Where Are All the Honeybees?
A Sermon by Aaron McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa
Barbara, November 30, 2008
When I was about twelve or so I
spent a couple weeks at Camp Bear Paw, a Boy Scout camp a few hours away from
my home in rural Wisconsin. I loved it
there, and although my family had very little money, my mom always made sure
that every summer brought a week or two of canoeing, archery, swimming and epic
games of capture the flag.
On this particular occasion, my
friends and I had a little less time for goofing off though. We were part of a very demanding wilderness
survival class, and spent every free minute either planning or building the
survival shelter we would have to sleep in for the next few days.
It was built into a hillside,
which we hollowed out a bit more, figuring all that earth would help keep us
warm on those cold Wisconsin nights.
The rest of it was framed by a few fallen trees and walled by smaller
pieces, which we wove together like a big green blanket. We even built a rudimentary door and a
chimney hole. We were very proud.
One afternoon I was out looking
for some firewood. My arms were already
pretty full, but I thought I could handle a couple more good pieces. I bent down awkwardly and picked up the old
log with one hand and turned to head back to the shelter. That’s when they started landing on me – at
first I tried to brush them off absentmindedly, that part of Wisconsin is
plagued by swarms of ill-tempered horse and deer flies and I assumed that’s all
it was.
But no. It was the stinging that caught my full attention. You see the fallen log I had picked up
wasn’t just a fallen log, oh no – it was a ground hornet apartment building! I threw the log away and started running,
but hornets are vengeful creatures under the best of circumstances and I had
just pulled a Godzilla on their little version of Tokyo. They were angry, and they were a lot faster
than I was.
I went tearing through the woods,
trying to make it to the lake. The
hornets were still hot on my trail and managed to get in more than a couple
good stings no matter how fast I ran and dodged. I hit the pier at a full sprint and dove off the end into the
cold green water of the lake.
I stayed under for as long as I
could, sure that the hornets would give up now. But hell hath no fury like a homeless hornet and when I finally
came up they were right there waiting for me.
It was not one of my better days, and I spent a good part of my evening
in the nurse’s office having gross oily ointment applied to the many angry
welts that covered my arms, legs and face.
Not one of my better days….
I have been afraid of hornets,
wasps, bees and anything else that flies, buzzes and stings – ever since. I know this is an unfair and discriminatory
position to take toward all the stinging insects that could have stung me over
all these long years and elected not to – but there it is.
And so it is with a powerful sense
of irony that I speak to you this morning as a passionate friend and ally of
the honeybee. I know, I know, honeybees
aren’t interested in stinging anyone – I know its true, but they could if they
wanted to and so I can’t help but view them with a certain degree of suspicion
– even as I fear for their lives.
You see the honeybees are
dying. They are dying in droves, in
millions and tens of millions. And
nobody knows why.
Here’s what we do know: starting
in North America in late 2006 (and now Europe and Australia as well) vast
numbers of bee colonies began to disappear.
They appeared to simply vanish, leaving behind hives full of honey and
abandoned eggs that would now die of starvation. Other bees would make no attempt to steal the nectar from the
abandoned hives and no bodies were ever found.
Millions of bees, poof – gone without a trace!
By 2007 it was estimated that
somewhere between 50 and 70% of all the honeybees were dead or dying and nobody
had the slightest idea what to do about it.
Even here in the Eden that is Santa Barbara, bee-death stalks the hives. One day this past June, a whole hive of bees
showed up here at church, right back there in the children’s play area where
they filled up a big branch of that old mulberry tree.
We had a bee expert come to take
them away, but he said the bees were all sick and couldn’t be moved or exposed
to any healthy bees – and so another call was made, this time to an
exterminator who came and vacuumed them all up – a whole hive.
We don’t know if these bees had
Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD for short – or not – we just know they were
sick and lost and died. And it’s
sad. But a name wouldn’t help us much,
since the name Colony Collapse Disorder, is, as one beekeeper describes it,
little more than “a pseudo-scientific term that translates into plain English
as the “Huuuh?” sound made by Scooby Doo in 1970s cartoons.”[1]
The internet is full to the gills
with theories, counter-theories and conspiracy theories to explain what is
causing the collapse: viruses, and mites; cell phones that mess with their
guidance systems; antibiotics, genetically modified crops, and pesticides…and
there is some evidence to suggest that some or all of these things are
contributing to the epidemic – but no single cause can be found.
But there is one commonality, one
common thread, one common word that appears in every single article I read,
“Stress.” Can it be that the entire honeybee species is facing extinction
because they’re stressed-out? I’m
afraid so.
Let’s take a look at the life of
your average honeybee these days. First
of all, almost all the “wild honeybees” are already gone now. The rest live in commercial captivity. They are bred for size and productivity and
are not as resistant to various stressors as their wild counter-parts, the
“killer bees”, who do not seem to be affected by CCD at all.[2] Figures, the meanest, nastiest ones with the
biggest stingers – they’re the ones we’re left with – probably lurking around
Boy Scout camps in Texas right now just waiting for some poor kid to chase…
Anyway, these hard-working
commercial honeybees work their little wings off so that we can have tasty
strawberries, almonds and lots of other good things all the year round. Over 1.5 million hives are trucked all the
way to Bakersfield California every year for almond pollination alone. Just imagine 1.5 million apartment buildings
full of Los Angelinos being loaded into trucks and shipped back and forth
across the continent for generation after generation! And they work so hard -
these bees are directly responsible for one out of every three bites of food we
put in our mouths. An incredible
workload.
As they buzz around pollinating
everything they come into contact with all sorts of things that aren’t good for
them – the mites and viruses from other hives, all kinds of pesticides,
including ones made out of nicotine, good old nicotine – which doesn’t always
kills them but has been proven to seriously impair their navigational ability –
leaving them to buzz back to their hives like so many hundreds, thousands or
millions of drunk drivers.[3]
All of this, in combination, takes
a horrific toll – a veritable “perfect storm of stressors.”[4]
The few bees left in the CCD-affected hives are terribly ill, afflicted with,
as one expert put it, “a tremendous number of pathogens, literally every bee
virus known, with many bees carrying as many as five or six different viruses,
including fungal infections and mites.”[5] Their immune systems are completely gone.
Albert Einstein is reputed to have
said that, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would
have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no
more men!” This may or may not be so, but the facts are dire – we have
eradicated most of the non-commercial honeybees, the very bees that provide us
with over 30% of our food supply – and the remaining bees we raise are in deep,
deep trouble.
Honeybees are not native to the Americas, and presumably things
grew just fine without them for a very long time. But the fact is we have hitched our wagon to the honeybees and
where they goeth, so goes our nation.
What I find most fascinating about all of this is not the actual
mass death of this species, that happens all-too frequently these days. What I find most fascinating and troubling –
is how little we care! I mean think
about it – what would happen if even 1% of the chickens or cows we raise
started to mysteriously die off, with collapsed immune systems and no
discernable cause? People would freak
out, governments would create special task forces and the whole thing would play
out on the covers of every newspaper in America.
But here we have 50-70% of the species most responsible for our
survival dying off and there’s barely a peep.
Coverage of any given celebrity getting busted for drunk-driving is
guaranteed to get more play in twenty four hours than the bee crisis will ever
get. One of the perplexing tidbits here
is that bee-experts claim that they have had a terrible time researching this
because no one will fund them – even Congress, while expressing alarm, has
coughed up a laughably small amount – not a lot of investment in this kind of
Homeland security, I’m afraid.
We’re just whistling in the dark.
Maybe it is because, like so many of the challenges we face – the death
of the bees is such a slow moving catastrophe, and has begun to feel normal to
us. Maybe it’s because we are afraid, maybe we can’t bear to know. Maybe in this apocalypse of bees we feel the
breath of our own potential future. And so we whistle in the dark, nothing to
see here folks….
But we can’t whistle in the dark for long. The fact is that like it or not we are as
interdependent, as inextricably interconnected with our friends the bees – as
we are with one another. We have a lot
in common with the bees, things that go way deeper than the fact that they
raise our food and make our lives sweet.
Bees have a lot to teach us.
Like us, bees are social creatures.
They work hard, commute to the office every day, and build lovely
communities, complete with nurseries, storehouses and police forces. True, they do live under a queen, but she is
a benevolent despot. Every bee has a
place, a meaningful role to play in the life of the community, and all you have
to do is look at them to see how much pleasure those round and bumbling
creatures take in life as they “gather their rosebuds while they may” in their
brief little lives.
We are not so different, are we?
We see what is happening to the bees as stress takes over. Their commutes to work get longer and
longer, as do their hour of work. Where
they used to pollinate certain plants at certain times in certain seasons they
now live in a non-stop 24/7 production cycle – just as so many of us do.
Did you know that stress is directly linked to all the leading
causes of death for humans, and that between 75 and 90% of all visits to
primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints? According to social scientists life today is
more than 44% harder than it was just 30 years ago, and the accompanying wave
of stress this has produced is actively compromising our immune systems, just
as it does to our honeybees. Stress
also plays a critical role in the skyrocketing rise of violence in the
workplace – where homicide is now the second leading cause of fatal
occupational injury and the leading cause of death for working women.[6]
I could go on – and on – and on with statistics just like
these. But I know you’re hearing me.
