Honeybee Update: Pesticides

We arrive at the end of June and Tumbledown has not seen more than a few honeybees in the garden--and those only on a couple of different occasions this whole season--despite continuing efforts to attract them with sugar-water syrup, honey, and swarm catch attractors--and despite the constant provision of fresh water and flowering plants. The blackberry and raspberry blooms, which are hardly ever absent a honeybee in an average year, have hardly been visited at all in 2007.

You have no doubt followed the various news updates of the investigation into Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the results of which (for now) seem to point increasingly toward a complex syndrom rather than a single factor, chemical, pathogen, pest or otherwise. The use of pesticides is often cited as a contributor to the CCD syndrom, especially pesticides in the Neonicotinoid class. Bayer and other producers deny (of course) that their products are the cause, even a contributing cause, and claim that nonchemical causes are to blame.

Maybe the causes of CCD are nonchemical, but the question still remains, why are we addicted to pesticides?--especially when the current chemical regime has proven ineffective? Tumbledown has been reading an essay by David Pimentel ("The Pesticide Question," Ecology, Economics, Ethics) that makes the point: "Corn and cotton account for about 60 percent of the total insecticide use in agriculture" (1991). For Indiana, make that corn, almost exclusively. "During the 1940s, little or no insecticide was applied to corn, and crop losses to insects were only 3.5 percent.... Since then insecticide use on corn has grown more than a thousandfold, and losses due to insects have increased to 12 percent." The major reason for the increase seems to be the abandonment of an important (vital?) aspect of traditional farming, crop rotation (p. 64).

What does this have to do with Colony Collapse Disorder and the bee die off? Maybe nothing. But in the concluding table, Pimentel estimates the unintended cost of pesticide use at $955 million (1980), $150 million of that due to honeybee poisonings and reduced pollination. Hmmm. Maybe that should be increased a thousand fold this year?

Meanwhile, with no chance of a swarm on the horizon, Tumbledown has decided to buy his bees next year. Maybe they'll survive the pesticides poured onto the fields that lie just beyond the suburban sprawl--and survive the pesticides poured onto suburban lawns. ...or maybe they'll suffer from Colony Collapse Disorder, even though he plans to keep them according to the ancient instructions of Varro (On Agriculture, III, XVI). Tumbledown recently discovered a blog that suggested CCD may be nothing new and appears in fact to have plagued the ancient Romans, based on a description of ancient hive disruptions found in Virgil's Georgics. Or maybe it is entirely new--a twenty-first century problem; maybe all those cell phone signals are playing the Pied Piper to our honeybees. If that's the case, Tumbledown's bees should fare well. He doesn't own a cell phone.

Tumbledown Farm