This article originally appeared at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
Bees are in the news, but for all the wrong reasons—mainly, dire tales of disappearing bees threatening a third of our food supply. Time Magazine, opting for sensationalism over accuracy, said we were headed toward “A world without bees,” with an online video explaining, “Why bees are going extinct.” They called it the “beepocalypse” and blamed it all on modern agricultural technologies, urging immediate and aggressive action before it’s too late.
This would be scary stuff indeed—if it were true. But like so many overly simplistic, sky-is-falling claims, these predictions are misleading and false. Activist groups like Loonies of the Earth—sorry, I mean Friends of the Earth—and the Pesticide Action Network work tirelessly to provide the media a steady stream of suitable doom-and-gloom material that they and other groups then use for “save the bees” fundraising opportunities.
Bees are popular, even iconic. The public naturally wants them to survive, but it simply isn’t true that honeybees are about to disappear–so they don’t need “saving.” The truth about the bees turns out to be far more complex, and far more interesting, than the alarmist headlines suggest.
- There are billions more bees than a decade ago
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture counted 2,660,000 million honeybee colonies across the United States. A decade earlier, in 2004, there were 2,556,000 honeybee colonies. That’s a gain of 104,000 colonies, not a loss. At around 50,000 bees per colony, that’s an increase of five billion honeybees in the United States.
The overall honeybee numbers in the United States have stayed steady at about 2.5 million colonies for the last two decades, dipping slightly when the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) hit in 2006, then rebounded at a healthy clip and actually reached a 20-year high in 2014. Europe and Canada have experienced significant increases in their honeybee populations as well, and worldwide, there are 30 million more hives today than in 1961, an increase of about 60 percent. That means there about 1.5 trillion more bees buzzing around today than there were 50 years ago. There simply is no bee-pocalypse and never was.
- Bees are always dying–and reproducing–at an “alarming” rate
Not so long ago, amusing photos spread across the Internet adorned with the phrase, “bees are dying globally at an alarming rate.” The first of these memes depicted Eli Manning, the New York Giants quarterback, purportedly pondering unhappily the fate of the pollinators. While it’s true that beekeepers in the U.S. are having increasing trouble keeping their hives healthy, and that hive losses have been elevated in recent years, if it weren’t a spoof, I’d suggest that Manning should worry less about bees being blitzed and more about the adequacy of his own offensive line. High losses, while they may create economic hardship for some beekeepers, don’t spell catastrophe. That’s because bees also reproduce “at an alarming rate,” or at least, very, very quickly.
Unlike the animals we tend to be more familiar with, honeybees have an exceptionally short lifespan–about six weeks. It is shorter during warm weather months and in perennially warm climates where honeybees never go into winter hibernation, or “cluster.” Many generations of honeybees are born and die within any given year, so rapid rises and falls in population numbers within any given year are common.
Recently, the Bee Informed Partnership–which conducts an annual survey of U.S. beekeepers–decided to add the warm weather losses to the traditional count of overwinter losses to come up with the startling announcement that, “Beekeepers lost 41 percent of Bees in 2015-2016.”
Bee Informed is funded by USDA, and this change in reporting was a sure-fire way to heighten concern and therefore increase funding dollars for the U.S. government (pardon my cynicism), but it did little to enlighten anyone as to what was really going on with bees. Not surprisingly, most journalists reported this as if our entire bee population was on the verge of being wiped out in the space of a few years. A May CBS News headline, for example, read, “Death rate for honeybees takes turn for the worse.” As usual in “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, there was no mention that even with these cataclysmic-sounding losses, the U.S. bee population was still very near a two-decade high.
- Bees are livestock, just like cattle
Activists spread hysteria about dying honeybees because it advances their political aims. They want the public to think the happy little bees we see buzzing about our gardens are about to draw their final breath, and that their imminent disappearance will threaten the world’s ability to feed itself. The exact opposite of this apocalyptic theory is true: Agricultural production guarantees steady honeybee numbers because of the potent effects of market forces.
The honeybee is a domesticated species, imported from Europe. Like cattle and other livestock, bees are raised in the numbers needed, in this case to pollinate agricultural crops. Human intervention is the driving force underlying their population numbers. Certainly, hives can experience severe health problems, usually driven by disease caused by mites and viruses, and those hives can collapse or die.
The rest of the story, however, is that given the demand for bees, beekeepers adapt to losses by “splitting” a healthy hive to grow more bees to suit their needs. One of the most basic beekeeping skills is to divide an existing colony and introduce (or grow) a new queen for the “new” hive. The new queen, which can be ordered online for as little as $25, will lay enough eggs—about 2,000 a day—so that what was once a single hive becomes two hives. With a little help from its human friends, nature is resilient.
Honeybee numbers fluctuate with beekeepers’ expectations about market conditions, including domestic and overseas demand for specific types of honey or other bee byproducts.
- Crop pesticides aren’t killing honeybees
Activists’ political goal is to convince regulators and lawmakers to ban the most popular agricultural chemicals, especially a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics for short. They have had some success in doing so by blaming the disappearance of honeybees, which isn’t actually happening, on neonics. This is a particularly obnoxious attack since modern crop protection products such as neonics are actually designed to target harmful pests while, when used according to the instructions on the label, keeping beneficial insects like honeybees as safe as possible. There are several ways we know neonicotinoids aren’t killing bees.
First of all, bees aren’t attracted to the most popular U.S. crops like corn, rice, soybean and wheat, which account for the majority of neonic usage. Honeybees would come into contact with neonics used on these crops only if beekeepers place their colonies close to fields that are about to be planted so that dust from the planting machines might drift and spread to the hive. This is a rather simple problem to fix, by ensuring beekeepers and farmers talk to one another so they know when to keep the bees away.
