Vanishing Bees

Sainath Suryanarayanan, Daniel Lee Kleinman

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574608
• Categoría: Biological Sciences
• Categoría: Ecology

In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives full of honey and pollen. Over the following decade, widespread honeybee deaths—some of which have come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—have continued to bedevil beekeepers and threaten the agricultural industries that rely on bees for pollination. Scientists continue to debate the causes of CCD, yet there is no clear consensus on how to best solve the problem.    Vanishing Bees takes us inside the debates over widespread honeybee deaths, introducing the various groups with a stake in solving the mystery of CCD, including beekeepers, entomologists, growers, agrichemical companies, and government regulators. Drawing from extensive interviews and first-hand observations, Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman examine how members of each group have acquired, disseminated, and evaluated knowledge about CCD. In addition, they explore the often-contentious interactions among different groups, detailing how they assert authority, gain trust, and build alliances.   As it explores the contours of the CCD crisis, Vanishing Bees considers an equally urgent question: what happens when farmers, scientists, beekeepers, corporations, and federal agencies approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table.   

1

Knowing with Their Eyes?

Beekeepers’ Understandings of CCD

It was another one of those gloriously hot summer days in August 2010 at the land grant university’s experimental bee yard. Research personnel from the university bee research facility were gathered for “data collection” from thirty-six beehives, which were part of a field experiment to investigate the links between agricultural pesticides and CCD. It was an unusual day at the lab, because two veteran commercial beekeepers had driven in to help the bee research group with its work. As the scientists and beekeepers sat around opened beehives, with bees flying all around, and the bee smoker’s sweetly pungent smoke drifted into the eyes and nostrils behind bee veils of everyone there, the research personnel called out various counts, such as the number of comb cells containing immature bees (or brood) and nectar and pollen stored by foraging honeybees inside each beehive. Hand recording the shouted information, one beekeeper quipped that these scientific counts and evaluations were “pretty subjective.” In his opinion, most of the experimental beehives, both untreated and treated (with pesticides), had “poor brood patterns”; just because a beehive had a laying queen and large amounts of brood, honey, and pollen did not necessarily mean that it was healthy. After scrutinizing several experimental beehives, the other beekeeper asked whether the hives had experienced “a period of intense food shortage a few weeks ago.” He explained that he asked this question because he noticed the absence of “middle-aged brood” in the hives, and this suggested to him that these hives had a “break” in their brood-rearing cycle, where the bees used up the comb space to gather nutritional resources rather than raise brood. One of the scientists confirmed that the beehives had, indeed, undergone starvation a few weeks ago due to an abrupt shift in the experimental feeding protocols. The way in which the beekeeper was able to piece together an accurate picture of the past history of these experimental beehives just by looking at the distribution of brood left a lasting impression on some of the researchers.

Earlier in July of the same summer, a major state-level association of beekeepers held its annual convention at the Holiday Inn of a small town. For its keynote address, the beekeepers invited Randy Oliver, a beekeeper from California, increasingly influential among his beekeeping colleagues. Oliver was introduced to the audience as someone whom “all” beekeepers wanted to talk to. His immense popularity stems from his extensive writings found in, among other places, the American Bee Journal, the premier trade magazine of U.S. beekeepers. As one beekeeper attending the conference said, his readers like the ways he “pulls together a lot of [scientific] information” and gives “a beekeeper’s view.” As Oliver explained in his presentation, his view of bee health issues is based centrally upon a “good, clean set of data” generated from controlled scientific trials of the sort that he was conducting in his own bee yards and that were occurring at the university bee research facility and elsewhere.

These two vignettes illustrate not only that beekeepers have intimate knowledge of their bees but also that different beekeepers develop their knowledge of CCD in ways that are different from one another but not necessarily mutually exclusive. It was commercial migratory beekeepers such as David Hackenberg who were the first to observe and describe what scientists later called CCD. Bee scientists are not alone in their search for the causes of CCD and the more general problem of substantial increases in bee losses; commercial beekeepers are also trying to understand the malady.

In this chapter, we delve into three prominent ways in which various commercial beekeepers approach and understand phenomena of accelerated honeybee deaths such as CCD. First, we introduce several commercial beekeepers with years of experience in the business of crop pollination who are convinced that a newer generation of systemic insecticides is primarily responsible for CCD. Through their voices, we show how some beekeepers construct their knowledge of CCD based on the actual field conditions that commercially managed honeybees encounter. From the perspective of a second group—influential “scientific beekeepers,” such as Randy Oliver—the imprecision of the methods of those beekeepers who monitor the real-time conditions among their beehives leads to knowledge that is at best inconclusive. We discuss how these scientific beekeepers study CCD and how their work has led them to conclude that CCD is the result of parasite-pathogen interactions. We go on to examine the knowledge claims of another set of commercial beekeepers, who contend that CCD does not exist, but is simply a case of “piss poor beekeeping.” We analyze fractious debates about CCD and broader trends of honeybee deaths between these beekeepers, and how the divergent, but sometimes overlapping, notions of science, politics, and beekeeping to which these groups adhere affect how they position themselves in the controversy over the causes of CCD. We also explore how the social common sense about science has affected the stature of beekeepers in the CCD debate. This is a story about what beekeepers know (and don’t), how they know it, and about the relationship between their knowledge and their positions on the kinds of government policy necessary to stem the heightened levels of honeybee deaths.

It’s the Newer Systemics . . .

Several commercial beekeepers, many with multiple decades of experience in migratory beekeeping for pollination, have noted a correlation between the occurrence of CCD in their hives and the proximity of these hives to crops treated with a relatively new class of systemic insecticides called neonicotinyl insectides (or neonicotinoids) such as imidacloprid and clothianidin.

Take the case of Clint Walker III, a third-generation commercial beekeeper from Rodgers, Texas. Walker’s beekeeping firm, Walker Honey Company, is a family-run outfit that was started by his grandfather in 1930. After starting in honey production and queen breeding, in around 1940 the fledgling beekeeping operation entered into the business of crop pollination. Clint Walker grew up learning the ins and outs of honey production, queen breeding, and migratory crop pollination. During that time, he came to accept “two basic philosophies” he was introduced to by his beekeeper-father G. C. Walker (Sollenberger 2004): first, “don’t get too far from the bee tree.” In other words, when trying something new, Walker believes in always asking oneself whether “the bees like it” and in relation to what “the bees [would] be doing in the tree” (Sollenberger 2004, 189). Second, “don’t think you have ever arrived” and become rigid in thinking that one has all the answers about their beekeeping operation (quoted in Sollenberger 2004, 189).

In the summer of 2006, Walker trucked approximately a thousand of his beehives to the cotton fields of west Texas, about 200 miles from his home in central Texas.1 He kept another thousand beehives in central Texas among wildflowers, where there was apparently no exposure to agricultural practices. In the fall, after roughly two and a half months in the cotton, Walker brought those bees back to central Texas and mixed them with the rest of his beehives among the wildflowers. At the time, Walker thought the “west Texas bees were better than the central Texas bees.” They were healthier, more vital. In November, a few months later, Walker inspected his hives once again in order to assess which among them would be of sufficient grade to take to California for the February almond pollination season. Walker’s grading reflected evaluation criteria specified by different state departments of agriculture, developed in conjunction with extension scientists at U.S. land grant universities, to ensure that beekeepers and growers meet “mandatory colony-strength regulations for hives involved in commercial pollination of agricultural crops” (Burgett et al. 1993, 7). Assessment criteria include the approximate number of hive frames covered with adult bees (an estimate of the total number of honeybees in each beehive), the square inches of beehive comb covered with brood (an estimate of the number of immature offspring), and the presence/absence of disease and of an egg-laying queen (Burgett et al. 1993). Following a comparable system of evaluation, 90 percent of Walker’s west Texas bees—the ones that had been pollinating cotton—made the grade, compared to only 70 percent of the central Texas bees—the bees that had stayed put among the wildflowers; the west Texas bees were still stronger. In January 2007, as Walker began grading his beehives one last time before preparing them for the trip to California, he found that 68 percent of the beehives that had been kept among the wildflowers in central Texas were healthy, but the west Texas bees, the bees that had pollinated the cotton crop, “were gone,” “just gone.” “They were classic CCD,” according to Walker, with “big, nice slabs of brood, twenty bees and a queen.” The sudden disappearance of adult bees from beehives with ample stores of brood, honey and pollen, a queen, and some newly emerging bees, were signatures of what scientists were calling CCD.

It is fairly normal for beekeepers to lose some bees each year, and many factors might explain Walker’s initial assessment that more of the bees he shipped back and forth to pollinate cotton were healthy enough to head to California than the bees that had stayed put. But the later massive disappearance of the cotton-pollinating bees was shocking. In close to seven decades of migratory crop pollination, the Walkers’ operation had “never had a disappearing event that was even remotely close to” the one that his operation suffered in 2006–07. Walker and his fellow beekeepers “spent sleepless nights and hours, days, months and years processing” and deliberating over what may have caused the huge die-off. It seemed unlikely that the deaths of these bees could be explained by the transit from central to west Texas and back, since Walker’s company had been “hauling bees trans-state for seventy-two years” without any adverse health effects for the bees, and, according to Walker, this was “just 200 miles—almost zero stress.” Nutritional deficiency also didn’t make sense for Walker. Even though drought had limited the variety of pollen to which the bees among the cotton had access, plenty of cotton nectar and pollen was available to them, and they came out of the cotton with “strong brooding,” that is, with seemingly healthy young bees. By December, the beehives that had been working the cotton had “slabs of good, fall pollen” and plenty of honey. “If it had been poor nutrition, you’d expect them to come out with low brooding,” Walker said. The beehives had “no mite loads” either. That is, there was no evidence that parasitic mites could have explained the die-off. Moreover, according to Walker, they had had “zero exposure” to honeybees from other beekeeping operations. This reduced the likelihood of transmission of some parasite or pathogen from other beekeepers’ honeybees. But one thing did make this season distinct: upon talking with local farm-equipment sellers and an area toxicologist, Walker discovered that the cotton in the fields where his bees had been pollinating had been treated with imidacloprid, apparently because the drought that year had led to an outbreak of aphids, a pest that threatens the cotton. Walker never went back to the west Texas cotton, and to this day he avoids crops treated with imidacloprid as much as possible; he notes that ever since, he has not seen CCD in his operation.

It is worth looking closely at the actual practices that led Walker and other beekeepers to their conclusions about CCD. The knowledge production processes of commercial beekeepers like Walker are distinctive.2 For one thing, Walker and other commercial beekeepers performed their studies of CCD in situ. In other words, they gained their understanding of CCD not in laboratory settings but in the actual fields and bee yards where the phenomenon unfolded. Secondly, their measures of beehive health are clear, conscious, and deliberately articulated, but they are not the formal, narrowly quantitative variety that scientists use. They treat beehives as integrated wholes. They are informal. “Strong brooding,” a commonly used beekeeper measure of hive health, for example, is based on visual assessments of the overall pattern of brood distributed across a hive comb. When brooding is strong, beekeepers see on a brood comb a uniform pattern of rows of cells containing evenly aged brood (in similar stages of development), in the form of sealed cells (indicating brood in the pupa stage) or unsealed cells with eggs. By contrast, a weak overall pattern on a brood comb would feature a patchwork of sealed and unsealed cells with unevenly aged brood (in widely divergent stages of development). Brood pattern also enables inferences about the queen’s health and the nutritional status of a hive. When brooding is strong, beekeepers surmise that the queen is healthy and the beehive has adequate levels of nutrition. Another informal measure of hive strength and health is the number of frames that are covered completely by adult bees. A large number suggests a strong and active beehive with high pollination potential. Indeed, pollination contracts often specify the minimum number of frames per hive that third-party inspectors and growers would like to see covered with adults. These informal measures such as brood pattern and the number of frames covered with bees provide commercial beekeepers with useful information about multidimensional aspects of a hive. By contrast, scientists typically rely on more narrowly construed formal measures, such as statistical counts of individual cells containing brood treated as isolated units. Beekeeper knowledge such as Walker’s is developed in the field day-by-day. The approach to understanding that beekeepers like Walker take—attention to small changes in patterns within and across hives—is conducive to the highly dynamic, local, variable, and complex aspects of their operations.

The approaches taken by commercial beekeepers oriented like Walker are shaped by their daily experiences, professional lives, and stakes and interests. Beekeepers seek their bees’ long-term health, since it is the quality of the work their bees do that will determine the profits they make in the pollination market. Contemporary pollination contracts include specifications such as the number, location, strength, and health of the beekeeper’s hives, the kinds of pesticides that the grower can and cannot apply while beehives are in the crop setting, and arrangements for the pollination rental fees (Burgett et al. 2010; Spivak and Mader 2010). A grower’s dissatisfaction with the pollination performance of rented beehives could mean a significant reduction in the fee for the beekeeper and the possibility that the farmer will not renew his or her pollination contract with the beekeeper. On the other hand, beekeepers’ perception that damage to the health of their bees results from crop-related sources could lead beekeepers to decide not to renew contracts with farms, or in more extreme cases to sue farmers for compensation. At the same time, some commercial beekeepers feel, as one noted during a public panel discussion on honeybees and pesticides, that they need to be careful about how much to criticize grower practices. As this beekeeper said, “if you complain too loudly” about perceived damages from growers’ practices, farmers may decide not to renew beekeeper pollination contracts.3

In all, beekeepers face a wide array of contradictory pressures. Commercial beekeepers’ practices of beehive manipulation, such as treating a beehive with nutritional supplements to stimulate brood growth at a time that would be considered unseasonal in a beehive’s lifecycle, reflect growers’ short-term interests in having beehives with sufficient strength to carry out maximal pollination in the relatively short duration of crop bloom. At the same time, commercial beekeepers also have a stake in the longer-term health of their hives, which they use for subsequent pollination operations. This is because sick bees make for poor pollinators (Spivak and Mader 2010). As a result, beekeepers also have a strong interest in developing practices that gauge and enhance the longer-term health of their beehives, without which immediate and subsequent pollination ventures are likely to fail. Beekeepers with these bottom-line concerns, however, grapple with hives that exist in real contexts where they interact with, and are affected by, environmental factors in complex ways. Given their interests, the tools available to them, and their day-to-day realities, many beekeepers rely primarily, but not exclusively,4 on in-the-field approaches to understanding and managing the factors impinging upon beehive health. The relatively informal character of their knowledge acquisition processes allow them to arrive at only tentative, albeit “good enough,” conclusions. While their findings have unquestionably practical implications, from the perspective of the norms of professional scientists, they are not sufficiently precise or definitive. Despite the lack of exactitude, this approach is consistent with beekeepers’ economic stakes, and this is why, although there is certainly a measure of uncertainty in the findings of these beekeepers, they prefer to err on the side of caution, potentially accepting false positive results (type I errors) in the hopes of protecting their livelihoods. They would rather not have their bees exposed to a substance that might turn out to be harmless than to keep using chemicals that their own observations suggest may be harmful, in the long term, to their bees. Their approach, based on a mixture of observation-rooted knowledge and a risk-based calculation in the face of uncertainty, is precautionary and shaped by the priority they place on keeping beehives healthy. Importantly, this means that these commercial beekeepers will seriously consider the possible influence of multiple difficult-to-quantify environmental factors, not just those that are easily isolatable and thus measureable, in potentially causing CCD and other incidents of honeybee deaths.

Even though several commercial beekeepers agree with the scientific consensus that CCD is a complex multifactorial phenomenon, beekeepers like Clint Walker point to the newer systemic insecticides as playing a central role amid a cocktail of secondary contributing factors. Their position on CCD is shaped by two noteworthy historical factors. First, beekeepers have experienced a century-long history of tensions and perceived problems in their beekeeping operations due to growers’ use of insecticides (see Root and Root 1920; vanEngelsdorp and Meixner 2010). Walker points out that “we’ve been playing the chemical game for over eighty years. . . . [It’s] not our first rodeo, as we like to say in Texas.” More pertinently, perhaps, beekeepers’ suspicions about the place of the neonicotinoids in CCD have been fueled by reports of similar honeybee collapses at the turn of the twentieth century in France. “Mad bee disease,” as the honeybee colony collapses in France came to be known, garnered coverage in beekeeping trade magazines and sparked debates between beekeepers in online forums of the U.S. beekeeping industry. For example, in February 2001, the American Bee Journal announced, “French Beekeepers Demonstrate” (News Notes 2001, 85). Alongside a brief description of French beekeepers’ concerns about imidacloprid’s “disastrous effects on bees” was a photograph from the front cover of the November 2000 issue of L’Abeille de France et l’apiculteur,5 which showed a demonstration in front of the factory of imidacloprid’s manufacturer, Bayer, with people holding banners. There was a second photograph of a pile of burning hive boxes. Some commercial beekeepers even visited France to glean information that French beekeepers may have gathered from their experiences with mad bee disease and imidacloprid. One U.S. beekeeper, for example, learned from his French counterparts that imidacloprid’s dose-effect relationship “was a plateau,” where its toxicity to bees wa...

Índice

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Knowing with Their Eyes? Beekeepers’ Understandings of CCD
• Chapter 2. Keeping the Research Disciplined: Entomological Understandings of the Controversy over Insecticides
• Chapter 3. Bees under the Treadmill of Agriculture: Growers’ Responses to Bee Decline
• Chapter 4. The Bottom Line for Bayer: Agrochemical Companies and “Bee Care”
• Chapter 5. Regulating Knowledge: The EPA and Pesticide Standards
• Coda: Toward Just Research and Policy on Bee Health
• Notes
• Reference List
• Index
• About the Authors