A Closer Look at Bees
By Aprille Hunter
What’s really happening with America’s bees? We’ve seen bee populations across North America and Europe declining since World War II, and they hit an all-time low in 2015, but why? To better understand why the bees’ lives are being impacted, let’s look at some changes that have been happening with their food supply, namely flowers.
Many sources of food for bees have been systemically eradicated as our country becomes more developed. Habitats containing wild flowers, native blossoming trees and weed-labeled flowers such as dandelions and clover are being paved over for neighborhoods and industrial centers, which are not held responsible to compensate for the mass destruction that occurs when they uproot diverse meadows and forests.
The agricultural industry also plays a role in the decline of available resources for bees. Beneficial plants are being plucked from farm fields as monoculture farming becomes the new way to “efficiently” grow and harvest food in order to meet the needs of our exponentially growing human population. Monoculture is illustrated by an entire field devoted to the planting of one particular crop for many years. Imagine expansive rows of one crop creating an easily accessible highway for any pest that is attracted to that crop. Let’s say we grow kale on 3 acres of land and a few cabbage worms show up and begin eating the kale. Instead of having to forage for kale among other plants such as marigolds and chives in a home garden, the cabbage worms can easily move from plant to plant down the rows of kale and decimate all 3 acres in a matter of days. Therefore, pesticides must be sprayed to keep the leaf-eating worms at bay, and the chemicals inadvertently harm the surrounding beneficial insects living in the soil, and the compounds of the pesticide can be taken up by the plant’s roots and be found in the pollen of the flowers when kale goes to seed. On top of that, because kale has been growing for a season, some of the soil’s nutrients have been taken out by the kale (you guessed it, the vitamins in vegetables are derived from healthy dirt). In traditional farming practice, the soil would be given a chance to replenish its nutrients for a season by planting a fast growing, nitrogen-fixing cover crop such as clover or alfalfa (both of which are loved by bees), but today’s large-scale farms use harmful synthetic fertilizers as “easy fixes” to re-establish more-or-less balanced soil compositions.
As humans we creating new issues for ourselves by practicing monocropping and we are only half-solving the problems created by spraying pesticides. Which, of course, brings about another human-created problem: the pesticides destroy the soil life which leads to less healthy crops, necessitating another solution: synthetic fertilizers, and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides harm beneficial insect populations, circling back to the bees.
The compounds in fertilizers and insecticides can be found in the pollen of the plants’ flowers, and is evidenced by the presence of six detectable pesticides observed in batches of pollen that bees collect. But what do the producers of these toxic products have to say about them? As Jon Cooksey, director of How to Boil a Frog, cheekily puts it, “In the last four years, the chemical industry has spent $11.2 million on a PR initiative to say it’s not their fault, so we know whose fault it is.”
However, not all hope is lost. There is one, simple way that you can make a difference and positively impact the bees, among other beneficial pollinating insects like monarch butterflies. First: Stop spraying. Then, plant bee-friendly native flowers in pots, garden beds, lawns, and boulevards. By filling some clay pots, or lining a mulch bed, or even switching out your whole front lawn with wildflowers native to your area and not treating them with pesticides or fertilizers, you will be making a huge impact for the local bee population. If you hire a company to do your lawn service, keep an eye on what they spray and request that they do not apply any fertilizers or pesticides to your yard.
The bees are holding up a mirror to us. The pesticides aren’t sprayed to eradicate bees, and yet they’re being affected. When will we begin to be affected by our pesticides?
For more education, watch How to Boil a Frog by Jon Cooksey.
Sources:
1. Lawton, G. (2017, July). Retrieved October 23, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6G7kBOcmas.
2. Spivak, M. (2013, June). Retrieved October 23, 2019, from https://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing.