As mystery plague threatens to wipe out bees, scientist reveal

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The mountains of southern Sichuan in China are covered in peartrees.

Every April, they are home to a strange sight: thousands of peopleholding bamboo sticks with chicken feathers attached to the end,clambering among the blossom-laden branches.

Closer inspection reveals that children, parents and evengrandparents are pollinating the trees by hand.
Key to life: Bees pollinate our crops and without them we'd haveseriously limited food supplies
It is a ritual they have been following for more than 20 years,ever since pesticides killed their honey bees.
It’s a tough job. The farmers must first collect pollen fromthe blossoms by scrubbing it off the anthers (the male part of theflowers) into a bowl.

They let it dry for two days, then the whole family come out withtheir homemade feather dusters, which are dipped in the pollen andapplied to the flowers’ stigmas (the female parts).
It is a slow, laborious process and much less efficient than acolony of honeybees, which could visit three million flowers in aday.
But the hand pollination seems to work. In August, the trees areheavy with fruit and each family harvests around 11,000lb of pears.
Impossible to imagine such scenes in Britain, isn’t it? Well,don’t be so sure.

Some experts fear this extraordinary ritual may have to be repeatedacross the world — because the honeybee population isdeclining at a truly alarming rate.

So far, a third of all honeybees in America have died and thehoneybee population in Europe has been devastated.
Sixty years ago, in England and Wales, there were more than 360,000hives; now there are just 270,000 across the whole of Britain.
But most perplexing of all is that no one knows why this ishappening — and what to do about it. Adult bees have beenleaving their hives and not returning, leaving their queen, eggsand larvae to starve to death.
This phenomenon has a suitably modern name — Colony CollapseDisorder (CCD) — and theories as to what causes it range frommobile phones interfering with the bees’ navigation systemsto pesticide poisoning and exposure to GM crops.
More than a year after scientists began investigating, they arestill only following vague leads.

In Britain, the Government denies that CCD has reached our shoresand, instead, attributes the heavy loses to varroa mites —the deadly parasites that have been massacring Europe’s beessince 1992.
Like something out of a horror movie, these blood- sucking miteshitch a ride into hives on the backs of unsuspecting bees.

Once inside, the female mites bury themselves at the bottom of thebrood cells, feed on the larvae and lay their eggs. These hatch andmate and continue the cycle.
Hive: In the UK alone the honeybee population has fallen from360,000 to 270,000 in 60 years. Other parts of the world are farworse hit
But the bees that grow from larvae and are attacked by mites have ashorter lifespan, as well as shrunken and deformed wings, and areless resistant to infection. Eventually, the population is wipedout.
But there are other factors at play, too. Changes in agriculturalpractices mean huge areas of land have been planted with a singlecrop, and the removal of hedgerows and field margins has robbedwild honeybees of places to nest.
Meanwhile, the abandonment of crop rotation in favour offertilisers, and the elimination of weeds in these huge fields andpastures, have contributed to a dearth of food for them.

Excessive mowing of embankments, roadsides and public areas alsoleads to loss of flowers and nesting sites.
So could buzzing on a summer’s day really become a distantmemory? Some experts fear the honeybee could be extinct in fewerthan 30 years — with catastrophic results.
It is hard to grasp the full horror that would ensue if honeybeesdid vanish. Most people’s initial response to the idea of aworld without bees is ‘That’s a shame —I’ll have no honey to spread on my toast’ or:‘Good — one bug fewer that can sting me.’
Yet without the insect that pollinates many of the plants we relyon for food, beekeepers warn of an economic and ecologicaldisaster.
Einstein is reputed to have said: ‘If the bee disappeared offthe surface of the globe, then man would only have four years oflife left. No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, nomore man.’
That may seem a rather apocalyptic view, but consider this: some 12per cent of the earth’s land mass is cultivated for thegrowing of crops.

Add grazing land, and more than a third of terra firma is dedicatedto human food production. How much of that would stay intact if thebees disappeared?
Not the yellow fields of sunflowers or rapeseed stretching to thehorizon, nor the fruit-filled orchards whose offerings fill thebowls on our kitchen tables, or the clover-rich pastures and thedairy herds that graze upon them.
Research in America estimates the annual value of the 11 crops mostdependent on honeybee pollination at £6billion.

Alfalfa, which is turned into cattle feed, tops the list followedby apples, almonds, cotton, citrus, soya beans, onions, broccoli,carrots, sunflowers, cherries and melons.
How long before these crops shrivel and the landscape turns fromfruitful fields to barren wasteland?
Wheat-washed plains, corn-covered prairies and flooded paddy fieldswould still create a patchwork of agriculture across the surface ofthe globe, sustained by wind pollination.

