Science Vs - The Bee-pocalypse

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

What is killing the bees? And will we have enough food to eat if the bee-pocalypse becomes worse? We speak to Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology and Bumblebee ecologist at the University of Sussex, Judy Wu-Smart, Research Entomologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Steve Ellis, a beekeeper in Barrett, Minnesota. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2YEm0oc Extra reading Judy Wu-Smart’s study on how neonicotinoid pesticides affect queen beesDave Goulson’s round-up of the parasites that plague beesA comprehensive laundry list of all the factors that make the world inhospitable to bees Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the show where we pit facts against fuzzy flying things. On today's show, bees. Because from what we've been hearing, they're in an awful lot of trouble. Massive, mysterious reduction in the bee population, and it's becoming a serious concern. A mysterious disease that is killing honeybees across the country. Dead bees are washing up on a popular beach in Naples.

Bees are key to our food system. They help pollinate a bunch of things that we love to eat and drink, like blueberries and squash, tomatoes, pears, and even coffee. And all that pollination makes bees powerhouses for the economy. A report by the United Nations found that the work that bees do is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And now they seem to be in danger. Even everyone's favourite liberal is freaking out.

Future generations will judge us by how we cared for the tiniest creatures. I am not just asking you to save the bees, I am asking you to save your souls. To see just how much trouble these tiny creatures are in, we went to meet a beekeeper who's living through the bee apocalypse right now, Steve Ellis. Yes, my name is Steve. I love bees. I'm going to admit it. Our senior producer, Caitlin Sori, and reporter Shruti Ravindran first met Steve on a very cold and windy morning in Minnesota. Welcome to you both. This is our little town of Barrett. Yeah, it's lovely.

It's freezing. A little different than New York. Caitlin asked Steve about the worst case scenario, and he didn't sugarcoat it. What does a world without bees look like? Whew. A world without bees is a really scary thought. A world without bees is a world without blooming flowers and plants.

It's a bland, drab existence. We would still have food, but we'd be eating gruel. The stakes are high. The stakes are very high, yeah. It literally is like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz going from Oz to Kansas. World Without Pollinators is going from Oz to Kansas. Steve first realised that we were leaving Oz about a decade ago

when he got a phone call from one of his employees who told him that many of his bees were dead. I was personally stunned by the whole thing. 50% are gone and the others don't look all that good. What are we going to do, you know? So there's an immediate panic sets in. And what was happening to Steve's bees was happening all around America and even in parts of Europe. A survey of U.S. beekeepers at around that time found that they lost about 30% of their honeybees.

And some beekeepers reported that a mysterious and frightening thing was happening to their hives. Bees were disappearing. Scientists had little idea what was going on, but they gave it a name anyway. They called it the Bee Rapture. No, of course they didn't. They called it Colony Collapse Disorder. And since that time, Steve says that things have gotten much harder for him.

His bees are still dropping dead and getting sick. Here's Shruti. So your hives have become hospitals. It's exactly true. When Shruti got back from Minnesota, she told me about what she saw. So Steve drove us out to this cornfield. In the middle of these fields, were these small boxes which is where the hives were and they were lightly buzzing. As we approached these hives we saw that the

grass under them was kind of dark and discolored and black and crunchy and then as we got really close we realized that the thing that was black and crunchy was dead bees. Oh, this is more than it should be. I would guess about 80 dead bees, something like that. We also saw this tiny little sick bee. It was hanging onto a blade of grass and quivering. It was this tiny little fuzzy thing with a pink petal-like tongue that it was sticking out of its tiny fuzzy face. It was too weak to fly and all around it on the grass were these really sick bees that were crawling and

all in all it was a pretty grim scene. I know that this hive won't make it. It's already starting to show signs of dwindling down and it's not even winter yet. So, is this really the beginning of the end for bees? There's a lot of casualties out there. What's killing them? That's the case we're investigating on today's show, the murder of the bees. And we're looking at three possible suspects. One, pesticides.

Two, diseases. And three, industrial farming. Plus, we're also going to look at how bad this really is. Are we all going to be eating gruel in the future? When it comes to the bee-pocalypse, there's a lot of angry buzz. But then there's science. Science vs Bees is coming up just after the break. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special.

Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think?

I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here,

astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So Welcome back. On today's show, we're looking into what's killing the bees okay first bee killer suspect pesticides and there's one particular pesticide that people are really worked up about neonicotinoid pesticides are harming bee colonies more than previously thought. Nicotine-based pesticides, or neonics, they've been linked to the collapse of bee colonies. Neonicotinoids, or neonics. They're the most widely used insecticide in the world,

and they came onto the market in the 1990s. But barely a year after French farmers started using them, they noticed that their bees were dying. But many people didn't take much notice. That was until the mid-2000s, when beekeepers like Steve were seeing emptied out hives and a whole lot of dead bees. Ideas pollinated and soon neonics became bee enemy number one. Over in Europe, they're so freaked out about them that they've restricted their use. And France is moving towards an all-out ban. So, are these pesticides really to blame for the bees dying?

We asked Judy Wu-Smart, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And Judy, she loves bumblebees. She told Shruti that she has loved them since her very first experiments with them. They just made the room smell so wonderful, better than any aromatic candle. What do fragrant bumblebees smell like? Well, I really think they smell like a little piece of happiness in sunshine. They just smell great. But enough of these honeyed words.

Back to neonics. Judy says that neonics are made with a chemical that's similar to nicotine. So it's a stimulant. And when a bee takes in too much of it, it can be really bad for them. Your nerve cells would become overstimulated. So something that might happen to a bee would be trembling or shaking to the point of no longer being able to respond. And so that leads to paralysis and then death.

What Judy is describing is a bee who's exposed to a lot of neonics all at once, enough to kill them. But a review paper wrote that, quote, there is little convincing evidence, end quote, that neonics are directly killing a lot of bees. Thing is, most bees just aren't taking in enough of this stuff to kill them. What's more common is the bees might be taking in tiny amounts of neonics over time.

And Judy says that this can happen because neonics often get coated onto seeds and from there they move through the plants and up the roots into the flower. So even though farmers aren't targeting bees with neonics, bees can accidentally take them in when they pollinate the flowers. Yes, yes, yeah. So could tiny amounts of neonics over time be what's hurting the bees?

That's what Judy wanted to know. So she did this experiment in a dinky dim-lit shed. Well, I actually have a headlamp so I can see in these sheds. They are pretty dinky. They are definitely little sheds in the middle of a field. Judy puts a bunch of hives in glass boxes and then she spikes some of their food with just a little bit of neonics. And Judy's eye isn't just looking at any old bee. She's homed in on the queen.

Yes, amongst the beehive, she's watching the queen bee. I basically follow that queen. I mark where she's laid eggs. I mark when she's not moving. And I mark the path that she takes. And it's actually quite therapeutic. You go in there and you just watch these busy bees moving around. After a couple of weeks of waiting and watching, Judy started to see big differences between the queens that got the tiny dose of pesticide and the ones that didn't. The clean eaters were behaving like normal. They just move around the hive looking for open cells to lay in. A queen can

typically lay a thousand eggs a day. A thousand eggs a day. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And so she's quite busy during that time. But the queens that got the neonics? These queens were very inactive. Some of them barely moved at all. In other cases, they would wander around but not really lay eggs as if they were confused or something. And these queens laid about half as many eggs as the healthy ones. And that's bad news for the hive. No bee babies. Eventually, no beehive. And Judy says that what she found suggests that these pesticides are more dangerous than we originally thought because it's not as simple as,

does it kill a bee or does it not kill a bee? And in this case, we saw really, really strong evidence that, no, it's not killing a bee, but when it is inhibiting the queen's ability to lay eggs, that colony is pretty much unable to survive. Other studies have found that neonics at low-ish doses aren't just harming the queen, they can also hurt her workers.

