Final Speech Jacob Ferguson - Save Da Beez Man

“Bees?”, “Why bees?”, “Who cares about bees?”, “Oh no, we’re going to lose all our honey!”  These are things you all might be, and probably are, thinking about; and not without reason: I at first was skeptical about the importance of bees and the so-called “crisis” surrounding them.  But it is real, and it is important.

Watermelon, canola, onion, cashew, melon, cucumber, squash, raspberry, almond.  These are all crops pollinated by bees.  And the list goes on: 90 different commercial crops in North America are in this category.  The significance of that is hard to understand, so I will put it in terms of money: 15 billion dollars.  Honeybees pollinate 15 billion dollars’ worth of commercial crops in the United States.  And they are in trouble.  Since 1947, the amount of honeybee hives in the US has decreased by almost 60%.  That such a massive part of our national food supply is so drastically threatened; that, I would say, constitutes a crisis.

And where did this crisis start?  Well, when settlers came to Jamestown, Virginia in the early 17^th Century, they brought the honeybee to America.  That was not the first time honeybees would be moved about, because they have spread across the country, and are still moving.  It is now a frequent practice of beekeepers to migrate their hives across the country to pollinate crops; due to the scarcity of bees, they are paid to do this by farmers.  In order to minimally disrupt the colonies, these trips are made in day-long drives, where the bees must stay in the hive.  It is normal to lose entire hives of bees in this strenuous process and it is one of many contributing factors in their decline.

Amongst these many problems beekeepers face today, the most disturbing is Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.  In CCD, entire hives of bees will disappear overnight, leaving everything except for bodies.  For such a dramatic phenomenon not much is known about it.  In a study done by the USDA no correlation was found between CCD and any common parasite, pesticide, or pathogen.  This ambiguity makes this problem even more disconcerting: if we don’t understand exactly what the problem is, it’s hard to find a solution.  A reasonable explanation for CCD and the decline of bee colonies is that it’s a combination of factors.  As Mark Winston from the New York Times says, it’s a “synergy” of problems, of parasites, pesticides, pathogens, and the entire environment we raise bees in today.  If this is true, then an end to this crisis will require a major shift in our approach to bees as a whole.

Not only is the bumblebee threatened by our agricultural system, but also all the bees native to North America.  The bumblebee was brought over because of its honey-making prowess, but bees that were already here have ample pollination ability to sustain crops.  As honeybees are on the decline, feral, or wild, bees could be picking up the slack.  But they aren’t.  Our land management practices have greatly destroyed their habitats and potential to assist farmers.  We have cleared great amounts of woodland and native groundcover to build cities and farms.  The irony is that in trying to increase productivity farmers have destroyed some of their most important assets, which has led honeybees to be stretched thin as they are hired out to work all these pollinator-deprived farms.  In a study, it was found that farmers who were willing to leave one third of their land undeveloped as a habitat for native bees made around $65,000 off of their land, compared to only $27,000 for those who cleared all their land for crops.  This kind of concrete proof should convince farmers to start replanting native shrubbery in available spaces, a somewhat simple method to help save a species and boost their business.

Despite its simplicity, that practice might take years to catch on, and our honeybees are still in dire straits.  This problem is one we have brought upon ourselves, like many other environmental problems today.  So, to really do anything about it, we must fundamentally reconsider the relationship between our society and nature: a relationship upon which hinges our very survival as a race. Thank you.

 

Bibliography

Kaplan, J. Kim. "Colony Collapse Disorder." Agricultural Research 60.6 (2012): 4-8. Business Source Premier. Web. 19 July 2014.

Levy, Sharon. “The Vanishing”. OnEarth. NRDC, Summer 2006. Web. 19 July. 2014.

"List of Crop Plants Pollinated by Bees." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Dec. 2014. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.

More Than Honey. Dir. Marcus Imhoof. Netflix. Web. 19 July. 2014.

The White House. Office of the Press Secretary. Fact Sheet: The Economic Challenge Posed by Declining Pollinator Populations. The White House. The White House, 20 June 2014. Web. 12 Dec. 2014.

Winston, Mark. “Our Bees, Ourselves”, The New York Times. New York Times, 14 July 2014. Web. 19 July. 2014.