Kevan calls unnatural ‘stress’ on the bees. Combine this with long distance travel and you’ve got a problem, says Dr Kevan, a member of the US National Academy of Science’s Committee on Status of Pollinators in North America.
‘The bees are bounced from one end of the country to the other, usually from east to west in the winter, which means they’re also getting cold and heat shock en route. Transport is part and parcel of commercial beekeeping in the US. And pollination services are dictated largely by huge scale mono-cropping. Once the bees get there they have no food except what they can get from the crop for three or four weeks. It isn’t surprising that there’s a lot of stress on these bees. Good lord, if you put me through that I’d certainly be pretty susceptible to a cold or the flu or whatever might be going around.’
A lot of ink has been spilled on ‘the mystery of the disappearing bees’ and legions of scientists have been unleashed to find the cause of CCD. So far no single culprit has been found; there is no smoking gun. In fact, it’s turned out to be a lot more complicated. The closest human parallel seems to be HIV. Bees suffering from CCD are riddled with all manner of diseases. It’s like there has been a general collapse in the bees’ immune system and opportunistic invaders have jumped in, much like the way pneumonia might kill someone with AIDS. A consensus is building that multiple factors interact to weaken the hives, making them susceptible to a range of pathogens and viruses.
We can now produce mountains of cheap food with minimal labour. But in the process we’ve levelled bio-diversity and become less resilient
Others are beginning to ask more fundamental questions about the nature of modern farming. Could it be that the high-tech, chemically dependent system we have created over the last 50 years, first in the West and now globally, is the source of the problem? The small-scale diversity of the family farm has been replaced by an industrial agricultural model premised on the narrow notion of economic efficiency and growth at all costs. Our food system is so dependent on cheap oil – for fertilizers, pesticides, powering farm machinery and transporting crops to market – that we have backed ourselves into a dangerous corner.
As Vermont beekeeper Ross Conrad writes: ‘One of the guiding principles of the industrial model… is the desire to maximize production and thus profits. When applied to agriculture this typically results in the drive to push biological organisms to the limits of their capacity.’7 
We can now produce mountains of cheap food with minimal labour. But in the process we’ve levelled bio-diversity and become less resilient. Writer and activist Chip Ward argues that we reduce the resilience of natural systems at our peril: ‘There is little resilience in a manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out... The cult of efficiency,’ Ward says, threatens more than the bees. ‘How futile it is in the long run to impose narrow notions of efficiency on natural systems that are profoundly dynamic and inherently unpredictable.’8
CCD is a wake-up call, a signal that our modern agricultural system is in deep crisis. People rightly worry about the loss of the big showcase mammals: the polar bear, the tiger, the wolf, the elephant. But the insect world may be a better indicator of the health of our natural systems. It’s not just the bees that are in trouble. It’s us.












The Co-operative, one of the UK’s largest farmers and a significant food retailer, has launched Plan Bee, a 10-point plan to help reverse the decline in the UK bee population.
The plan includes the prohibition of the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on own brand fresh produce; a commitment of £150,000 for research into the causes of the decline in bee numbers and empowering its three million members to take action in their own gardens, for example through the giveaway of over 300,000 packets of wildflower seeds.
As part of Plan Bee, in October, The Co-operative will back the UK cinema release of The Vanishing of the Bees, an eye-opening account of the shocking truth behind the declining bee population.
For more information on Plan Bee and The Vanishing of the Bees, visit www.co-operative.coop/planbee
Other hives of activity
Pollinator Partnership www.pollinator.org
International Bee Research Association www.ibra.org.uk
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation www.xerces.org
Apimondia www.apimondia2009.com
David Suzuki Foundation www.davidzsuzuki.org
Bees for Development www.beesfordevelopment.org
Hives Save Lives – Africa www.hivessavelives.com
Ontario Beekeepers' Association www.ontariobee.com
Aussie Bee Online www.aussiebee.com.au
Sierra Club www.sierraclub.ca
  1. Excerpted from The Mountains of California by John Muir, available at www.sierraclub.org
  2. Robbing the bees, Holly Bishop, p.133
  3. For the full story of Hackenberg’s discovery see Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen, pp.57-66
  4. ‘The Status of Pollinators in North America’, National Research Council, Washington, www.nap.edu
  5. Fruitless Fall, pp.84-99
  6. ‘Solving the mystery of the vanishing bees’, Scientific American, March 31/09
  7. ‘Natural Beekeeping’, Ross Conrad, Bee Culture, Jan 01/09. www.beeculture.com
  8. ‘Diesel-driven bee slums and impotent turkeys: the case for resilience’, Chip Ward, www.tomdispatch.com
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The Bees' Knees - The Facts

Bees are truly amazing creatures, found in just about every region of the world from the Arctic tundra to the towering peaks of the Himalayas. About three quarters of more than 240,000 of the world’s flowering plants rely on them to reproduce.

• There are more than 20,000 bee species in the world and, unlike the honeybee, most of them are solitary. They range in size from the 1.5 mm tropical stingless bee to the 40 mm long giant rock bee of Asia.
• They include mining bees, mason bees, leaf-cutter bees, carpenter bees, carder bees, masked bees, sweat bees and bumblebees.1
• Most bees don’t live in hives and are not communal. Instead, they nest in grassy hillocks, in burrows in the ground, under rock ledges, in trees and in rotten wood.
The Queen Bee
One for all
European honeybees (apis mellifera) live in hives. Each hive is a finely tuned machine, every buzzing inhabitant contributing to the survival of the whole. A thriving colony may reach 50,000 honeybees:
The Queen – The queen lives up to 5 years and can lay her weight in eggs every day – up to 2,000 daily. There is one queen per colony, easily recognized by her long narrow abdomen and short wings. She mates once in her life, in the air with as many as 30 suitors (sequentially), who die after donating their sperm.
The Worker Bees
Workers – Infertile females, worker bees make up more than 95% of the colony. They live about 6 weeks and do a variety of jobs: caring for and feeding the larvae, feeding and grooming the queen, cleaning and protecting the hive, secreting wax to build comb, making honey and storing pollen. Halfway through their life workers become field bees, foraging for nectar and pollen and gathering water to bring back to the hive. Eventually their wings wear out and they die of fatigue.
The Drone Bee
Drones – Big guys whose sole purpose is to mate with a virgin queen. Live about 6 weeks, have no stinger and are produced in small numbers from unfertilized eggs. They do no work and are fed and cared for by the female workers. When temperatures drop in the autumn and food stores get scarce the drones are literally shoved out of the hive or stung to death by the workers.
The food connection
Honeybees pollinate a third of the food we eat. They are the bee of choice for honey production and pollination.
• Of the world’s 115 most important food crops, 87 require pollination to produce fruits, nuts and seeds. They account for a third of the $3 trillion worth of agricultural produce sold each year.
• These crops provide 35% of the calories we consume yearly and most of the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.2
• Seven of the nine crops that provide at least half the vitamin C to the human diet depend on insect pollination. They include oranges, cabbages, peppers, tomatoes, melons, tangerines and watermelons.
• Five major fruit crops (apple, almond, avocado, blueberry and cranberry) are completely reliant on insect pollination.
• The economic value of pollination worldwide may be as high as $90 billion.
• The economic value of honeybee pollination to food crops in Canada has been estimated at $1.2 billion a year.
• In Britain the annual pollination of food crops is estimated at $270 million.
• The contribution of bee pollination to US agriculture is close to $20 billion a year.
Some crops pollinated by bees (3)
Photo by: MAIN PHOTO: WILDLIFE / P.Hartmann / Still Pictures

Dancing fools
The Round Dance
In 1953 the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch discovered that bees could communicate with each other. How? By dancing! He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research in 1973.
The round dance
Used to alert other foragers to a new source of food up to 100 metres from the hive. A series of circular runs with frequent changes in direction. The rate of change increases with the quality of the nectar. The flower scent, which clings to the dancer, helps the others identify the flower they’ll be looking for.
The Waggle Dance
The waggle dance
A dance which indicates the direction and quality of nectar and pollen up to 5 kilometres away. The dance is a complicated figure-8 which tells other workers both the distance to the food and its direction in relation to the sun. The intensity of the waggling and high frequency buzzes convey information about the quality of the food. In both dances a special gland in the bees’ abdomen releases a pheromone (hormone) announcing the presence of new food.1, 4
A jar of honey
Taste of honey
Bees store honey to feed themselves during the winter when nectar and pollen are unavailable.
• Honey is made from nectar, which is stored in a bee’s honey sac for the flight back to the hive. The nectar is regurgitated and passed from bee to bee until evaporation reduces the water content from 70% to 30%.
• The honey is then pumped into wax cells where more bees fan their wings to further evaporation, bringing the water content below 20%. The cell is then capped with a lid of beeswax. Water content is so low most bacteria can’t survive in it – so honey can be stored at room temperature with no risk of spoiling.
• To make a pound of honey, a bee flies around 55,000 miles, equivalent to twice around the world, visiting 10,000 flowers on more than 500 foraging trips.
•  A single productive hive can produce 1kg of honey every day in a good year.1 500g of honey represents the sweetness of about 10 million blossoms.5
•  About 300,000 tonnes (a third of total world honey production) is traded internationally. China, Argentina and Mexico are the biggest exporters with about 60% of the total. The EU, the US and Japan account for 70% of all imports.
•  After China, Turkey is the world’s biggest honey producer, churning out 70,000 tonnes annually. There are 40,000 professional beekeepers in the country providing a living for more than 180,000 families.7
World honey production by region, 2005 (1000 tonnes) (6)
What’s bugging the bees?
Lots – including Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and a laundry list of other problems.
CCD was first diagnosed in the US in the spring of 2006. The main symptoms are:
• Older bees disappear completely with no dead bees in the colony or anywhere around
• Some immature bees, capped brood (larvae), eggs and stored honey remain
• Queen is alive and young bees are not aggressive
• Absence of usual insect pests such as hive beetle and wax moths
• Neighbouring bees will not venture near to rob remaining honey8
Varroa mite.
Varroa mite. Photo by: Biosphoto / Lecomte Jean / Still Pictures
Varroa mites – Tiny parasites from Siberia that have now spread around the world. Attack both larvae and adult bees and reduce bees’ resistance to viral infection.
Tracheal mites – Spread around the globe in the early 1980s, attack the respiratory system of adult bees and can wipe out a colony in a day.
Nosema – A single celled fungal parasite that spread from the Asian honeybee. The bees’ digestive track is destroyed and they starve to death.
IAPD – Israeli acute paralysis virus, another imported virus, which causes paralytic seizures in bees, was recently confirmed in the US.
Pesticides – Indiscriminate use of synthetic agro-chemicals, including by beekeepers themselves, has a deadly effect on the relatively weak immune system of bees.
Bountiful Banyan.
Bountiful Banyan. Photo by: Biosphoto / Mafart-Renodier Alain / Still Pictures









