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Honey, I'm Gone

Abandoned Beehives Are a Scientific Mystery and a Metaphor for Our

Tenuous Times

 

By Joel Garreau, Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, June 1, 2007

 

In " The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, " just before Earth is

destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route, all the

dolphins in the world disappear, leaving behind just the message: " So

long, and thanks for all the fish. "

 

Now, around the world, honeybees are vanishing en masse, leaving

their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning

of their exodus. Entire colonies are following the Shakespearean

stage direction, " Exeunt omnes. " They're flying off and not

returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty

except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and

pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even

dead bodies.

 

A third of our food supply -- including much of the boredom-relieving

stuff, from cranberries to cucumbers -- is dependent on animal

pollinators like the honeybee. As a result, this mystery is rapidly

joining the all-star ranks of millennial end-time run-for-your-lives

threats, right up there with Y2K, mad cow disease, West Nile virus,

SARS and avian flu.

 

Of equal note is the way the bees are setting a new standard in human

emotional resonance. Absolutely no one yet knows why the bees are

checking out, though not for lack of abundant effort on the part of

the world's scientists. This dearth of data allows us to project our

greatest anxieties onto the bees.

 

If what you're searching for is an entire spectrum of moral lessons

regarding the evils of human behavior, this crisis is even better

than global warming. If you hate globalization, then you will

doubtless see its evils as patent in the disappearance of the bees.

Pesticides? Genetically modified foods? Those, too, are convenient

hypotheses in the absence of contradictory information. Even

cellphones have been offered as an explanation. If you're driven

crazy by them, then so must be the bees. Isn't it obvious?

 

Our fuzzy, hard-working, sweetness-producing icons have become our

most powerful Rorschach test.

 

As go the bees, so go our hopes and fears for the future.

 

'Mad Bee Disease'

 

Jeff Pettis reports that he has become one of the most popular soccer

dads in the Washington metropolitan area.

 

" My wife says she's tired of hearing about it, " says the co-leader of

the huge national research group working on " colony collapse

disorder, " as the phenomenon is known. An estimated quarter of the

country's 2.4 million colonies of Apis mellifera have been lost since

winter. Similar reports are pouring in from Spain to Germany to

Brazil to Taiwan.

 

Pettis is a man in the right place at the right time. He heads the

Bee Research Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service at the

Department of Agriculture in Beltsville. His group includes

scientists from Columbia, Penn State, the University of Illinois,

North Carolina State, the Florida Department of Agriculture and a

host of other entities.

 

" Most people may not be able to tell the difference between a yellow

jacket and a bumblebee, " he says. But now, as the news of the

honeybees captures the popular imagination, " people who never even

knew what I did before come up to me on the soccer sidelines and

say, 'Hey, I want to find out what's really going on. Tell me the

real story.' "

 

" I tell them, 'We're still working on it.' "

 

This hardly slows the questions.

 

Colonies caught in the act of collapsing seem to display a raft of

diseases. Is this the AIDS of bees?

 

" I don't like that particular analogy, " Pettis says. " We actually

don't have any evidence that the immune system is compromised. It's

one of the ideas that we have, but the immune response genes are not

turned on or off. "

 

(Demonstrating its importance to commercial agriculture, even before

the current crisis the honeybee was one of the first insects to have

its entire genome sequenced.)

 

What do you think of the French referring to it as " mad bee disease " ?

 

" They were using that because they thought some of their losses over

the past 10 years were connected to low-level pesticides. It's one

myth. But we can't make the connection to disorientation. "

 

Where did the cellphone idea come from?

 

" The authors of that story were from Germany. It wasn't even a

cellphone. It was an old cordless phone. They tested it in small

hives and saw some very minor effects. We work with bees in a lot of

areas where you can't even get a cellphone signal. The amount of

energy is very, very remote. Even the authors themselves now say that

was a big stretch. "

 

What are the other theories?

 

" My favorite theory, which I throw out, is that the bees are out

there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically

pushing the crops down with their little legs. It fits. It explains

the loss of bees and crop circles at the same time. At taxpayers'

expense. I want credit for it. "

 

Pettis pauses for effect.

 

" People say, 'You're kidding, right?' "

 

He is. But his " theory " fits the facts as well as other wild

surmises. These include a secret plot by Osama bin Laden to destroy

American agriculture, and " the rapture of the bees " as a harbinger of

end times.

 

No Stinging Indictments

 

What about the comment attributed to Einstein 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! "

 

" That gets to the heart of the story, " Pettis says. " I don't

personally believe that the bees are the canary in the coal mine. You

don't have to bring in larger human destruction of the environment. I

can see things going on in the ways bees are managed that explains

it. "

 

For example, it turns out that not only does U.S. agribusiness grow

more than 80 percent of the world's supply of almonds (who knew the

world consumed so much marzipan?), but in February, when all those

groves need to be pollinated, fully half of the commercial beehives

in the entire United States are trucked to California's Central

Valley on 18-wheelers. Big-time beekeepers constantly haul their bees

all over the continent to service the next crop of apples,

blueberries, watermelons or whatever. Their bees are the planet's

hardest-working migrants.

 

Scientists have a hunch that this may be stressful. They do not yet

have the data to prove it. But some commercial beekeepers seem to be

hit harder than others, suggesting that their management practices

may be a fruitful area of inquiry.