Second, 98 percent of the time, neonics aren’t sprayed on crops at all but are used as seed treatments. This high-tech approach is what makes the product friendly to bees and other non-target organisms while still being lethal to biting insects that attack plants at the earliest stage, when they are most vulnerable. Bees forage much later, on nectar and pollen from flowers. By the time bee-attracting, neonic- seed-treated crops reach the flowering stage, the amount of neonics expressed in crop pollen (and, for crops that produce it, nectar) is extremely low. A small amount of the pesticide is applied to the seed, and as the plant grows, the chemical becomes more and more diluted, to the point that it has no significant effect on bees.
That’s why bees positively thrive in Canada’s extensive canola fields, which are almost 100 percent grown from seeds treated with neonicotinoids. A good account of the Canadian experience can be found in the blog, “Alberta Buzzing,” by Lee Townsend, one of Alberta’s most successful beekeepers. Like other beekeepers in Alberta, he loves neonics because they keep the canola healthy, and canola produces a particularly tasty brand of honey.
There’s more evidence. Since neonics arrived on the scene in the mid-1990′s, honeybee hive numbers have climbed. Bee populations fell before neonics were introduced. That was due in large part to the loss of small farms, with their individual beehives, after World War II, and the devastation wrought by the Varroa destructor mite, which hit the U.S. in the mid-1980′s and which bee scientists recognize is the chief cause of bee health problems.
But as soon as the supposedly evil neonics were introduced around 1995, bee populations have been steady or climbing. And yet, activists and some journalists continue to blame neonics for bees’ non-existent “declines.” Go figure.
The fact is, if pesticides are sometimes a problem, it’s not neonics. Study after study confirms that neonic residues in hives tends to be extremely low, and that the pesticide residues that are found in much greater amounts in beehives tend to be pesticides introduced by beekeepers themselves to control the invasive Varroa mite. Studies conducted in the field under realistic scenarios inevitably arrive at the same result: Neonics introduce no observable harmful effects on honeybees under field-realistic conditions.
- Beekeepers are sometimes the bees’ worst enemy
Studies show consistently that when honeybee colonies do meet an unnatural and untimely death, more often than not the cause is a parasite or disease. By far the biggest threat is the Varroa destructor mite, mentioned above. In second place is the Nosema ceranae gut fungus. These nasty pests have reached an epidemic scale in U.S. honeybee hives and are driving the bulk of honeybee-hive losses over the winter months, forcing beekeepers to split more hives in the spring to maintain their numbers.
There’s a human factor as well. The prime culprit in the rapid spread of disease is the beekeepers’ annual cross-country journey to California’s Central Valley for the almond crop pollination. About 60 percent of the nation’s bee hives are trucked in from as far away as Florida for this this event, which takes place between January and March. That’s worth repeating. Well over half of all the bee hives in the U.S. are put on trucks every year and hauled across the continental United States to service one crop: almonds.
The bees, which have barely emerged from their winter cluster, are often stressed to the breaking point. Then they all mix with one another, ensuring that a disease that surfaces in one part of the country soon spreads to the rest.
Once a hive is infected with one of these parasites, it may be a challenge for even a skilled beekeeper to salvage the situation. Under these stressful conditions, untrained beekeepers might fail to act in time, leading to higher losses, or they might use too much of the wrong pesticide inside the hive to bring the mites under control. The result in both cases is a dead colony. Beekeepers who don’t want to acknowledge their mistakes find convenient scapegoats like neonics.
Such mishaps are becoming more and more common as amateurs take up beekeeping as a hobby to do their part to “save the bees.” They don’t realize that if they don’t put in the time and effort to do it right, they become the Typhoid Mary of the industry, spreading diseases fatal to their, and other, hives.
- Bees are responsible for one-fourteenth of our food, not one-third
Pretty much every claim the activists make is bogus, even the statement that one-third of crops would not exist without bee pollination. That chestnut is endlessly repeated in news articles, and even some scientific journals. As the Genetic Literacy Project reported, the figure is based on a flawed analysis buried in a 1976 report on pollination.
Here’s why it’s wrong. The majority of crops we consume, including corn, rice and wheat, are self-pollinated. While a third of other crops do benefit from bee pollination, they are not fully dependent on it. Some crops see a “moderate” benefit from bees, while others are “highly dependent” upon it. A 2000 Cornell study more carefully apportioned the value of bees to each crop and arrived at a $15 billion valuation for the service of bees to agriculture. That compares to U.S. agriculture’s production of $197 billion worth of food in the year studied, which means the bees were only responsible for 7.4 percent, or one-fourteenth, of our food supply.
In any case, honeybees aren’t the only, or even the most important, pollinators. There are some 4,000 native bee species in the U.S., and repeated studies have shown them to be doing fine (the major exceptions are some bumblebee species that were infected by disease from commercial beekeeping operations).
A 2015 study published in Nature Communications found that only 2% of wild bee species are responsible for almost 80% of the crop pollination performed by wild bees, and that these bees are thriving. (And note that these wild bees would have the most extensive contact with neonics–more proof that those insecticides aren’t a problem.)
Moreover, bees aren’t the only pollinators. Other important animal pollinators include butterflies, moths, bats, beetles, flies and hummingbirds. Even cockroaches and termites can sometimes act as pollinators, though these cases appear limited. And, of course, there’s also the wind.
Don’t be stung by misinformation about bees. Keep in mind the six facts above the next time anyone—whether an activist, bureaucrat or “journalist” who can’t be bothered to check his facts—tries to scare you with fables about the woes of bees. The friendly pollinators, and the food supply they help to grow, are flourishing.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