While it can be hard to study bees in the field, studies in the lab suggest that these chemicals can hurt a bee's memory, disorient them, and also affect this amazing thing that bees do called the waggle dance, which is where they shake their booty in a very particular way to tell the other bees where the best flowers are at. Anyway, the pesticides can actually make the bees dance less. So, with all these studies, you might think that Judy would be blaming the neonics

for the bee-pocalypse. But do you think that, you know, these pesticides are to blame for a lot of the decline that we're seeing, maybe even all of the decline? I don't think so. I can't, I don't think that it would be right to directly blame neonicotinoids for everything. And that's because, Judy says, it's complicated.

Some studies don't even find that neonics hurt bees and work published earlier this year found that, yes, while some bee colonies shrank after being exposed to neonics, a few colonies actually grew. Plus, there are other chemicals to consider here. It's not just neonics on a farm. Neonicotinoids is just one class of insecticide that the bees are facing. But, you know, some studies have showed

that they are exposed to over 100 different compounds. Researchers are now concerned that fungicides or other pesticides that farmers use might be working together with neonics to form a toxic brew. But Judy says there's just a lot we still don't know. Conclusion. Neonics can kill bees if they get exposed to enough of them at once. But for the most part, that's not happening. New evidence suggests that tiny doses of pesticides over time can hurt bees.

But even then, these chemicals probably aren't entirely responsible for the bee-pocalypse. So, what else is there? Well, bee diseases. Dave Goulson studies them. He's a bee researcher at the University of Sussex in the UK. And Dave's been trying to save the bees since he was a kid. I remember when I was about six or seven, I found some bedraggled kind of wet bumblebees on some flowers that got caught

out in the rain and brought them in and tried to dry them out by putting them on the hot plate of the electric cooker. Wait, why did you put them on the hot plate? To dry them out because they were all soggy. They'd got wet and I figured I even made them little blankets of tissue paper and put them over the top. Next thing I knew, the poor things were in flames. Decades later, Dave became a scientist so he could actually save the bees. I still don't think the rest of my career has been trying to make up for my early bee incineration incident. And Dave walked us through bee killer suspect number two. It's one that Professor Frink from The Simpsons knows all about.

Thundering thorax! It's just exactly what I feared. This bee has been felled by bee measles, or as I call it, beesles. Animals can get sick? Yes, they can. Just like humans, bees can get infected with bacteria, fungi and even parasites. And these parasites can spread tiny viruses. And there is one particular beetle that has many scientists worried. It's called the Varroa destructomite.

No, that's seriously what it's called. So, say you're a honeybee and you're buzzing about in a big field and then you land on a flower and a parasite latches onto you. That's the Varroa destructor. It's annoying and it makes you weak, but it probably won't kill you. What it will do is suck your bee blood. And when it does that, it can infect you with viruses. Looking around, many of your friends are also infected. So, is this what's killing your bee kind? Dave told us that one of the most common viruses that bees can catch from

that big fat parasite is called the deformed wing virus. Oh my gosh, so what does she look like? She looks like a perfectly normal bee apart from the fact that her wings are all crumpled up and completely useless, so she can only ever walk. If lots of the bees are infected that way, then the hives had it. And another nasty thing that can make bees sick is a teeny creature that lives inside the gut of bumblebees. This beasel can make it harder for the bees to collect food and once infected, they can die younger. It's just a really crap disease to get.

Literally. Can cause them to have bee diarrhea, for want of a better term. I never thought of bees pooing, I've got to be honest with you. To be fair, it's normally pretty liquid anyway. It's not like human poo. And then so what does bee diarrhea look like? Well, so it's much the same as bee poo normally, except it's full of parasites,

which then can contaminate the nest or flowers or whatever. So these diseases are bad. But where did they come from? Bee colonizers. Well, kind of. We transport bees from around the world to help pollinate crops in different countries. So Asian honeybees are put to work in the US and European bumblebees are shipped to South America. And here's the thing. These bees bring foreign diseases with them, which the locals might not have immunity to.

That parasite, the Varroa destructor, came to the US from Asian bees several decades ago. And now it's the number one bee problem that beekeepers in the US had this year. That's according to a report from the USDA. And when these foreign diseases first hit a vulnerable population, that's when we can really see a devastating impact. Dave reckons we're seeing a dramatic case of this

unfolding in South America right now. The world's biggest bumblebee, called Bombus dalbomii, which lives in the Andes in Argentina and Chile. A beautiful, big, bright orange bumblebee. People say it looks like a flying mouse. That flying mouse is in trouble because imported bees are squeezing it out and spreading a very nasty disease. And now this beautiful giant bumblebee seems to be vanishing. So there's a high risk that the world's biggest bumblebee may actually go extinct in the next couple of years. Conclusion. Diseases are a big player in the bee-pocalypse. For decades, local bees have

been getting sicker and sicker in part because bees are being transported around the world and spreading diseases to new populations. But in the case of the murder of the bees, there's one more suspect that we want to tell you about. Well, they're more like an accessory to murder. And that's the modern world and how we grow our food. Well, you see, bees get their food from the nectar and pollen in lots of different kinds of flowers, and so for many bees, their happy place is a wild meadow. But in many places around the world,

wild meadows with all sorts of flowers have been replaced by farms, large expanses of the same crop. And there's not as many different kinds of flowers for them to forage. Here's Dave. Most people who live in a city think that wildlife lives in the countryside. But actually, the sad truth is now, if you go on a journey across Britain on a train or on a motorway and look out the window, the countryside is green, but it's a sterile green desert, if you like, from a bee's perspective. As agriculture has become more intense in parts of the world, it's also demolished spots where bees might like to nest. A review paper from several years back found that, quote,

habitat loss is generally thought to be the most important factor driving bee declines, end quote. Conclusion. Our giant farms filled with crops and just a few flowers can be a pretty hostile place for bees. But even that can't explain why all of a sudden our beekeeper Steve's bees started dying. After the break, we finally crack the case of the dead bees wide open.

Where the honeybees at? Where my bees at? Welcome back. So we've told you that industrial agriculture, diseases and neonics, a particular kind of pesticide, can all hurt the bees. But the best science tells us that none of those are solely responsible for the bee-pocalypse. So, what is killing them? Remember what happened to the bees 10 years ago, so-called colony collapse disorder, where bees were disappearing around Europe and across America? That was when Steve was in a panic because his bees were all of a sudden dead.

50% are gone and the others don't look all that good. What are we going to do, you know? Well, scientists searched and searched for an answer as to what might be killing the bees. Was it the pesticides, the parasitic mites, other diseases, industrial farming, flowerless fields? And then they realized, wait a second, it's probably everything. That is, there's no one killer responsible for colony collapse disorder. That's according to several papers published recently analysing the evidence. They now reckon there's probably a bit of blood on everyone's hands here. All of those suspects seem to be interacting

to make the bees weaker and then sicker and then deader. Dave, our UK bee expert, says you can think about it like this. Imagine you've got a guy who's obese. He doesn't do any exercise. He smokes like a chimney and he drinks like a fish. And then he dies of a heart attack. It's a bit daft to then have a long debate about whether it was the smoking or the drinking or the overweightness or the lack of exercise that killed him. It could have been any of them,

but actually the reality is it was all of them. They all contributed. And it's the same with the bees. It's probably pointless to argue endlessly about which of these factors is killing the bees. It's all of them. So we've created a world where some of our bees have become fat, smoking alcoholics. But how bad is this really? So despite the horror stories about the bee-pocalypse, the situation is actually much more complicated than you might have heard.

So if you look at honeybee numbers around the world, they're actually not going down. On a global scale, actually the total number of honeybees has gone up. Yeah, they've gone up. So with all those bee killers out there, how is that possible? Well, because honeybees are basically livestock.

You can farm them. That's what Steve does in Minnesota. And around the world, there are more beekeepers farming bees, particularly in places like China, Turkey and Argentina, than there used to be. It's not that the conditions for honeybees have suddenly become wonderful. It's just that there are more people keeping honeybees. But the buzz about the bee-pocalypse hasn't been totally oversold. Despite the fact that you can farm honeybees,

their numbers in the US and parts of Europe have been dropping dramatically. And that's been happening for several decades. And there's another thing. We don't treat all bees like livestock. Globally, there are 20,000 species of bees, and currently beekeepers breed less than 20 of them. And wild bees help pollinate crops that honeybees aren't so good at, like pumpkins and cherries and blueberries and cranberries.