Bountiful banyan
A huge banyan tree near Bangalore may hold the world record for the largest number of beehives. An October 2008 survey found 575 hives. The Indian Institute for Natural Resources Conservation is lobbying UNESCO to have the tree declared a world heritage site.7
  1. C O’Toole, A Raw, Bees of the World, Blandford, 1991
  2. Holly Bishop, Robbing the Bees, Free Press, 2005
  3. ‘Nature’s Partners: Pollinators, plants and you’, www.nappc.org
  4. Candace Savage, Bees, Greystone Books, 2008
  5. Rowan Jacobsen, Fruitless Fall, Bloomsbury, 2008
  6. FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives
  7. ‘Nonwood News No 17’, FAO, July 2008
  8. ‘Colony Collapse Disorder Symptoms’, Feb 1/09, www.beeculture.com
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Honey is life

The Kattunayakan are tribal people who live deep in the forests of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve in South India. They collect and sell wild honey. Today, settlers from the crowded plains and eviction from the forest reserve threaten both their land and their traditions. Mari Marcel Thekaekara accompanied a group of Kattunayakan on one of their forays into the jungle.

Kattunayakan honey harvesters can tell from the ground whether a hive 60-80 feet up in the air has honey or not and whether it is worth the effort to climb there. Children as young as eight go along not just as spectators but to actively participate. By the time they are 12 they are full members of the team. Photo by: Tarsh and Tariq Thekaekara
















































