Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder and the Decline of Pollinators

Buried amidst all of the scare stories this week about cell phones causing Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees is a more important point: populations of pollinators have been in decline for years. The importance of pollinators to humans should be obvious. If it isn’t, let me restate the pull quote from the recent National Academy of Sciences report:

About three-quarters of the world’s flowering plant species rely on pollinators—insects, birds, bats, and other animals—to carry pollen from the male to the female parts of flowers for reproduction. There is direct evidence for decline of some pollinator species in North America. For many species, there has not been enough monitoring over time to determine whether or not there has been a population decline.

Honeybees are essential in the production of numerous food crops, especially the more nutritious fruits and vegetables, they’ve been slowly disappearing for years, and we have not been investing enough resources to better understand their biology. This is a collection of facts that doesn’t speak highly to our intelligence as a species. Dr. May Berenbaum of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of the authors of the NAS report, and also gave testimony to Congress last month on CCD. Dr. Berenbaum’s testimony frames the issue nicely:

Honey bees are in effect six-legged livestock that both manufacture agricultural commodities – honey and wax – and, more importantly, contribute agricultural services – pollination. Close to 100 crop species in the U.S. rely to some degree on pollination services provided by this one species – collectively, these crops make up approximately 1/3 of the U.S. diet, including the majority of high-value crops that contribute to healthy diets. Although economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honey bee pollination to American agriculture, virtually all estimates are in the range of billions of dollars. It is difficult in fact to think of any other multi-billion-dollar agricultural enterprise that is so casually monitored.

Dr. Berenbaum points out that grain crops, the primary supply of dietary energy, do not rely on pollinators. So, at least we’re not going to go hungry in terms of calories. However, declines in pollinators will affect the availability of fruits, nuts and vegetables which provide the bulk of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. This is the environmental health angle to CCD.

Just weeks before Dr. Berenbaum’s testimony, the Centers for Disease Control published a survey of fruit and vegetable consumption among adults, conducted as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). A diet high in fruits and vegetables is associated with decreased risk for chronic diseases. In addition, lots of fruits and vegetables in the diet are important for maintaining a healthy weight, because the have low energy density (i.e., few calories relative to volume). In simple terms, the survey concluded that Americans do not eat enough fruits and vegetables, a fact that perversely does not come to the surface in all of the hand-wringing about health insurance. With this in mind, we don’t really need another excuse such as higher prices to avoid eating more fruits and vegetables.

The discussions of pollinators and CCD come at a time when the Farm Bill is up for renewal in Congress. Dr. Berenbaum chronicled the dismal state of agricultural research: where the National Research Initiative, the USDA’s tool for basic biological research, is funded for a paltry $180 million, for all grants; where there is no ongoing systematic surveillance program to monitor pollinator health, an astonishing state of affairs given their importance to agriculture; where members of the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group have been donating time and resources to study this increasingly urgent problem – the season in which crops need to be pollinated is fast approaching, and there still aren’t any good answers yet about causes or prevention of CCD.

It’s hard to know if, with the din of other matters both important and trivial, this is going to receive the attention it deserves. It’s too early to tell, but we should watch the news of CCD closely because it might provide an example of just what an ecological disaster looks like.