99% Invisible - 365- On Beeing

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples and the like.  Yet it’s only in the last 30 years that pollination services have become such an enormous part of American agriculture. Today, bees have become more livestock than wild creatures, little winged cows, that depend on humans for food and shelter. On Beeing

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you drive from Oakland to Los Angeles in February, you'll pass through a spectacular scene. Neat, symmetrical rows of trees covered with pink and white flowers, stretching on for hundreds of miles. This is the annual California Almond Plume, and it really is massive. is the annual California almond bloom, and it really is massive. California almond trees take up a million acres of land in the Central Valley. When the petals fall off, they carpet the road and create this sweet smell. And the almond bloom also has its own distinctive sound. You can actually hear it before you even walk into the orchard.

That's the sound of thousands of bees from an orchard outside of Modesto, California. To create a single almond, a blossom needs as many as it does in bee visits. That means you need roughly 80,000 bees to pollinate an acre of almonds. That's Adam Ellington, he's a reporter covering the environment for Bloomberg. He also hosts the podcast, The Business of Bees. When you think of bees in business, you're probably thinking of honey. But in fact, honey has little to do with commercial beekeeping today. Every winter, beekeepers from every corner of the United States descend on California to pollinate almonds. Almonds have a window

of about two weeks for pollination to occur. Otherwise, the blossoms won't turn into fruit. The demand is so high, it takes almost every bee hive in the country to do the job. Upwards of two million hives. This is the largest managed pollination event on Earth. This is John Miller. He's a fourth generation beekeeper from North Dakota. In every year, John brings 13,000 hives over 1,500 miles

to the Central Valley. I've got the best job on earth. Look at this. It's a beautiful spring day in Northern California. All my trees are in bloom. I just love it. So what are we looking at right here? This is the top of the hive. These are the occupants. These are the little bees. They're hanging out. There's a...there's... This guy just landed. For a beekeeper like John, pollination isn't just big business.

It's most of his business. In recent years, almond pollination has become so lucrative it accounts for about two-thirds of John's income. How much of this honey actually will go to making honey for people to eat? None. Instead of selling the honey, John says it's more cost-effective to just leave it in the hive as food for the bees. After pollinating almonds, John will load his bees onto a semi-truck and they'll move from one crop to another in other states.

You know, they'll go from almonds to plums to cherries to apples to vine crops to pit fruits to cotton to lime of beans to watermelons and then their season is over. Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honey bees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, or apples. But it's only in the last 30 years that pollination services like the kind that John provides have become such an enormous part of American agriculture. Today bees have become more livestock than wild creatures, basically tiny little winged cows that depend on humans for

shelter, food, and even medicine. But for thousands of years our relationship with bees was much simpler. It was really all about the honey. Way before sugar came along, honey was one of the few sweeteners we had. There are 8,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain of people collecting wild honey, and once humans got a taste for honey, they do almost anything to get it. Alexander Zamcheck is an apoculturist at the University of Miami, Ohio. He studies bees and agriculture. To put it gently, we

found ourselves as plunders. When we tripped across natural beehives, the Winnie the Pooh trees and the wild. And when people came across one of these trees, they would cut it down. And in so doing, rob the bees of this honey, it was not a wonderful experience. We didn't have bee suits. It was a pretty raw event. These collectors would smother and kill the bees with smoke, and then they'd take the honey. It was not exactly a sustainable process. Slowly over time, it really dawned on us that, well, what if we tried to put them in a container? By the middle ages, beekeepers in Europe had

designed a method of capturing swarms of bees and then putting them inside woven upside-down baskets called skeps. For all you vuxilologists out there, there's actually a bee-skep on the state flag of Utah. It's got a little door for the bees to come in and out and it's positioned right in the center between the words Utah and industry. An obvious advantage of the skep design was that you didn't have to go out and hunt for the honey and chop down a tree to get it. And the skeps were portable. When the first Europeans came to America, they brought along a few skeps full of honeyes, which are actually not native to North America. The species the Europeans brought over is called apes-molifra, it's Latin for honey carrier.

Of the 20,000 bee species in the world, apes-molifra is the only one that can produce enough honey to be useful for humans. It formed larger colonies, it had a gentle nature. It was a good honey producer, it was one that we could use around the world, and that was our golden retriever. In these dye-siles, sweet tempered bees did really well in America. There's a good saying by a 17th century scholar that said the honey bees did better than the settlers did.

That's Tammy Horne Potter. I am the Kentucky State APA artist. I work with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. Tammy also wrote a book titled Bees in America, how the honeybees shaped a nation. And she says the honeybees loved their new continent. There were plenty of stands of a type of a species of tree called black gum. And black gum trees are notable because they decay from the inside out very quickly. They would swarm and take up residence in these trees.

And so honeybees did very well. So by the middle of the 19th century, honeybees were well-established in North America. People were still keeping them in skepts or hunting small amounts of wild honey in nature, but eventually everything changed with a Presbyterian minister named Lorenzo Langstroff. After attending seminary at Yale, Langstroff returned to his hometown of Philadelphia in 1848, and during this time Langstroth began to struggle with mental illness. In diaries from the time, his family referred to it as head troubles. Today is what we'd call seasonal effective disorder.

Back then, a standard prescription you fight depression would be lodenum. That's an alcoholic solution containing morphine. But Langstroth's doctor wanted to try something more gentle. He told him to spend more time outdoors, which he did. He would take long walks on his own out in nature, and he developed an extreme fascination with wild honeybees. He literally just spent hours and days and weeks and months staring at these hollow B-trees until an idea finally clicked in his mind.

Langstroth noticed something about B-hives in the wild. There was this pattern, a kind of mathematical precision to the spacing between the honeycombs. And the moment came when he realized there is the same exact space, a carpenters number, 3-8ths of an inch, between every one of these combs, and they were measured again and again,

different hives, different times, different colonies, and it's always 3-8-7-inch. Langstruth called this area the bee space. 3-8-7-inch is the exact amount of space, bees need to move around a colony. They're like little hallways between the honeycombs. So then Langstroth took this idea of the bee space and he put it in a box. Inside each wooden hive box he would hang a series of

removable frames, kind of like empty picture frames, and each one was spaced three eighths of an inch apart. When Langstroth put bees inside the box, they looked up at the frames and they thought, hey you know what? This looks a lot like home. Then up at the frames and they thought, hey, you know what? This looks a lot like home. Then other bees joined in and before you know it, they were making colonies inside these boxes. And the Langstruth hive was invented. It's the modern bee hive, the one that we still have today.

It was the first artificial hive which could be easily controlled and moved around. It changed everything about beekeeping. Oh, it was fundamental. I mean, there's just no doubt about that. Because once beekeepers can manage colonies, they can check on their health, say if it's a drought, they can help provide supplemental food.

Langstress innovations meant people could keep more bees, and the bees could reuse their honeycombs because people weren't destroying them all the time, which allowed honey production to go way up. Langstruth published a book of his findings in 1853 called The Hive and the Honey Bee. It's still widely read in beekeeping circles today, and once it got out, beekeeping became big business all over the world. The hives start crammed with honey and ready for mantle rob.

The bees have made millions of journeys to add to that fresh store, to be or not to be, to be it is. After World War I, people kept innovating and honey production went from family farming to a giant commercial operation, by the end of World War II there were something like 5.9 million commercial beehives in the United States. It also set the stage for the next chapter of beekeeping, the rise of commercial pollination. In the 1950s small family farms started getting pushed out by big companies and industrial

agriculture. While family farms had fields with different crops growing side by side, the new model replaced the whole system with ever-expanding fields devoted to growing just one plant. Instead of planting cover crops to replenish the soil after the harvest, they just use fertilizer. Some of our commercial crops, like corn, rice, and wheat, are pollinated by the wind, but many of our fruits and vegetables rely on insects to do the job. As the entire business became more and more industrialized and shifted to monoculture, there was a need for greater certainty when it came to pollination.

Commercial bees, thanks to the Langstroth hive, were a perfect fit. Controlled by humans and highly portable, they were able to do more pollinating in a day than most wild insects do in a week. So instead of trusting the local ecosystem to pollinate their crops, many farms came to depend on this single domesticated species of bee. As farmers grew more crops, commercial beekeepers started earning more money by renting out their bees as pollinators. But while pollination is big business in the United States, actually, the US is pretty

much the only country that does this. commercial beekeeper from North Carolina. Every year he ships 1200 hives to California to pollinate almonds. In March, they'll come back to North Carolina where I will do high-bush blueberry pollination. After that, they will go up to Maine. That's where they'll do the low-bush blueberry pollination. And some will go to Wisconsin for cranberry pollination. And others will come right back to North Carolina for a cucumber

and watermelon pollination. Today commercial beekeepers get most of their income from pollination. They're paid around $200 per hive for a few weeks of pollinating almonds. So if you do the math, $200 per hive, times say $1000, that's $200,000, which sounds like pretty good money for three weeks of work, but least says the cost for keeping bees alive has shot through the roof in the last couple years. Right now beekeepers are facing one big challenge. You might already know about it if you watch the worst movie of 2008, the happening starring Mark Wahlberg as a beleaguered science teacher. I don't know if any of you guys have heard about this article in the New York Times?

