The author correctly points out that as far as we know, honeybees are essential to agriculture. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that any number of other pollinators endemic to the Americas wouldn't kick into the picture if honeybees declined even further. This all brings me to another point, which has become so much more obvious to me after starting to eat paleo. I now look at biological knowledge in an evolutionary context.
The entire episode of so-called Colony Collapse Disorder, which seems to be a possible combination of different pathogens and possibly pesticides, seems fairly predictable. The honeybee has been removed from its normal geographic range and ecological niche and made into a farm animal. Yield of honey production has been the characteristic that has been maximized through artificial selection as the supreme value, along with other values such as a disease resistance, handling ease, overwintering ability, tendency to swarm, variation in propolis production, heat tolerance, and pollination activity. Guess what happens when you breed for certain traits? You're almost certain to decrease other traits unwittingly.
We're also keeping these animals at high densities on a wide geographic scale and moving them around the globe at unprecedented rates that have probably never before been seen in millions of years over the history of honeybee existence. Is it really unexpected that the honeybee might experience some diseases and disorders, or that resistance to mites, viruses, and Nosema might not have been optimized over the past 50-100 years as breeders focused on other things?
The world is not coming to an end. An astute commenter on the article writes:
As far as I know Apis mellifera was domesticated about 6000 years ago. Many plants were domesticated about 11000 years ago. Which animals were our pollinating friends in the 5000 years in between?
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. 100 years from now, the human race will probably still be here if it doesn't kill itself off, and I wager so will most of your favorite veggies and fruits.
2 comments:
Beekeepers and growers have been trying to get "native pollinators" to do some actual pollination of food crops for quite some time, with only isolated and limited success on specific crops, such as alfalfa seed-production plants.
Trust me, I'm a beekeeper, and if we could get NON-STINGING solitary bees or much smaller/more portable bumblebee colonies to do even 10% of the pollination work that honey bees do, we'd have left the honey bees as stationary honey-producers, and taken the other bees to pollinate the crops long ago.
And there is a simple answer to the question quoted:
"As far as I know Apis mellifera was domesticated about 6000 years ago. Many plants were domesticated about 11000 years ago. Which animals were our pollinating friends in the 5000 years in between?"
The answer is that feral honey bee colonies (in trees) pollinated those crops, and continued to do so until a combination of large-scale monoculture and invasive pests and diseases of honey bees killed off most of the feral hives, making contracted pollination a required item for most crops.
Hi Bee,
Thanks for stopping by. You're right: the reasoning presented here is probably a bit too oversimplified. Still, I don't think the end of the world is at hand and I just love that barren moonscape in the original post.
I'm a very small scale beekeeper and I haven't seemed to have a problem where I live, which is very far removed from most industrial ag. Any ideas as to what our best options are? My guess would be breeding for resistance. I think these problems are going to keep cropping up in any farm animal kept at high densities. Would like to hear your thoughts.
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