Keeping The Bees: Why All Bees Are At Risk And What We Can Do To

210 Pages·2010·1.65 MB·English

by  Laurence Packer

KEEPING the
BEES
WHY ALL BEES ARE AT RISK
AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO SAVE THEM
LAURENCE PACKER
Dedication
This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to my parents, Denis and
Lilian, who in different ways encouraged my interest in insects.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1 BUZZ FREE: A WORLD WITHOUT BEES
Stuck Under a Truck in the Atacama Desert, Chile
2 THE FUTURE OF OUR FOOD
Serenading the Bees on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia
3 HONEY, QUEENS, HARD-WORKING WORKERS AND STINGS:
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BEES
Stung by Bee Killers on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
4 A BEE OR NOT A BEE? A DIFFICULT QUESTION TO ANSWER
Insulting the Experts in Portal, Arizona
5 TWO BEES OR NOT TWO BEES? AN EVEN MORE DIFFICULT
QUESTION TO ANSWER
Uncovering Irregularities at the National History Museum, London
6 IT’S A BEE’S LIFE
Up Before Dawn in the Australian Outback
7 THE SOCIABLE BEE
Digging Nests After Dark in Calgary, Alberta
8 SEX AND DEATH IN BEES
Choosing a Mate in Subtropical Florida
9 WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE HUNT I
Painful Bee Sampling in the Tehuacan Desert, Mexico
10 ANTI-BEES
Sexually Transmitted Child-Eating Female Impersonators on a California
Sand Dune
11 WHAT ARE WE DOING TO THE BEES?
Bee-Free Day in Germany
12 THE PROVERBIAL CANARIES IN THE COAL MINE
Upsetting Ornithologists in Rome
13 HELP THE BEES
Dodging Hippos at the African Pollinator Summit
EPILOGUE
Bee Worship on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Bee Families
Appendix 2: Bee Names
Sources
Index
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Buzz Free: A World Without Bees
STUCK UNDER A TRUCK IN THE ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE
I
t was three in the afternoon and over 30˚C, yet despite the heat there was not a
drop of sweat on my body. The air was so dry that any perspiration was sucked
from my pores before I even felt it. I could see for miles in all directions, but
there was no sign of human habitation. I hadn’t seen a soul for hours. The entire
vista was in two colours—the ground was beige and the sky blue—and even the
Andes Mountains, faintly visible on the horizon, looked blue from this distance.
I had been stuck here in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile for three hours,
trying to dig the back wheels of a half-ton truck out of the sand.
The day had begun well. I had found a tiny trickle of water emerging from an
embankment at the side of a dirt road; there was some vegetation growing
around the moisture, and some bees were visiting the flowers. I collected a few
of them and then drove off towards my next sample site. Two hours of driving
and three hours of digging later, and I had not seen a single living thing—no
other drivers, not an insect, not a plant.
The Atacama Desert is both the driest and the oldest desert in the world.
People claim that there are parts of this desert where rain has never fallen,
although geologists have told me that it must have rained at least once in the past
hundred years over most of this enormous stretch of barren land. There are
indications of past precipitation on the surfaces of the mine tailings, extrusions
from the nitrate mines that dotted the landscape with human activity a century
ago. This is an eerie place to travel, as in some areas the only signs of past
human habitation are the graveyards that house the dead. The mausoleums
shelter the desiccated remains of the mine managers and their families (the
miners themselves were given less prestigious burials). Apart from some
vandalism, the coffins and their contents are exactly as they were in the early
years of the twentieth century. Where it (almost) never rains, the dead become
mummified.
Imagine living in a place where it rains perhaps once every hundred years. Not
surprisingly, detailed weather data are not available for most of this large,
sparsely populated area, but there are meteorological records that extend back
for long periods for several places. The northernmost city in Chile is Arica; the
average rainfall there between 1987 and 2002 was three millimetres per year.
But that average is misleading because over one-third of the total rainfall in that
sixteen-year period fell on a single day. It rained on a total of just fourteen days
in those sixteen years, and in an earlier period, not a single drop of rain was
recorded for fourteen years in a row. It seemed that the place where I was now
stuck was drier than Arica, and I had only my broken-down truck to keep me
company as the hours passed by.
This was not the first time I had got into a bit of a pickle while doing
fieldwork. For my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto I had studied geographic
variation in bee social behaviour, obtaining samples all the way from cold
temperate Ontario to the subtropical climes of the Florida Keys. At one point I
drove my car into the Okefenokee Swamp at dawn trying to get to the next
sampling site in time.
Since then I have authored or co-authored over one hundred research articles
on bees, most of them since becoming a professor of biology at York University
in Toronto, Canada. Over the past thirty-five years I have travelled to all
continents except Antarctica (where there are no bees) because of my fascination
with these essential and beautiful little insects. Arid lands are my preferred
destinations for the simple reason that bee diversity is higher in semi-deserts
than in any other type of habitat. The normally dry and sunny weather is
appealing to bees, which don’t like to fly when it is raining or cloudy. Although
my earliest research was mostly on bee behaviour, I have become increasingly
aware of the need to promote the conservation of bees. Research performed in
my laboratory demonstrates that bees are at a much higher risk of extinction than
most other organisms. And that’s a concern because the world as we know it
would not exist without the pollination activities of bees: not only would there
be few wildflowers, but our food supply would be substantially reduced. Some
almost essential items—such as coffee—would be at risk (though many would
consider coffee absolutely essential). So it is extremely important to increase our
understanding of bees and to spread the word about these valuable creatures as
widely as possible.
Consequently, I now put considerable effort into increasing general awareness
of the significance of bees. I have, for example, written a pamphlet on the bees
of Toronto; taught bee-identification courses in Ontario, Arizona and Kenya;
written identification guides to the bees of Canada and adapted previously
published ones for the needs of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
published ones for the needs of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations.
It is because of my interest in the conservation of bees that I was in the middle
of the Atacama Desert with no shade but that underneath the truck, where I had
spent quite some time. Fortunately, I had a large drum of water—essential for
anyone travelling in this part of the world—and a drum of gasoline. I knew of
other entomologists who had run out of gas and been stranded in this region for
days before anyone else passed by. Without water and gas, you would not last
long. I imagined the headline: “Mummified Bee Biologist Found in Desert.”
Large amounts of water and gas are two things everyone needs in this
beautiful wilderness. But few take a drum of liquid nitrogen with them as well.
Why would I take liquid nitrogen into the desert? At -196˚C, it was certainly not
for cooling beer. The liquid nitrogen was for storing bees in a way that prevented
their proteins from breaking down. Why was I interested in the proteins of desert
bees? Why was I risking life and limb studying the proteins of insects so
inconspicuous that even if you had thousands of them nesting in your lawn you
would probably not know it? The answers to these questions form part of an
extended narrative that eventually led me to conclude that bees may be the
proverbial canaries in the coal mine of the globe’s terrestrial habitats. Not only
do I believe that bees can tell us much about the state of the natural world, but I
also believe they are particularly good at indicating the state of the environment
in areas that have been considerably influenced by human activity. But in case
you think bees are unimportant, or even perhaps mostly a nuisance (after all,
some of them sting), let’s imagine what the world would be like without them.
Let’s start with the obvious: there would be far fewer flowers. Plants have sex
through the transfer of pollen from the male part of one to the female part of
another. Pollen may be transported on the feathers of a hummingbird, the hairs
on a fly or the tongue of a bat, and lots of it is transported by the wind (you may
have an allergic response when plants are having sex using aerial currents as
their intermediary). But the pollen of most flowering plant species is transported
on the hairs on the body of a bee.
In the absence of bees, most flowering plants would not persist for very long.
Yes, there would be some flowers left. The elongate red ones that are pollinated
by hummingbirds; the large saguaro cactus flowers that are pollinated by bats;
the white, moth-pollinated orchids that show up so well in the moonlight; and
the dull flowers that give off a scent like rotting meat to attract pollinating flies
—all of these flowering plant species could survive without bees. But the world
would certainly be a less joyful place for us if the only flowers were on cactuses
or smelled unpleasantly stinky.
In the complexity that is the web of life, we rarely understand the extent to
which the continued existence of one species is dependent upon the presence of
another. When it was a mere seedling, did that bat-pollinated cactus require the
shade provided by a bee-pollinated flowering plant to avoid shrivelling up in the
dry desert heat? If so, even the cactus might disappear from the face of the planet
if bees were no longer around. We simply do not know enough about ecological
interdependencies to understand what proportion of the organisms on the planet
rely, directly or indirectly, upon the pollination activities of bees.
Certainly the loss of all bees would result in catastrophic cascades through the
terrestrial ecosystems of the world. If many of the flowering plants were to
disappear, the other species that rely upon those plants would also be in trouble.
How many squirrels would there be without the nuts that result from pollination
by bees? How many songbirds would there be without the berries that result
from pollination by bees? No squirrels and no songbirds means no predators that
eat the squirrels and songbirds. So the impact of bees extends throughout the
food web—even to us.
We are part of the food chain (usually the end link, because comparatively
few people get eaten). We are also a very large part of the global food web,
appropriating perhaps one-quarter of the entire ecological productivity of the
planet. Not all our use of the world’s ecological productivity is through food. We
cut down rainforests and drain peatlands to feed our insatiable demand for
biofuels. We grow cotton for clothing, harvest wood for construction, and
produce coffee to help us get going in the morning and sedatives to help us get to
sleep at night. All these commodities rely to some extent upon the pollinating
activities of bees.
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four
years of life left.” That quotation has been attributed to Einstein, although
scholars can find no evidence that the unkempt sage said anything of the sort. I
think some, perhaps most, of us would survive for longer than four years without
bees, but there’s no question that the food supply would be substantially
reduced. Why? What exactly is the impact of bees upon our food supply?
Consider breakfast. Eggs, maybe a slice of watermelon, toast with butter and
jam, and a cup of coffee with a dash of milk—all are common components of a
North American breakfast. The only item in the list that bees do not play a direct
role in producing is your toast, since wheat is pollinated by wind.
Eggs come from chickens, and chickens eat seeds, among other things. Many
of the seeds in the diet of a chicken would not be produced in the absence of