Well, apparently, honeybees are just disappearing all over the country. Tens and millions of them. All right, let's hear some theories about why this might be happening. Nobody? You know, an interesting one happened to the bees. In an interesting way, what happened to the bees? Tragically, I have seen the happening. Marky Mark is not good in this movie, but he's right. The bees are dying.

Adult bees leave the hive and never come back, leaving the babies to die. Researchers blame pesticides, disease, and parasites. Back in 2007, reports of mysterious bee plague called colony collapse disorder were making headlines all over the country, and it got people worried. There were articles warning us about the end of bees. There were studies by wreaked out scientists. Colony collapses when all the bees in a colony just disappear in the course of a few days. There's no bee corpses to do an autop on, and no obvious signs of poisoning.

Around 2007, it was happening a lot. The number of cases technically labeled as colony collapse has actually gone down since then, but Jeff Lee says it's still happening. B's disappearing are dying in huge numbers. This last year, I had the most losses I have ever had. And I'm reading the literature and I'm trying to do everything I can to keep the B's healthy. A recent survey of commercial beekeepers found the average yearly dial freight is about 40%, which is way higher than the 10 to 15% which used to be normal.

Researchers point to increase use of pesticides as one factor, and when the bees started dying, there were protests. No more poison! You're not just killing the bees, you're killing yourself! But pesticides aren't the only culprit. Another problem is an invasive parasitic mite from Asia called Varoa Destructor. Once it has penetrated the bee hive, the varoa mite multiplies in the brood cells where the queen has laid her eggs. They use their mouth parts to suck a blood-like fluid from the bee larvae and then lay their eggs in the brood cell. This is a video from 2017. It's made by Bayer, the largest producer of pesticides in the

world. And given that, of course, Bayer wants us to focus on the mites. By the time the bee hatches, it is weakened, often infected with viruses, and has a shortened lifespan. The varoamite can also be carried by the bee into other bee hives. Varoamites have wiped out tens of millions of bee hives in the United States. Since the European honeybee didn't evolve alongside the mite, the bees don't have a natural defense. And because most of the commercial beehives in the country end up in a single place in California every February, we've created the ideal scenario for vero mites to spread

from one hive to another. Which is a real threat to our food supply. Because our whole agricultural system has become dependent on this single, vulnerable species of insect. And now it's hard to imagine feeding the country without them. It's inextricable from industrial ag, which the United States excels in. Not just excels, it defines industrial ag. That's at the root of all of our ability to have monocultural orchards, you know, your pumpkins and your raspberries and blueberries and blackberries, you know, you don't get those massive tracks of production without pollination. But there are farmers today who are trying to rely less on honeybee livestock by reintroducing

wild bees and insects into the pollination landscape. According to entomologists, just a small amount of plant diversity can help boost the population of wild bees and other pollinators like butterflies and beetles. An example of this is something called a pollinator hedge row. Basically, a small strip of native weeds or flowers near the edge of a field that can provide habitat and food for wild insects and bees all year round. The history of agriculture has been a history of control, trying to bend nature to our will and make it predictable and productive.

But for the sake of the bees and maybe even for the future of our food supply, we might need an agricultural system that's just a little bit more wild. More at the bottom about how domesticated bees became a symbol of conservation. After this. So in the story you mentioned that save the bees has become a big part of the conservation movement in the last couple of years. When I was a kid, it was all wails and pandas, another charismatic megafauna. How did bees take off is both a focus of activism and as a symbol?

