Discussion: the truth about our disappearing bees?

So, for quite a while now we've been hearing about bees, and the way they're mysteriously dying off. There was even an extremely dismal film made about it acouple of years ago. Fan as I am of 'the other side of the story' I was extremely interested to find this article through the Guardian website today.

There has been a trend of dying hives and worked bees abandoning their hives and queens. It's been used to warn us of the impacts we're having on the climate system, a secondary factor - something we're doing affecting bees which will impact on our crops and harvests and ecosystem in a multitude of ways. As we always need it to be brought home on a level which affects us directly for it to matter.

But it surprises me that this, according to the Guardian, has never really been investigated as a global trend. They're article, ofcourse, presents the findings of a man who did just that, an Argentine scientist called Marcelo Aizen. In order to track the global demise of the bee population, which is ofcourse very difficult to keep an eye on, he tracked a proxy - the harvest trend of crops which depend solely on pollinators like bees.

So if the theory were correct - that bees are globally diminishing - the yields of pollinator-dependant crops should be levelling out or decreasing in the last 50 years, but his findings showed they were growing. Infact they were growing at the same rate as yields from crops dependant on wind-pollination. Aizen also looked at honeybees, and found that the global population managed honeybee hives had increased by 45% in the last 50 years, with honey production itself increasing by over 100%. Comercial honeybee populations are especially increasing in places like China, Argentina and Turkey, and flooding the market with cheap honey.

So, if we look on a very small scale bees are diminishing it bits of America, say, but on a global scale we're ok. Similar to the practise of looking a a hot summer and deciding we're all going to die from global warming. But that's a rant I'll save for later... This problem of perspective was noted by Jaboury Ghazoul, who was apparently 'troubled' that scientists were taking these spot check readings of bee populations and using them to extrapolate a bigger picture. He wrote an opinions piece in the journal 'Trends in Ecology and Evolution' in 2005, which pointed out that 'whilst some pollinators had diminished, others had increased to fill the gap'. So, from a purely human-orientated standpoint, the pollinator-dependant crops were going to be ok. He also pointed out that many of our staple crops, such as rice, potaotes and wheat, don't depend on pollinators, so there's no real looming food crisis, just a possible loss of diversity even if the worst were to occur. He got shot down, essentially as his views weren't particularly popular. But that was before Aizens work, which showed that global yields were infact fine anyway.

Aizen's analysis did take a strong look at the underlying issues though. The proportion of crops which don't require pollinators to reproduce have been increasing dramatically, infact have doubled inline with Earth's population. Production of pollinator-dependant crops, which tend to be luxuries like cashews and cantaloups, has quadrupled - but with only a 45% in crease in honeybees. This implies that the increases in pollinator-dependant crops are being supported mainly by wild bees - not those being cultivated. So with the dramatic increases in those non-pollinator-dependant species the wild bees are having less to live on - so if they were to go it's likely production would dramatically drop. This is coupled with an apparent tendancy in say, Africa, to import honeybees from America to help with their crop production. This in turn diminishes the local bee population, and the newcomer bees are much less efficient at pollinating local plants - so this could also lead to a loss of production. They conclude that there is an impending crisis, just not the one we thought there'd be...