Dave says that rough figures from the UK estimate that wild bees actually pollinate more crops than farmed bees. Wild bees have no one to look after them, no one to breed up their numbers if they start to fall. And we know that wild bees are declining. He's honeycombed through the numbers and says that wherever scientists look, they see wild bees disappearing. Now, we don't have a lot of data from everywhere, and I don't mean to drone on about this, but as you can imagine, it's tricky to go counting bees in the meadows.

Still, one study found that half the wild bees that scientists looked at in Illinois have been in decline since the 1940s. And outside the US, in pockets of Europe and the UK, certain species of wild bees are vanishing altogether. Dave told us about one that he's particularly worried about. So there's a lovely little bee called the shrill carder bumblebee. Card bee! No, no, not cardy bee.

It's the shrill carder bee. Because it has an unusually high-pitched buzz. What does it sound like? Oh, no. Well, any impression would be absolutely pathetic. But if a normal bumblebee is more of a sort of zzzz, then the shrill carderbee is just a little bit zzzz. I'm exaggerating the difference slightly, but that's roughly it.

The point is, it's in serious trouble. It used to be very common in the south of England. Now it's down to six known populations and most of those are pretty tiny. And sadly, there are other bees that have gone the same way and not just in Britain, this is a global thing. Conclusion. We can farm some bees, like honeybees,

and so for now their numbers globally are going up. But a big problem is that wild bees are in trouble and we use them to pollinate a whole lot of our food. So here's a thought experiment. What happens if we do lose all the bees? Like, will we go hungry? Well, a review paper found that while a lot of crops use bees for pollination, very few rely on them entirely.

Most crops can sneak by using wind and other insects to help with pollination. But with a growing population and a hungry world, sneaking by is going to get harder and harder to do. Without the bees, we'll grow less food. Exactly how much less food? That is really tricky to answer. One paper estimated that without bees, global food production could drop by up to 8%,

which might sound small, but again, there's going to be more hungry mouths to feed, so this could become a big problem. So when it comes to the bee-pocalypse, does it stack up? Well, bees are dying in many parts of the world, and what's killing them? Is it the pesticides, the beazles or intensive farming? The answer is, it's all of them. That's what the hive mind of scientists now think is happening.

If we lost them all, we wouldn't be eating gruel, but it would become harder to grow many crops. And we don't want to wax lyrical here about the bees. I mean, not to bee labour the point. But they are in a sticky situation. The thing is, for decades now, we've wanted to use bees exactly how we've wanted to use them. We farm them to make sure they pollinate our food and make our honey. But at the same time, we've created this incredibly hostile world for them. And fixing it isn't as easy as just switching up our pesticides or farming more bees.

Plus, climate change is probably going to make things worse for the bees. So, you want to know what's killing the bees? It's us. Sorry to be such a buzzkill. Excellent speech, just excellent. That's science versus the bee-pocalypse. And if you want to get more information about this episode, you should subscribe to our newsletter.

We've got the transcript in there for each episode, including all of our footnotes, and there's a lot of fun stuff that we looked at during the week. To sign up, head to gimletmedia.com slash newsletter. This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, me, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, Heather Rogers and Rose Rimlow. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, fact-checking by Michelle Harris.

Sound design by Martin Peralta and Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord. An extra thanks to Lynn Levy, Ian Chilag, Professor Sydney Cameron, Dr Leland Salter, Dr Lena Bayer-Wilford, Professor Simon Potts, Dr Lynn Dix and Dr Michael Rowe. Plus Tim May, Jim Doan, Tom Theobald, Chris Hyatt, Alan Garr and Joshua O'Rear and Professor Robin Thorpe.

Thank you. Next week, it's science versus balding. Can anything help you grow your hair back? Yeah, I was terrified. I remember, like, taking these pills and just being, like, constantly worried what is going to happen to my penis. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time.