To visit the honey gatherers we travelled to Chembakolli, a small village in the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary – a 321-square-kilometre park that also happens to be one of the best tiger reserves in Asia. The park is at the junction of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka states on the northeastern slopes of the Western Ghats.
Chembakolli is a beautiful, magical place familiar to generations of British schoolchildren – for more than 15 years, eight- and nine-year-old students have had a geography lesson based on Chembakolli village. Teachers from Britain have visited the village and there is an interactive blog between English schoolchildren and Chembakolli kids (see www.chembakolli.com).
The conversation began tentatively but the stories soon came bubbling out. I asked about their ancient honey-gathering practices. Marigan, a tribal elder, began. ‘In the old days entire families – men, women, children, babies and old people – went deep into the forest in the honey season. We camped there for days carrying just a little bit of rice. Everything else, the forest gave us. But honey was our life. We used it as food, as medicine and what we could not consume we sold. People call us honey hunters. That’s not right. We are honey harvesters. We wait for the right time, when we will cause the least harm to the bees, to the babies inside. Only then do we speak to the bees and take their honey.’
But wasn’t it dangerous to venture in the jungle with old people and little children? What about animal attacks, bears and elephants? Even as I asked the question I knew it was a stupid one. Nearby, a wild elephant trumpeted loudly. A little girl, about five years old, ran whimpering to her mother: ‘the demons have come’. ‘Hush, it’s not a demon, it’s only an elephant,’ her mother soothed. Immediately the tears dried and a smile broke out. Obviously, Kattunayakans are not afraid of wild animals – not even the children. But Marigan quickly adds: ‘We do have to be careful about bears. They are nasty, sly things that will come up behind and attack you silently like a thief.’
‘We always look out for bears because they are the main competition for the honey,’ adds Babu. He is from nearby Kerala state, but has lived in Chembakolli ever since he married Mini 20 years ago. Do the bears know you’ve got honey? Another stupid question. ‘Of course they know! The air is heavy with the smell and hundreds of bees are buzzing around angrily,’ Marigan laughs. ‘Like us, that bear has been watching the hive for months, waiting for the right time. He’s been dreaming of it. And we have taken it from under his nose. No wonder he’s furious.’
‘Sometimes, when we are harvesting, the elephants come as well and wait. They love the poo-katta, the inner part of the hive. We take the honey and give them the poo-katta.’
Do the bees not sting you? Now everyone laughs. ‘Of course they do! They’ve worked so hard for months to make that honey for their children, poor things. If someone attacked our house wouldn’t we be angry? The first time you get stung you can get fever. After that – just a little pain. But what’s that compared to what we get in return from them?’
They explain the five different kinds of bees in their region. But the kombu thenu (apis dorsata) is the main one. They can harvest around 15 kilos of honey from each wild hive. Like all traditional livelihoods there is a lot of ritual.
‘When the honey season starts we first do a puja (religious ceremony) before entering the forests. If there are many hives on a single tree or if the tree is in a sacred grove, we do another special puja. It’s conducted by one of the elders who has domain over that particular part of the forest. We recall the ancestors and spirits of the forest, the clan deities. We ask their protection and blessings. We ask pardon of the bees and the forest since we are going to take their honey. When we finish harvesting, we say to the bees: ‘Thank you for giving us so much honey, please don’t be angry. Please come back here again.’
Harvesting honey from domesticated bees is a skilled task. But harvesting wild honey from hives often 80 feet and more up in the air in deep jungles is another matter altogether. A variety of skills, not least very nimble tree climbing, is essential and is often learned from childhood.
On a honey-harvesting trip the only things Kattunayakans carry with them is a knife, the various items needed for puja, rice to eat, an old tin to lower the honey from the tree and now more recently plastic jerry cans to bring back the honey. The rest they get from the forest. Tall bamboo for the ladders, sagay bark fibre for the strong rope, grasses to smoke out the bees and a bamboo blade to cut the honeycomb – metal is never used because they believe the bees won’t come back to the same tree.
Do bees always come back to the same tree? ‘Mostly. They have a special relationship with particular trees which we don’t understand,’ says Babu. ‘Perhaps they know these trees will always be there to host their hives.’
I explain that billions of bees have been decimated in the West and that bees are routinely shipped from Australia to North America. So is it sustainable to continue harvesting honey? They are stunned.
Marigan slowly replies: ‘Bees are part of our life. Would we kill our mothers and fathers? A bee is not just another insect like a fly or mosquito. It is special, all life depends on it. It pollinates everything. We would never wantonly kill a bee. We take the honey at the end when most of the babies have grown up. Very few larvae will be left at that point. We have been harvesting honey for generations. Would they return if we were harming them?’
Babu interjects: ‘The most terrible sight I’ve encountered was on a cardamom plantation in Kerala. They sprayed a weedicide. In the evening when we were going home there were dead bees everywhere. My heart twisted with pain. I felt ill.’
Everyone nods. ‘The only place you see dead bees is in the plantations when they spray pesticides. Not in the forests. Many plants they call weeds have flowers that bees need. Smoke from the tea factories bothers them. When estates clear lands for new planting the bees are disturbed, they move away. Increase in human population has meant a decrease in the bee population.’
‘We watch the bees a lot. When bees move from the flowers to the hives, they follow a particular path. We can follow them. At around ten in the morning when the sun is at a particular height, you see their path. At around two in the afternoon some bees can be clearly heard. This is the time when it’s very hot in the rocks and crevices. Around six to seven in the evening the big rock bees play with their babies, teach them to fly, when all the work is done.’
Beckoning bees
Bees are still an important part of Kattunayakan life even though they now have other sources of income. Babu points to a group of youngsters sitting nearby. ‘They were working in a factory in faraway Tirupur but when the honey season started they told their boss someone was ill and came running home. No matter where we are, we can’t stay away. The bees beckon us. The honey season is ancient; it’s in our blood. Every year we have our kaavu (sacred grove) festival when we remember our ancestors and all the spirits. All the costs must be met with honey money. We give honey to the sick, to babies. For us honey eating is a serious, solemn thing. We don’t talk when we eat honey.’
‘Bees are part of our life... a bee is not just another insect like a fly or mosquito. It is special, all life depends on it...'
A sadness overtakes Marigan. ‘Even our little children know about the bees. From eight years on they go with the older boys to collect honey. The bees sting them. But they know it’s part of our life. We have lived with the bees since the days when our ancestors walked these forests, when time began. But for the last few decades, everyone is afraid because the forest guards harass us.’
The Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary is policed by forest guards, some of whom are hostile to honey gatherers and believe they should be evicted. The Kattunayakans, with other tribes, have been fighting eviction and encroachment for more than two decades. They recently formed the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS), a union to fight for their rights (see www.adivasi.net).
‘We can be chased, our boys arrested, even beaten up if the forest guard is a bully,’ continues Marigan. ‘With the new Forest Rights Act things have improved, changed a bit. But we are still afraid.’
Anthropologists have extolled indigenous knowledge but it’s only recently that the world has begun to acknowledge what we can learn from them. The Kattunayakans – illiterate, living in their jungle homes, some still in caves – recognize what many of us do not. That it’s a sacrilege to kill a bee; that our very survival may depend on the smallest of nature’s creatures.

The story in pictures...

First a tree with beehives is located. Bees tend to make their hives on the same tree year after year. All Photos by Tarsh and Tariq Thekaekara
The Kattunayakans (also know as the honey hunters) can tell from the ground whether a hive 60-80 feet up in the air has honey or not and whether it is worth the effort climbing up there. They work in teams – each team has its own range or territory which is respected by all. The group then sets out close to dusk. They harvest the honey only when it is dark – otherwise the bees are much too aggressive. They carry with them nothing more than a knife, a few sacred items for their puja, a tin to lower the honey from the tree and big cans to carry the honey home.
The first step is to get two important things from the forest – ‘rope’ which is made from the bark of a tree and a bamboo ladder. To get a single bamboo from a thicket is not easy.
When they reach the top they swing from the vine and jump on top of a bamboo. They then start cutting the branches working downwards and when they have freed about 20-30 ft of bamboo it is cut down and dropped.
The ladder is then prepared – a single bamboo. The top bit is made into a hook so it can be hooked onto branches for the climb.
(This photo and next) The spirits are then invoked to protect them from the bees and to ask that the bees should not be too angry with them for taking away the honey. They also pray that bears and elephants should not come and attack them since both these animals are attracted by the smell of honey.
The spirits are invoked...
The spirits are invoked...
Then they collect leaves and dry grass, which are bundled together. This will be lit to create the smoke needed to chase away the bees.
The climb begins. When they reach the top of the ladder, it is pulled up behind them and then hooked on to next higher branch. The ladder is also placed sideways and like a trapeze artist with no net they walk across it 60-80 ft up in the air to cross from one branch to another. After this we have not been able to photograph. By now it is dark. Even if we could climb we are not sure how the bees would react to a flash!
Children as young as eight go along not just as spectators but to actively participate. By the time they are 12 they are full members of the team.





































Mari Marcel Thekaekara is a regular NI contributor. She and her husband Stan live in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve in Tamil Nadu, India.
 
 
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10 ways to help save the bees!

Over 90 per cent of the world’s plants rely on insect and animal pollinators for fertilization and reproduction. Bees are the most common and most important of those pollinators and they’re in serious trouble – mostly because of us. We have destroyed much of their natural habitat, planted millions of hectares with monocrops like soy and maize, and doused our farmlands with poisonous chemicals.

Reforming the dominant agricultural model is a major challenge. But in the meantime we can do a lot to help our buzzing buddies.

Illustrated by Scott Ritchie.

Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















1. Get off the chemical treadmill
Modern insecticides are powerful, persistent and deadly to bees and other insects. Probably the single most important thing you can do is to stop using them, completely. And don’t be afraid to proselytize. Convince your friends and neighbours to drop the chemical addiction too. Some jurisdictions have already banned or limited pesticide use. There are better ways of dealing with pests – like biological and organic controls.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















2. Go wild
If you have space in your garden, let some of it go wild to create a safe haven for bees, insects and small mammals. Gardens that are too tidy are not wildlife friendly. So leave some messy spots with dense plantings and brush piles that bees, birds and other animals can use to construct nests. By encouraging natural predators like frogs, toads, spiders, birds and ladybugs you’ll end up with fewer garden pests like aphids and slugs.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.












3. Boost diversity
A diversity of plants and flowers will provide bees, butterflies and other pollinators with food throughout the growing season. Select plants that provide a lot of nectar and pollen. Many ornamentals have been bred to produce little or none of these essential foods. To attract bats and nocturnal moths, consider night-blooming plants. To provide bees with the best sources of food – and to prevent the spread of invasive species – choose as many plants native to your region as possible.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















4. Avoid the demon seed
Many farmers now buy seeds coated with clothianidin and other systemic insecticides. These can cause the entire plant to become toxic to bees and other insects. The same coatings may soon appear on garden seeds. Check your seed packets carefully. If there’s any doubt don’t buy until you know the whole story.
5. Beware hidden killers
Some commercial compost now contains imidacloprid, a deadly insecticide. It is highly toxic to all insects and all soil life, including earthworms. Plants absorb the chemical and if you use this compost in hanging baskets bees seeking water from the moist compost may be killed.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















6. Drinks on the house
It’s hot and dry and you’re thirsty. Hey, so are the bees. Give them something to drink. You can provide water in a birdbath or shallow bowl; add a few pebbles so bees can easily climb in and out. Bees and butterflies love a mud puddle (they soak up valuable nutrients from the soil) so don’t worry if things get a bit mucky.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















7. Be a guerrilla gardener
Buy a few packs of wildflower seeds and comb your neighbourhood for a patch or two of wasteland. All you need to do is scratch the seeds into the soil and let nature do its work. You’ll improve the neighbourhood as well as increase the number of native plants. And your pollinator friends will love you for it.
8. Help the natives
Unlike honeybees, native bees (there are thousands of different kinds) live in burrows in the ground or in trees. Most bumblebees build nests in grassy tussocks. But some local bees will also nest in a bee box in your garden. Providing shelter for bees will also guarantee a healthy harvest of fruit and veg. (Note: generally, the ‘solitary’ bee species that use these nests don’t swarm or sting.)
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















9. Give bees a chance
If you have space you could offer a corner of your garden to a local beekeeper as a place to keep a hive or two. They will need to have regular access, so bear this in mind when considering a site.
The flowers will love you.
Illustration by Scott Ritchie.




















10. Support your local beekeeper
The 100-mile diet is more than a fad. It’s recognition that high-tech farming is bad news for the environment and for human health. So buy direct from your local beekeeper, preferably one who avoids chemicals and produces natural, unpasteurized honey. You’ll never buy supermarket honey again.
Sources: Adapted from ‘10 Things you can do the help save the bees’, Phil Chandler, www.biobees.com with additional information from North American Pollination Protection Campaign, www.nappc.org;  The Co-operative, www.co-operative.coop; David Suzuki Foundation, www.davidsuzuki.org
 
 
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Backyard beehives

They’re booming on Canada’s west coast with everyone from high-end hotels to apartment dwellers joining in. Hadani Ditmars reports from Vancouver.

Vancouver’s apiary missionary Brian Campbell: ‘If you care about grizzly bears, help the bees.’ Photo by Hadani Ditmars.


















‘We have a special responsibility,’ says master beekeeper Brian Campbell, ‘to create and preserve bee-friendly habitats.’ Campbell is preaching the bee gospel to a rapt group of mums, tots and members of a local non-governmental organization called the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA) where he is a mentor for apprentice beekeepers.
We’re in a garden in the Hastings Sunrise area of Vancouver on a sunny Saturday morning, where large lots and new immigrants make for an enthusiastic gardening community – and a natural habitat for many native bee species.
Campbell is a low-key missionary of all things apiary with an arsenal of props at his disposal. One is a jar full of an old subterranean bumblebee nest, which he passes around, explaining that many bees live underground. Some like gravel, some like packed soil, some like grass, so ‘a diversity of soil types is ideal’. Next he exhibits a cluster of bamboo sticks – the former home of a group of cavity-dwelling bees.
But creating bee-friendly habitats in urban environments is largely a question of awareness. As the group moves from a garden inspection to a back lane stroll he points out that unpaved laneways often make ideal bee habitats. He stops to examine a rose bush growing over a fence where he notes a bee has recently used part of a leaf for nesting material.
A stop in another backyard garden offers a close-up of a fertile bee environment, packed with fruit trees and flowers. Here a young mother gets out her power drill to demonstrate how to make a quarter-inch hole in a piece of 2-inch plywood, so attractive to some bees as an egg-laying site. The children are fascinated. One five year old asks: ‘How can you tell if bees live somewhere?’ ‘You just have to watch for them,’ explains Campbell.
Indeed, as we drive to a nearby park, site of the EYA’s ‘community hive’ programme, Campbell’s lecture has awakened a whole new way of viewing the urban landscape. We cruise past shop fronts and houses, our eyes peeled for bee-friendly plants and hospitable habitats.
While it may seem limited, restored habitats can have a wide-ranging effect on overall bee populations, explains Campbell. He cites the decline in bees in the northern town of Bella Coola, which resulted in a low yield of berries, which meant that local grizzly bears couldn’t hibernate due to lack of food. ‘So in that part of British Columbia, if you care about the plight of the grizzly bear,’ says Campbell, ‘you can help by restoring native bee species in your own backyard.’
Over at the ‘Means of Production’ community garden, on the edge of a park and opposite an industrial waterfront, the concerns are food security, the importance of pollinators and urban agriculture. ‘Over three-quarters of what we eat wouldn’t exist without bees,’ explains community hive coordinator Rhianna Nagel. The crucial connection between bees and plants – many of which have co-evolved together – is brought home by a ‘bee-friendly’ garden full of clover, poppies and sunflowers. Other plots are part of an initiative by local artists to grow their own materials – plants for dyes and other uses.
A few ‘bee condos’ – small rectangular plywood structures built for mason bees – hang on a nearby tool shed, remnants of the EYA programme that distributed them to individuals, schools and parks last year.
A few yards away a group of young volunteers tend the garden while others learn about beekeeping from Campbell. Today’s lesson is about hive inspection and mites. ‘Even a few can destroy a colony,’ he explains as a small group in protective gear looks on. He then shows them a ‘sustainable’ method of getting rid of mites, without hurting the bees, by using a small amount of tobacco smoke.
His students hang on his every word. One is a young marketing executive, hoping to gain a greater sense of connection to the land. Another works at a nursery and studies environmental science. Still another dreams of starting his own Buddhist monastery and raising bees for honey.
The young Buddhist asks Campbell if he can recommend any books on sustainable bee keeping. ‘They really don’t exist,’ he says, which is why his passing on his knowledge to the apprentices is so crucial.
Hadani Ditmars is a New Internationalist co-editor.
 
