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Bees now a species domesticated by humans

The buzz fades

Honeybee colonies are gradually failing in most temperate regions. They are widely exploited for commerce, yet under-resourced, in an overworked agricultural system.

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Honeybees, Apis mellifera, native to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, have been domesticated around the world, but since the 1980s their mortality has increased rapidly in most temperate regions (Europe, Japan, North and South America). Jean-Pierre Rogel writes, of Canada: ‘The current losses of around 25% are exceptional, and would be disastrous economically if they continued in the medium term’. Bernard Tiron, who has been keeping bees in the Valgaudemar valley in France’s Hautes-Alpes region for 35 years, says: ‘When I started out, I was losing 5% over the winter. Now it’s 30%. The way things are today, I wouldn’t go into beekeeping again. There are no more flowers in the pastures: farmers mow before the flowers bloom so they can get two hay harvests, which means more green stuff to feed their cows, and maximise their milk yield. Hedges are vanishing too.’

Tiron says there’s something wrong in the fields where the bees collect nectar: ‘The varieties of oilseed rape and sunflower they grow today give less nectar. Lavender used to flower for three to four weeks. Now it’s just one. They used to start harvesting earlier, and didn’t bring in the whole crop at once. It was cut by hand with sickles and the bees had time to collect nectar and fly on ahead of the pickers. Now they have machines that suck up the flowers, and the bees along with them.’ Something is wrong with the bees too. ‘Colonies are smaller and the queens don’t live as long. I used to have hives that produced with the same queen for three or four years in a row. Now they live two years at most.’

There are many reasons for this decline but all are related to the growing pressure put on ecosystems for commercial gain. One is the parasitic varroa mite, which has infested most colonies. It reproduces inside sealed brood cells, feeding on the haemolymph (‘blood’) of the immature bees. The mites originated in Asia and were transmitted to European honeybees when they were introduced to East (...)

Full article: 1 419 words.

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Raúl Guillén

Raul Guillen is a journalist and agricultural worker.
Translated by Charles Goulden

(1) Jean-Pierre Rogel, La Crise des abeilles: Une agriculture sous influence (The Bee Crisis), Multimondes, Montreal, 2017.

(2) Ben A Woodcock et al, ‘Impacts of neonicotinoid use on long-term population change in wild bees in England’, Nature Communications, vol 7, 16 August 2016, www.nature.com/.

(4) Karl von Frisch, Aus dem leben der Bienen, first published by Springer, Berlin, 1927.

(5) Robin FA Moritz et al, ‘The size of wild honeybee populations (Apis mellifera) and its implications for the conservation of honeybees’, Journal of Insect Conservation, vol 11, no 4, December 2007.

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