It’s time to take a lesson from the bees, and we better learn it
fast, because this is no time to lollygag.
Our task is pretty simple, really – “save the bees, save the
world.” “Save the bees, save
ourselves.”
And I don’t mean “Save the bees, save the world, save ourselves”
in a purely literal way – although we probably do have to physically save the
bees in order to save ourselves – I think we have to go deeper than that. The bees are reminding us, in the most
chilling possible way, what happens when we forget how to slow down. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a
commonplace saying, and yet how many rosebuds have you gathered lately?
The purpose of bees is to simply be bees, and the pollination and
honey they provide is just a natural by-product of them being bees. The purpose
of people is simply to live and to be – people! Bees don’t exist so that we can eat strawberries anytime we want
to anymore than we exist to keep our economy growing. Bees and humans both are born to be, not just to produce. In a world that is always speeding up, we
have to remember how to slow down.
One team of scientists I read about is working hard to develop a
solution to the bee problem that I find rather terrifying. They are working hard to better understand
the honeybee genome so that they can begin genetically engineering bees that
don’t feel the effects of stress at all, and would thus be immune to Colony Collapse
Disorder. How terrifyingly unsurprising.
Despite cautionary tales dating back thousands of years about what
happens when humans try to short-circuit nature and play god – looking for the
angle, the shortcut, is almost invariably the path we choose. It is almost always easier to treat the
symptom than to treat the cause, and so that is what we tend to do.
A quick stop at a local bookstore this morning verified this. There were TONS of books about coping with
stress, but almost none about reducing or preventing it! We want to engineer our bees and equip our
people to tolerate ever-increasing levels of stress – but what for? What for?
What do we get out of our 24/7 society?
Possibly more money, cheaper consumer goods and fruit that is always in
season. But also more illness, more depression, more trouble sleeping.
Certainly less time with our kids, less time period - less time walking on the
beaches not one mile from where we sit, less time cooking real food and doing
and being all the things that make our lives worth living in the first place.
Free-range bees as are happier and healthier – and so are free
range humans.
So let’s start by de-stressing our bees and ourselves. I am no expert, so I will have to leave the
bee part of the equation to others, but I do have some thoughts about how we
can avoid stress-related Colony Collapse – eat a balanced, healthy diet,
exercise; learn how to say no; laugh when you want to laugh and cry when you
want to cry; make friends, and help others whenever you can. Life is for living, and these are the
building blocks of a life worth living.
One summer a couple years ago, Eliza and I took my kids to a
fire-lookout in Oregon where we got to camp in a lookout tower sixty feet in
the air. My daughter Zoe and I went for
a hike one morning and found ourselves in a vast meadow full of
wildflowers. There were countless bees
buzzing heavily from flower to flower and I was nervous. But my daughter ran laughing deep into the
meadow and what could I do but follow her?
In the very center of the meadow I found her sitting, quite still, just
watching the hummingbirds and bumblebees and gently swaying flowers. She had the most beautiful look on her
face. And so we sat there in the sun,
still, except for the breeze, which sometimes lifted our hair, just a little.
And so we sat, the two of us surrounded by all that glorious life
– all those heavy round bumble bees, their bodies looking far too heavy for
their little wings to carry, how they seemed to love their lives that morning
in the sun. How the flowers seemed to
welcome them and the wind to help them along.
How good it was to sit there with my little girl and just be part of it
all as my fear fell away. How sweet it
was to just be.
This is our challenge my friends.
To weave moments like these into our ordinary lives not just on our
all-too rare vacations. Time to just
be. Because if we don’t, then we are
not really living at all.
[1] James Fischer “Pathogen (and Human Greed) Caused Bee Collapse, in The Daily Green. http://www.thedailygreen.com/print-this/environmental-news/community-news/4745
[2] Dan Sorenson, “Killer Bees Seem Resistant to Disorder” Arizona Daily Star, March 30, 2007. http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/176000
[3] Jane Akre, “Nicotine-Based Pesticide May Explain Bee Colony Collapse” in The Injury Board, October 17, 2008. http://www.injuryboard.com/printfriendly.aspx?id=249590
[4] USDA, Questions and Answers About Colony Collapse Disorder, May, 2008. http://ars.usda.gov/news/docs.htm?docis+15572
[5] http:///www.celsias.com/article/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-where-is-it-heading/
[6] http://faculty.css.edu/dswenson/web/Stress/stressfacts.html