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A stressed world

There are no more wild places. The era of economic globalization and exploding world trade has combined with climate change, population growth, the widespread pillage of natural resources and the expansion of large-scale agriculture to imperil the bio-diversity of our planet as never before. The loss of pollinators like bees is just one aspect of this loss.

Biologists call it the sixth extinction. There have been five great mass extinctions in the history of the earth including:
  • The Permian extinction 250 million years ago wiped out 70 per cent of all land animals and over 90 per cent of sea creatures. The causes are unclear.

  • The Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago saw the dinosaurs go down. Scientists think this was caused, at least in part, by a massive asteroid off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, which turned the atmosphere into a blast furnace.More than 70 per cent of the earth’s species were lost. It took tens of millions of years to bounce back.
Today’s extinction is different. It’s human-made rather than natural. There is a natural rate of extinction – evolution wouldn’t exist without it.
But what’s happening now is unprecedented.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates the loss of species today is 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural rate that occurs through evolution. But as ecologists say, we’re all in this together. Humans need clean water, wild spaces, unpolluted air and uncontaminated land.

So do plants, animals and all other forms of life.
Our interdependence has never been clearer.
The IUCN says nearly 40 per cent of all species are threatened. These include:
  • A quarter of all mammals

  • One in eight birds

  • A third of all amphibians and half of all tortoises and freshwater turtles

  • More than half of reptiles

  • Over 70 per cent of flowering plants

  • More than half of all insects
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Looting of a small planet

For the past two centuries years we’ve been trying to dominate and control the natural world. Beekeeper Philip Chandler argues that it’s time to learn from our mistakes, while we still have time.

Destruction in the name of progress: hardwood rainforest logs being stacked for export near Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photo by Ron Giling / Still Pictures.





