 

If this hypothesis were to hold up, the implication is that some

corporate bees around the world are heir to a combination of problems

that may or may not be faced by honeybees kept by small-time

operators, not to mention the honeybees that have escaped into the

wild. All pollinators are in decline, according to a recent National

Academy of Sciences study. But it is by no means clear that colony

collapse disorder affects any of the 17,000 other species of bees

known to exist, or the 13,000 additional species of bees estimated to

exist, not to mention the 200,000 other species of animal pollinators

such as beetles, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and even bats. This

also leaves aside the two-thirds of the world's food that is

pollinated not by critters, but by wind and rain, such as the

grasslike crops that include corn.

 

None of this, however, has decreased in the slightest the buzz

emanating from humans seeking moral lessons in the domesticated

honeybees.

 

Particularly disappointed by the lack of evidence are those rooting

for an indictment of the cellphone.

 

" We now know it isn't cellphones, alas, alas, " says Pamela McCorduck,

the futurist and author of " Machines Who Think. "

 

" I so longed to shut such people up with a sanctimonious 'You're

killing the bees, you clod!' "

 

" There are bees at the pool and I haven't been able to get rid of

them for 10 years, " says John Brockman, the author and literary agent

who works the intersection of culture and technology. " Now I go to

the pool, whip out the cellphone, point it at them, and say, 'Call on

Line 1!' "

 

" I don't think anyone really has a clue as to what's going on, but if

it turns out to be cellphones, it's the greatest metaphor in the

history of metaphors, " says Bill McKibben, the best-selling

environmentalist author of " The End of Nature. "

 

" Starving the planet in pursuit of one more text message with your

broker seems the very epitome of going out with a whimper, not a

bang. "

 

Collapse of the Machine

 

The disappearance of the bees nonetheless has mythic depth. It

captures intuitions people have about the human condition. A hive is

an organism, like a nation. It may be made up of individuals, but it

produces results beyond the imagination of any one of its members. To

think of one unraveling is profoundly unsettling.

 

The most optimistic metaphor for our interconnected world, for

example, is that by wiring up all the planet's humans, we are

creating a " hive mind " with startling powers. The analogy is to the

bees. You can look at a single bee for as long as you like and never

guess that a large number of them would turn into an amazingly

productive super-organism like a hive. What sort of wonders will

humans create when billions of us come together in unprecedented ways?

 

Already you can see primitive outlines of such a productive

transformation in Internet venues Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Linux,

Facebook, YouTube, Second Life and all the rest.

 

What other unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike

supermind?

 

Creating a global hive mind " doesn't cure all our ills, but it works

for a lot of stuff that we would never have guessed would possibly

work, " says Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine who

popularized the notion in his book " Out of Control: The New Biology

of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. "

 

What happens, then, if the beehive is unsustainable? Kelly wonders.

Will the new hive mind of the Internet someday fly off while we are

at lunch, leaving us suddenly dumb and alone?

 

What institutions are next?

 

Naturalist Barry Lopez wonders if the disappearance of the bees is a

metaphor for the end of the federal government.

 

" The colony collapse is the collapse of a piece of machinery like a

federal bureaucracy, " says Lopez, the National Book Award-winning

author of " Arctic Dreams. "

 

" It's the rise of the local. It's the biological expression of the

marginalization of the federal government. It's the silver lining in

the Bush cloud. It's become crystal clear. If you want the job done --

carbon footprints, climate change, really important stuff -- don't

rely on the federal government. The day of contacting your

congressman is over. It's the collapse of large-scale institutions. "

 

" Not that big a deal, " Lopez feels.

 

" From an ecological standpoint, it is opening up the possibility for

local pollinators like the mason bee to come back. " Honeybees, after

all, are an introduced species. They were brought here by European

explorers and settlers. The Indians called them " white men's flies. "

 

Lopez sees local people creating local food using local means in a

turn to self-reliance and resiliency, away from a global system that

uses water in the desert of Arizona to create cotton to ship to China

to be made into T-shirts to be sold at malls in Maryland.

 

But maybe this is over-thinking the situation. Bill Joy thinks the

collapse of the bee colonies is a harbinger of our increasingly

complicated world coming apart.

 

" I think that we will see many more such 'era of limits' mysteries,

some of which turn out to be difficult to impossible to unravel, as

causal wires of which we are unaware, many of them nonlinear, are

tripped, " says Joy, the respected former chief scientist of Sun

Microsystems, who has warned of the accelerating pace of

technological change leading to dire results for mankind -- up to and

including the possible destruction of the human race in a generation.

 

Exeunt Omnes

 

In seeking the meaning of the bees, perhaps we can take solace in our

culture's great exit lines.

 

Take your pick:

 

" So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly

into the past, " F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us at the end of his

masterpiece, " The Great Gatsby. "

 

The movie " Shane " ends: " Pa's got things for you to do, and Mother

wants you. I know she does. Shane. Shane! Come back! 'Bye, Shane. "

 

In the 1954 film " Hondo, " the final words are " Yup. The end of a way

of life. Too bad. It's a good way. Wagons forward! Yo! "

 

" In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good

at heart. " -- " The Diary of Anne Frank. "

 

" God help us in the future. " -- " Plan 9 From Outer Space. "

 

" Every exit is an entrance somewhere else. " -- the Player

in " Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. "

 

" Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble. " -- " Butch

Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "