No bees, no butter chicken?!🙀
Bees run the world but their future is in danger
Folks!
Brace yourselves to make Anticlimatic your new Sunday binge.
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Dropping the first Sunday binge in 3,2,1….
Explain like I’m a memer
Let’s talk about bees today. Wait, but why?
Bees are at the foundation of our food system. While they suck on flowers for nectar and collect pollen for their dietary needs1, they, unintentionally, also provide Pollen-transfer-as-a-Service (PtaaS) among different flowers or from one part of the flower to the other. With PtaaS, they facilitate flower reproduction which eventually results in production of nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables for human and animal consumption.
Given bees’ invaluable service, the apiary business (beekeeping) - which brings you honey, beeswax, propolis and royal jelly - has evolved as a livelihood for many across the world.
Trivia:
There exist more than 20,000 species of bees which provide PtaaS but a dated LA Times article indicates that it’s probably 2% of them who do 80% of the job worldwide. Pareto principle may really be the universal truth then 🤔
The most widely domesticated pollinator is the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) and globally, ~81 million beehives produce ~1.6 million tonnes of honey annually2.
While bees are not the only pollinators, they constitute a significant proportion of insect pollinators, working their magic on 75% of food crops and ~90% of wild flowering plants globally3. The Indian laburnum, a tree native to India, which welcomes spring drenching cities yellow, is pollinated by carpenter bees. In that sense, bees are equally essential for maintaining the richness of our biodiversity.
However, their population is on a decline. A notable decline.
While data, at this point in time, seems insufficient to establish a global number, regional and national assessments of insect pollinators indicate high levels of threat (often >40% of species threatened), particularly for bees and butterflies4.
This decline translates into a direct blow on the production of some of our everyday pleasures - coffee, chocolate (cocoa), berries, fruit juices, cheese, almonds, bananas, honey, tomatoes (backbone of butter chicken!)…the list is long. When production of commodities comes at stake, it ALWAYS puts innumerable livelihoods at risk. Butterfly effect.
Trivia: Since 2018, May 20 of each year is observed as World Bee Day to raise awareness about the importance of bees and pollinators for world’s food security and nutrition.
What’s killing the bees?
The usual suspects.
Climate change
The erraticness in temperatures and rainfall caused by climate change is wreaking havoc on the lifecycle of bees.
Honeybees are highly sensitive to temperature. Too hot - they die; too cold - they die. Further, heat waves, droughts, floods and off-season rainfall not only affect flowering cycles of plants, they also destroy blossoms which put foraging bees into jeopardy. Beekeepers in Nepal have been bearing the brunt of fluctuating extreme weather with a 50% reduction in their honey production5.
Just like for humans, environmental stresses make bees susceptible to disease and infection, taking their overall fitness down6.
Urbanization
With increasing urbanization across the world, the abundance of flowering plants and trees has massively declined putting an immediate negative pressure on bees’ habitat. Pollution (of air, sound and light) is a freebie that comes with traditional urban areas which further puts pressure on bees’ existence. Air pollution, for example, interferes with bees’ GPS tracking for food. Plants emit scents which bees follow, however, air pollution breaks these signals, throwing bees off-track and leaving them hungry7.
After all of this, the bees that are left in the cities - rock bees (most common in Indian cities) - nest in buildings, often in conflict with humans. With the threat of being bitten by bees, beehive ‘removals’ happen by either spraying pesticides or burning the hives8 - thousands of bees wiped out one hive at a time!
Trivia: A typical beehive can house 20,000 to 80,000 bees but each hive has only 1 queen bee whose sole purpose in life is to mate and lay eggs (2000 per day)9.
Pesticides
Modern agricultural practices rely heavily on pesticides to protect crops from pests and thereby, ensure high yield. However, these chemicals have been proven to be lethal for bees, often causing neurotoxicity which poorly affects their navigation, identification of their hive and learning & feeding behaviour10.
Anything happening to set things right?
Bee Basket, a Pune (India) based organization, extricates beehives from neighborhoods that don’t like them and relocates them to wooded areas or farmlands bordering the city or sends them to beekeepers11. Their focus is on harvesting bee products without harming or killing them. They have also helped households in kick starting their beekeeping journey right from their balconies and backyards.
While certain pesticide bans came in effect to preserve the pollinator populations in the past, some got rolled back and the on ground enforcement of others is questionable. A 2021 investigation revealed that the EU and UK were exporting certain banned insecticides to developing nations.
What can you easily do?
To help make tiny bees’ lives less tumultuous, plant native flowering species in open spaces around you - balconies, backyards, window sills and community spaces. And everytime, a swarm of bees choose to make your house their home, give coexistence a shot, since bees are generally harmless unless provoked. However, if that spooks you at first, contact a local beekeeper (should not be difficult to find) who could help relocate the hive instead of destroying it.
It’s hard to believe but these little creatures rock our world!
PS: Additional read on how decline in pollinators may be linked to premature human deaths every year
I am amazed as well rejoiced to read what I heard as a child in 70s is proving to be true. My father, a bee-keeper then, in a small village of Himachal, almost 50 years ago, used to tell me how our lives are indebted to those bees he used to harvest and save through migration. I never understood then for obvious reasons, but see I understand and correlate better now when my child explained. Truly said, it takes generations to realize😊
Very interesting post, will take care of this. Yes we all have a garden, can nurture this tiny creature.