But the world would lose its cotton plantations, vegetable beds andorchards.

How would our weekly food shop change? With bees responsible for somuch of what we eat, the shopping list would get shorter and becomeless palatable.

Off would come the honey, followed by fruit, save for bananas(which don’t need pollination) and pineapples (which mostlyuse hummingbirds), and most vegetables, along with protein-richbeans.
Meat would disappear, too, because bees are needed to pollinatecrops grown for cattle and pig feed. And it won’t just besausages and joints of beef that go: cheese, milk, ice cream andother dairy products could disappear, or become prohibitivelyexpensive.
Bees dramatically increase yields of coffee, so without themsupplies would be severely reduced. And where dozens of types ofcooking oil used to stand on supermarket shelves, only a couple— walnut and olive — would remain. The fish countermight be stocked — but with fewer sources of proteinavailable, the seas would probably be plundered to the point ofexhaustion.
That leaves bread (because plants such as wheat and oats have noneed of the mediation of bees for pollination). But what would youspread on it? Rice and pasta would be plentiful, but where would bethe ingredients to make a tasty sauce? And let’s hope youcould get used to pizza with no cheese topping.
Breakfast would consist of a dry piece of toast, a bowl of porridgemade with water, and an egg. No fruit juice to wash it down. Youcouldn’t even substitute soya milk for cows’ milk, asthe soya bean relies on bee pollination.
But it’s not just our diets that would change beyond allrecognition if bees were to vanish. We would also have to give upclothes — from T-shirts and jeans to chinos and denim skirts.The cotton plant has far higher yields when pollinated by bees.
Medicines also rely on flowering plants pollinated by bees.Digitalin, a drug that treats irregularities in heart rhythm, comesdirectly from foxglove flowers; the decongestant ephedrine is fromthe shrub ephedra; and reserpine, which lowers blood pressure, ismade from serpent root.
Chemicals are also extracted from plants and used as buildingblocksto create new compounds. Etoposide and teniposide, which treat skincancers and warts, for example, are manufactured fromepipodophyllotoxin, a chemical found in the mayapple plant.
And don’t forget beeswax — produced by young bees andused to build the honeycomb cells in the hives.
Beeswax has more than 120 industrial uses in drugs, polishes,lubricants and skincare products, where it acts as an emollient,emulsifier and stiffening agent for oils and fats. Some of its moreobscure uses include coating the strings on archery bows andwaterproofing whips.
Yet if bees vanished tomorrow and with them their wax andbee-dependent plants, wouldn’t we just find alternative waysto feed, clothe and cure ourselves? Paraffin has already supersededbeeswax in most applications because it is cheaper and easier toproduce, while nylon, rayon and polyester are among the syntheticfibres we could wear.
But imagining that science will somehow come to our rescue shows aspectacular failure to comprehend the scale of the crisis we couldface if nature’s master pollinator spiralled into extinction,from the unravelling of the world economy to the collapse of theterrestrial environment.
If bees vanished off the face of the earth, no country would beable to solve food shortages by importing more fruits, vegetablesor cattle feed.
An economic meltdown would ensue: food price inflation fuellinginterest rate rises and the whole global credit economy, which isalready in a parlous state, would suffer a further blow.
Just a basic understanding of food chains explains why the loss ofbees would break a natural bond that begins with flowering plants.Without the flowers being pollinated, there would be far fewerseeds, roots, leaves, flowers or fruits for birds and small mammalsto eat and they would die. As a result, their predators — theomnivores or carnivores that continue the chain — wouldstarve.
It is a haunting thought, but it is not unknown for civilisationsto die of starvation. The downfall of South America’s ancientMayan culture has been attributed to its inability to grow enoughfood crops because of environmental damage and population growth.
Deforestation, hillside erosion and the depletion of soil nutrientsfrom overfarming led to a reduction in the amount of usable arableland at a time of a population explosion. Food shortages led to waras Mayans fought each other for diminishing resources.
Is this what the honeybees are telling us? That our industrialisedfarming with its monocultures, pesticides and increasinglyunreasonable demands on the bees themselves is not sustainable?
With their limited resistance to poisons and pollutants, are theythe canary in the coalmine warning us that if our lifestyles arekilling them, we are not far behind? ¦
Adapted from A World Without Bees by Alison Benjamin and BrianMcCallum, published by guardianbooks at £9.99. © 2008Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum. To order a copy (p&p free)call 0845 606 4206.