Beekeeping in Europe and North America is no longer sustainable in its present form. We need to re-think our management methods from top to bottom – or face an unprecedented decline in the health and strength of the bee population and the end of honey as a pure, healthy food.
Intensive beekeeping – especially on a commercial scale – generates massive amounts of energy-consuming work in return for an unpredictable honey crop. Copious quantities of energy and water are consumed in manufacturing, cleaning and sterilizing equipment, rendering wax and cleaning up the inevitable, intractable, sticky mess. Transporting our kit around the countryside also burns carbon fuels by the tankful.
Meanwhile, ‘scientific’ chemical treatments have resulted in fitter parasites and tougher bacteria. We artificially maintain bees that are ill equipped to deal with infections or infestations, despite their ancestors having done so, unaided, for at least 100 million years. Some beekeepers routinely use potentially dangerous and illegal chemicals – including antibiotics and organophosphates – risking prosecution as well as their health and their customers’ health, while having little or no long-term impact on the bees’ problems. Many of these chemicals persist in beeswax, which is recycled into new comb by the worker bees. A low-dose cocktail of who-knows-what is then passed to the next generation.
All this might be understandable if the results were bumper crops of honey and happy, healthy bees. However, honey crops will forever depend on the weather more than any other single factor. As I write, our bees are suffering from unprecedented levels of infestation by the varroa mite and endemic infection by mite-borne viruses. Thanks to those who persist in shipping bees around the world, instead of breeding from local stocks, the small hive beetle will most probably arrive in Britain soon. So-called Africanized bees may not be far behind.
In the modern, Western world, where relatively few people have a day-to-day, intimate relationship with nature, public appreciation and understanding of the pivotal importance of the honeybee in the greater scheme of things has been largely lost. Many people regard bees as pests rather than a vital, natural resource. A surprising number of people cannot tell a honeybee from a wasp. Our Government would rather cover the countryside with untested, genetically modified crops than invest in sustainable, organic farming or fund research into bee diseases. Even our British Bee Keepers Association takes money from agrochemical companies in return for their patronage of poisonous sprays and, it seems, their passive acceptance of genetically modified (GM) crops.
In practical terms, sustainability may mean accepting lower honey production in return for healthier bees. It may mean, at least in the short term, accepting heavier winter losses in return for improved vigour in surviving colonies. It almost certainly means increased vigilance in inspecting colonies and assessing desirable traits, which will mean that more beekeepers will need to educate themselves in bee husbandry and breeding.
Philip Chandler: ‘We may have to re-think the unthinkable: that commercial beekeeping is inherently unsustainable.’
Natural lifecycle
The remedy, as well as the blame, for the current parlous state of beekeeping lies with beekeepers themselves: nobody else knows enough or cares enough to take the necessary action. We need to share more information with each other and make more effort to educate the public, especially the next generation.
We may need to re-think much of what we now take for granted, even if it means discarding protocols we have regarded as holy writ for the last 150 years. We may have to think the unthinkable: that commercial-scale beekeeping is inherently unsustainable. Keeping 100 or more beehives in an area that nature might furnish with only one or two colonies is very like cramming 10,000 chickens into a battery farm and has similar implications for aberrant behaviour and spread of diseases.
We must look closely at our complicity in the over-use of agricultural chemicals and find ways to achieve a good honey crop that don’t rely on pumping poisons into the environment. We must accept that chemical treatments for mites and brood diseases are ultimately doomed to failure, as they inevitably create dependency. The long-term answer lies with the bees themselves. Our job is to provide them with the best possible conditions in which they can solve their own problems, as they have always done.
Looking back over last 150 years we can see how commercial beekeeping developed from the Victorian desire to dominate the natural world and subjugate its inhabitants to human will. This was the dominant paradigm through the first two thirds of the twentieth century – until we began to wake up to what was happening to the planet as a result of our arrogant assumption that we could treat it as a bottomless waste pit. Some of us looked out at decimated forests, depleted soil and polluted water and realized that we had to change our ways.
The current rapid growth of the organic food movement indicates the beginnings of a shift in public perception. Meanwhile, the global dominance of a handful of agrochemical corporations, intent on covering the earth with genetically mutated organisms and chemical-dependent crops, represents the old order, stubbornly clinging to old ways.
The big lesson of the last century was that the way we treat the natural world has repercussions beyond the immediately obvious. Our destruction of rainforests and other wild areas in the name of ‘progress’ has led to a cascade of species loss, soil erosion and climate change that we are only beginning to understand and that will haunt us for generations.
So it is with the bees. For a century and a half we have assumed that we know better than they do what living conditions they require, what size cells they prefer, how many colonies can live in close proximity. We have sought to bring under our control every detail of their lives down to the mating of their queens. And now we are reaping the rewards of our arrogance: bees that are dependent for their survival on chemical inputs and human interventions.
Can this situation be reversed?
Nobody can say for sure. But those who are experimenting with sustainable beekeeping believe the answer lies in a low-tech approach that allows bees to build honeycomb according to their own design, eliminating the artificial constraints imposed on them by the use of frames and wax foundation. Foundation (artificial comb) was introduced as a way of ‘helping’ the bees – saving them work so they could do more work for us, i.e. make more honey.
Sharing information
But artificial comb – of whatever size – is part of the old control-freak, we-know-best paradigm that has caused the current problems. Having seen the beautifully formed, naturally constructed comb that bees build in ‘skeps’ (old-style conical hives built of straw) and in my top bar hives (simple, intermediate-technology hives with no frames or foundation), I would not go back to frames and foundation if they were giving them away.
Bees need to build comb. It is a part of their natural lifecycle and a part of their biochemical makeup to extrude wax and to work it. And they need the freedom to build it their way.
I am now looking at beekeeping as more of a conservation and restoration project than a profitable hobby
If that means they raise 15 per cent of their colony as drones (non-worker male bees) then so be it. That is what they need to do; we may never know the reason why, nor do we need to know. Our preoccupation with drone culling cannot but affect the quality of queens, as many of the most important traits are passed down the drone line. It would not surprise me if the many stories of poor quality queens I have heard and read about recently were caused by a local shortage of good drones.
I am now looking at beekeeping as more of a conservation and restoration project than a profitable hobby. Much as I love honey I am more interested in breeding bees that can look after themselves.
I don’t know to what extent I will succeed but I hope that others will take up the challenge and that, by sharing information, we can find a way to develop a balanced system of beekeeping that is genuinely sustainable. Then the bees will have a chance to re-establish feral colonies, which will form the all-important genetic pool for future generations.
I have been keeping bees in natural-comb top bar hives for eight years now, and having seen the enthusiasm with which a swarm set about constructing its home from scratch and experienced the simplicity of this low-tech style of hive, I would like to invite all beekeepers to build and try one next season alongside their normal boxes.
I guarantee it will enrich your beekeeping experience.
Philip Chandler is author of The Barefoot Beekeeper. He lives in Devon and has been keeping bees for nine years. See his website www.biobees.com for masses of useful information. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Beekeeper’s Annual 2007.

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