There is no existential threat to honeybees, and trying to remedy this non-problem with urban beekeeping could be making things worse
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CBC’s As It Happens published an amusing tale yesterday about a New York Times reporter whose home in the District of Columbia suffered a honeybee invasion. Naturally, being a concerned and intelligent media consumer, she knew that honeybees are essential to agriculture and remembered dimly a chorus of news stories about their potential extinction. It seemed she suddenly had a profound, uninvited ethical challenge in her attic. Her Washington neighbours were of the same mind, and they pleaded with her to seek a non-destructive solution to the infestation.
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Being a reporter, she turned to beekeepers, apiologists and exterminators for advice — and found to her astonishment that nobody really gave half a damn about her dilemma. The advice she received, and took, was to suck up the little beggars with a Shop-Vac. But what of those apocalyptic news stories from a decade ago about the prospective disappearance of pollinating honeybees? An entomologist tells the CBC that these pieces were plain, undiluted “misinformation.”
In the North American setting, honeybees are a domesticated invasive species, and farmers of pollinator-dependent crops like almonds keep as many of them around as they need, trucking them great distances when necessary. In other words, they’re protected by a powerful economic price signal.
And biologically it’s just not easy to run out of an insect. There’s a sporadic local phenomenon of “colony collapse” that still defies full understanding, and pesticides are widely regulated to protect bees, but there is no existential threat whatsoever to honeybees like the ones in Sarah Kliff’s attic: their numbers are growing. Beekeepers might have been happy to come capture and remove her swarm non-destructively, but it wasn’t large enough for any of them to go to the trouble.
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Ground Zero for the Honeybee Panic was a 2013 Time magazine cover story bearing the frightening headline, A World Without Bees. Last month the author of that article, Bryan Walsh, wrote a chuckling retrospective about how dopey he had been: I feel it may almost be redundant to add that it appeared on the Vox website, where he edits a section dedicated to, er, predicting the future. Walsh’s mea culpa explains, basically, that at the time he was writing Time cover stories, he didn’t know jack squat about economics.
“Capitalism, as it turns out, is really, really good at finding solutions to scarcity when enough money is on the line. The mid-2000s moment that (colony collapse) was first entering the public consciousness also marked the height of fears around “peak oil”: the idea that the world had entered a terminal decline in oil production, with cataclysmic results for the global economy. And there was reason to believe this was true.… Cut to today, when the world is producing more oil than it did during the peak days of “peak oil” and the United States has become the single largest oil producer ever. So we have honeybees and we have oil because that’s what the market demands.”
If you horselaughed at the Beepocalypse in the 2010s, give yourself a gold star. If you horselaughed at the Beepocalypse while also spending the 2010s aggressively ridiculing “peak oil” theory … well, that paragraph might seem like a tiny, perfect birthday present, if it happens to be your birthday.
But, look, this isn’t all giggles and blushing apologies. Some apiologists are now complaining that the 2010s spasm of media attention to honeybee conservation, which produced a fad for urban beekeeping as a side effect, may have had misguided and destructive results. While adding, one might add, to society’s general psychic burden of media-driven millenarian horse puckey.
Farmed honeybees compete to some degree with native species that, in many cases, are threatened or vulnerable; and policy strategies designed specifically to protect farmed bees might be bad for overall bee diversity. (Wild bees help with agricultural pollination, but they do not have industrial stakeholders pestering governments on their behalf.) Apiologists have found themselves having to tell urban bee enthusiasts to cut the nonsense and go plant some flowers already. And be sure to touch grass while you’re at it.
National Post
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