Well, I think it really started around 2006 with the onset of the colony collapse disorder scare. six with the onset of the colony collapse disorder scare, honey bees really became this symbol of confluence of all these environmental problems. They had the advantage of being cute and cuddly and easily identifiable creatures. Environmentalists really latched on to them, and in some cases some states actually sued to create protections for honey bees. You probably heard the protests. There was actually a really huge protest in the UK a few years back where protesters dressed up

like Winnie the Pooh were holding signs and you know singing songs and basically we are all beekeepers. Winnie the Pooh wasn't the greatest beekeeper. No way. In fact, yeah, you know, most of those hives that Winnie the Pooh was actually robbing were paper wasps, which don't actually produce honey. But so when you talk to most people about saving the bees, the image that they probably have in their head is like of an orange and black honey bee. And this is the result of all of this promotion and cartoon bees, like the honey net Cheerios B. One person I spoke with for this series, Catherine Baldock, as she's a biologist in the UK, and she says the big reason people care about bees and conservation is the honey bee. They're kind of like the panda,

aren't they, of um, in verse-brick conservation. I think it is a good thing by conserving or by trying to help bees with generally improving habitats, putting more flowers in, and that's going to benefit a whole host of other species. So yeah, I think it is a good thing. They're kind of like a bit of a symbol of conservation in a way, aren't they? The panda of bees are struggling. In fact, we're losing about 40% per year, but they aren't an extinction risk. They're managed just like cows or sheep,

so they'll probably be okay. It's really the native bees that we're worried about. And the key distinction here is that things that benefit honey bees don't always benefit native bees, especially when the two species are competing for the same resources, you know. So actually, this has kind of become a problem in recent years. Beekeepers have lobbied the federal government to be allowed to put their honeybee hives

into national parks, where the bees then can out-compete native bees for the floral resources. So that's a case where you have this managed species, a honey bee, out competing with a native species. Wow. So honey bees might not be a great symbol for conservation after all. So what species would be more accurate if you wanted to have an invertebrate mascot for environmentalists? Well, there's no shortage of candidates. That's for sure, you know, about 20,000 beast species in the world. But, you know, let's run through just a couple that's spring to the top of your mind. The black sweat bee, you know, this is kind of like the aziaz born of bees, you know, all

black, kind of looks more like a fly with these kind of purple eyes. You know, you've got ground nesting bees, like the mason bees, which are, you know, kind of resemble honey bees, a little more shaggy, a little more rough around the edges. And then the rusty patched bumblebee, which was actually recently added to the endangered species lists. It's actually quite cute and cuddly. You know, it looks like a bumblebee, except it's got these two little rust-colored orange patches on its back.

That would be a bee that could compete, you know, on cuteness alone. Other than finding the perfect fuzzy symbol for conservation when it comes to bees, if people are concerned about bees and the health of bee populations, what can they do? Well, you know, this is where there's a bit of good news because unlike other big, looming environmental issues, which can kind of be abstract or maybe difficult to wrap your head around in terms of individual action, you know, things like climate change, for instance,

with pollinators, you can actually do something that will create direct benefit for bees. This doesn't include, you know, unfortunately, buying things like a local honey from the farmer's market. And don't get me wrong, I love honey, but it doesn't actually help native bees if we're purchasing a product that's created by honey bees. The same thing goes with backyard beekeeping. It doesn't do anything to help pollinators by raising basically this agricultural livestock. So toward that, and there are things you can do, which is obviously plant more native flowers and plants in your yard.

Plants that can bloom at different times throughout the year to give those bees something to feed on. Other things, obviously, avoiding pesticides, for example, or perhaps consider letting your lawn go a bit wild, letting all those dandelions come up in the springtime. Those are things that can really help native pollinators quite a bit. I'm so excited about this because I hate taking care of the lawn and letting it go wild is exactly in keeping with both my ethic as a conservationist and as a lazy human. That seems perfect for me.

There you go. Now you've got an explanation. Because the neighbors get mad and I can just say I'm doing it for the bees. Exactly. Thank you so much. Thank you, Roman. If you'd like to hear more about the connections between honey bees and our environmental landscape, you should check out Adam's show. It's called The Business of Bees.

It's available everywhere. You get your podcasts. 99% of visible was produced this week by Adam Allington, edited by Chris Baroube, mixed in tech production by Sheref Yusif, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Trollham, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee,

Delaney Hall, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland California 99% invisible is a member of radio topia from PRX a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows and all of podcasting fun mall at radio topia.fm you can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI or on Instagram and read it too.

But you're always welcome to hang out at our hive at 999PI.org Radio Tepia from PRX.