"Wind, rain, spiders, and other animals can pollinate plants, but nothing does the job as efficiently as the honey bee. Some crops, such as almonds, are so dependent on honey bees that they couldn't be produced without the help of commercial beekeepers. Every February, more than half a million acres of almond trees bloom in California, and beekeepers from around the country truck in more than one million bee colonies to do the pollinating.
"Other crops depend on commercial honey bees too. In addition to California almond trees in February, Dave's bees pollinate Florida citrus trees in March, Pennsylvania apple trees in April and May, Maine blueberry bushes in June, and Pennsylvania pumpkin plants in July.
"'The biggest thing about bees is not honey,' says Dave. 'It's that your food supply depends on them.'"
When I was little and I had a nose stuffed with snot and a throat filled with sandpaper, my mom would squeeze some fresh lemon into a big mug, add a spoonful of honey and fill it with hot water. I'm thinking that honey's sweet role in being a comfort to me when I was feeling really miserable is one reason why I am still so fond of it today. Concerned about the degree to which refined sweeteners were being added to nearly all processed foods (Yes, I read a book about it.), I've avoided eating food and beverages containing white sugar and/or corn syrup since the Seventies. But I do like to keep a container of honey around for when I bake.
As Loree Griffin Burns explains in THE HIVE DETECTIVES, big-time commercial beekeeper Dave Hackenberg trucks all of his bees to Florida in the winter. "Instead of clustering in a hibernation-like state, which is how bees survive frigid northern winters," each of the 150 million bees living amongst Dave's 3,000 beehives keep busy as...err...bees, "maintaining their hive, rearing young, and collecting nectar and pollen" (as well as availing themselves of the sugar syrup and protein patties with which they are supplemented in the leaner months).
"Dipping into the flower zone
Soaking up directions
Finding our ways in the dark..."
-- Naomi Shihab Nye from "Honeybee"
But as became big news in 2006, twenty million of Dave's buzzing pollinators vanished without a trace that winter. And, as Loree Griffin Burns was explaining to me when we conversed at the NCTE convention last fall, she recognized news of the bee problems as a potential ecological and food supply disaster in the making, and decided she needed to take a closer look at what was being discovered in the scientific community about these mysterious disappearances.
Since that conversation, I have been waiting impatiently all winter for a chance to read and view what Loree learned from researchers about this Colony Collapse Disorder.
What conditions did the hive detectives discover?
"Among this 'stuff' were striking changes in the way the bees' internal organs looked under the microscope. Dennis found swollen, discolored, and scarred tissues and organs throughout the bodies of bees from CCD hives. The CCD bees also contained evidence of yeast, bacteria, and fungal infections, often all in the same bee. These abnormalities weren't seen in bees from healthy hives."
What is causing these abnormalities?
As the hive detectives compared evidence from hives that suffered CCD to evidence from healthy hives, the results remained unclear as to what factors are separately or collectively responsible for this Colony Collapse Disorder. The pests that many in the beekeeping community immediately suspected of triggering the CCD are apparently not the problem. Nor, it seems, are viruses. There was also no significant difference between the levels of pesticide residue found in the pollen and wax samples from the hives that had been victims of CCD versus the healthy hives.
The investigation continues.
But what stuns me in reading THE HIVE DETECTIVES is that across the board -- in healthy hives and in dead hives -- high levels of pesticides are being found in pollen and wax samples. These pesticides include those employed by the beekeepers themselves to rid bees of certain mites and all the latest pesticides employed by the farmers who are growing the crops being pollinated by the bees:
"The first surprise was how common chemicals were; Maryann found them in almost every sample she tested, whether it came from a CCD hive or a healthy hive. Of 208 pollen samples, only three were completely chemical-free.
"'It was shocking to us to find, on average, five pesticides in each pollen sample,' said Marann. 'In one sample we found seventeen different pesticides.
"Perhaps even more shocking was that the chemicals found most frequently -- and at the highest levels -- were those that beekeepers themselves put in the hive to protect their bees from Varroa mites. Somehow these beekeeper-applied chemicals were finding their way into the pollen the bees stored in the hive."
So, does this mean that I am ingesting a chemical feast every time I put together a batch of carob fudge brownies or oatmeal raisin cookies containing honey? Whether or not the honey comes to contain concentrated levels of these pesticides is a question that Loree does not directly address in the book, but is the question that has me thinking hard about my continued use of honey.
My biggest fear from reading this book is that Rachel Carson is long forgotten, that our silent spring is coming, and that 2006 was just a dress rehearsal for an even larger CCD disaster that will critically and irreversibly impact the human food supply. I continue to not understand why those of us who seek to eat in a manner that puts less pressure on an ecologically stressed-out planet are so often characterized as being radical, while the employment by multinational food production companies of new pesticides as foundational tools in their monocultural excesses -- a process by which the public and Mother Earth have become the laboratory rats on whom these brave new chemicals are being tested -- is perceived to be the honest work of mainstream down-to-earth American farmers.
Ellen Harasimowicz's photographs are vivid and revealing; and Loree Griffin Burns' text is clear, engrossing, and easy to follow. Given the ease to which the next epidemic of Colony Collapse Disorder might so quickly plunge us all into the midst of a planetary food supply catastrophe, THE HIVE DETECTIVES is certainly the most important children's book I have so far read this year.
