Stories about the declining bee population and its effects on the environment trickle through the news cycle nearly every day. To keep track of the latest bee news and make sense of the issues, we're highlighting the major bee stories each week, with analysis from the Guardian's Alison Benjamin, co-author of A World Without Bees, Bees in the City: The Urban Beekeepers' Handbook and Keeping Bees and Making Honey
Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing
What happened:
A TED talk by Dr Marla Spivak, founder of the University of Minnesota Bee Lab (a Buzzfeeds friend), was posted online last week.
Her 15-minute talk provides an overview of the benefits of bees and why the population is declining. She talks about the harmful class of pesticides of neonicotinoids, but also how their presence interacts with other threats to bees including: diseases, monocultures and flowerless landscapes.
Spivak said she became involved with bees "on a fluke" after picking up a book when she was 18 and learning how complex insect societies could be.
Key quote:
I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big blood-sucking parasite running around on it and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus. But I do know what it feels like when I have a virus – the flu. And I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. But what if I lived in a food desert? And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store and finally got my weak body out there and I consumed in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin that I couldn't get home. This is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death.
Why it matters:
There is no one cause for why honeybee populations have been dying at alarming rates, particularly in the US. Parasites, pesticides and poor nutrition are all major culprits. Spivak explains the threats in an easy, accessible way. It's important for everyone who wants to help bees to understand that focusing on one of the culprits is not the answer. Banning neonicitinoid pesticides alone will not tackle the flowerless landscapes, nor the varroa mite which lives on our honeybees. We need to change our farming practices, and our stewardship of the countryside and urban landscapes, and the way that we manage our honeybees to reduce the stress the colony is under. Weak, malnourished bees are no match for the mite which spreads viruses that kill the bees. The better we understand this, the more chance the bees have.
Bee researcher struggles for funding
What happened:
Dr Denis Anderson, the leading bee researcher in Australia, said he is collecting money from fashion magazine fundraising efforts and community parties to pay for bee research he estimates will cost $10m. Anderson said he needs that money for breakthrough research that would find a chemical trigger that would move feral bees to protect themselves from the harmful varroa mite.
Key quote:
The horticulture industry does contribute funds into a research fund, controlled under the roof of the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. But the amount of money is still a pittance. It's really $350,000 a year and that includes from honeybee sector.
Why it matters:
Denis Anderson is a highly respected bee researcher across the world, for his work on the relationship between the varroa mite and the western honeybee. In the early 20th century, the mite jumped species from the eastern honeybee, (Apis cerena) which over millions of years has learned to live with its parasite, to the western honeybee (Apis mellifera) when man started transporting western honeybees all over the world for pollination and honey production. Anderson discovered the mite had also adapted to its new host and the new varroa was named Varroa destructor. Since honeybees' pollination services are worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the global economy by increasing the yields of the majority of commercially grown crops, there should be a global government bee fund to support all research that has the potential to improve honeybee health.
Researchers discover new bee here in Oklahoma
What happened:
A researcher at Oklahoma state university discovered a new species of bee over the weekend. The new bee is named Anthidium-Michener-Orum after influential bee biologist Charles Duncan Michener and his wife Mary. This bee does not live in a colony, it's more solitary. It also does not make honey
Key quote:
'Although most people think of bees merely as honeybees, in reality there are more than 20,000 bee species worldwide,' Dr. Victor Gonzalez Betancourt said. 'One-quarter of this diversity occurs in North America, particularly in the western United States.'
Why it matters:
In north America there are no indigenous honeybees, they were taken there by the pilgrim fathers to pollinate their farm crops. In the Hiawatha poem, the honeybee is called the "white man's fly". Yet there was a thriving eco-system before the arrival of the western honeybee because there were thousands of solitary bees and bumblebees pollinating the native flowering plants which provided food for birds, other animals and Native Americans.
Of the 20,000 bee species globally, about 250 are bumblebees, 4 are honeybees and the other 19,000 plus are solitary bees. They all play an important part in pollinating flowering plants and trees. This discovery of a new solitary bee helps to raise awareness that all bees, not just honeybees are important for our eco-system. These native pollinators are threatened by habitat loss and flowerless landscapes. We need to improve stewardship of the countryside and change farming practices to help these bees, as well as the honeybees. Without these pollinators, the biodiversity of our ecological system will break down and our flora and fauna will disappear.
Bee bonus:
And this week in Celebrities Who Keep Bees, Neil Gaiman. The prolific author wrote for the Express UK about his love for the winged insects.
People ask me why I like beekeeping. I say people should always have a hobby that could kill them. Although as long as you're sensible you'll rarely get stung. If I get stung once a year it's surprising and you learn not to flail. If you move slowly bees won't get agitated but if you start flapping around, they see you as a target and they go for you.
