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Keeping The Bees: Why All Bees Are At Risk And What We Can Do To PDF

210 Pages·2010·1.65 MB·English
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KEEPING the BEES WHY ALL BEES ARE AT RISK AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO SAVE THEM LAURENCE PACKER Dedication This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to my parents, Denis and Lilian, who in different ways encouraged my interest in insects. CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication 1 BUZZ FREE: A WORLD WITHOUT BEES Stuck Under a Truck in the Atacama Desert, Chile 2 THE FUTURE OF OUR FOOD Serenading the Bees on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia 3 HONEY, QUEENS, HARD-WORKING WORKERS AND STINGS: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BEES Stung by Bee Killers on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom 4 A BEE OR NOT A BEE? A DIFFICULT QUESTION TO ANSWER Insulting the Experts in Portal, Arizona 5 TWO BEES OR NOT TWO BEES? AN EVEN MORE DIFFICULT QUESTION TO ANSWER Uncovering Irregularities at the National History Museum, London 6 IT’S A BEE’S LIFE Up Before Dawn in the Australian Outback 7 THE SOCIABLE BEE Digging Nests After Dark in Calgary, Alberta 8 SEX AND DEATH IN BEES Choosing a Mate in Subtropical Florida 9 WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE HUNT I Painful Bee Sampling in the Tehuacan Desert, Mexico 10 ANTI-BEES Sexually Transmitted Child-Eating Female Impersonators on a California Sand Dune 11 WHAT ARE WE DOING TO THE BEES? Bee-Free Day in Germany 12 THE PROVERBIAL CANARIES IN THE COAL MINE Upsetting Ornithologists in Rome 13 HELP THE BEES Dodging Hippos at the African Pollinator Summit EPILOGUE Bee Worship on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Bee Families Appendix 2: Bee Names Sources Index About the Author Praise Copyright About the Publisher 1 Buzz Free: A World Without Bees STUCK UNDER A TRUCK IN THE ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE I t was three in the afternoon and over 30˚C, yet despite the heat there was not a drop of sweat on my body. The air was so dry that any perspiration was sucked from my pores before I even felt it. I could see for miles in all directions, but there was no sign of human habitation. I hadn’t seen a soul for hours. The entire vista was in two colours—the ground was beige and the sky blue—and even the Andes Mountains, faintly visible on the horizon, looked blue from this distance. I had been stuck here in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile for three hours, trying to dig the back wheels of a half-ton truck out of the sand. The day had begun well. I had found a tiny trickle of water emerging from an embankment at the side of a dirt road; there was some vegetation growing around the moisture, and some bees were visiting the flowers. I collected a few of them and then drove off towards my next sample site. Two hours of driving and three hours of digging later, and I had not seen a single living thing—no other drivers, not an insect, not a plant. The Atacama Desert is both the driest and the oldest desert in the world. People claim that there are parts of this desert where rain has never fallen, although geologists have told me that it must have rained at least once in the past hundred years over most of this enormous stretch of barren land. There are indications of past precipitation on the surfaces of the mine tailings, extrusions from the nitrate mines that dotted the landscape with human activity a century ago. This is an eerie place to travel, as in some areas the only signs of past human habitation are the graveyards that house the dead. The mausoleums shelter the desiccated remains of the mine managers and their families (the miners themselves were given less prestigious burials). Apart from some vandalism, the coffins and their contents are exactly as they were in the early years of the twentieth century. Where it (almost) never rains, the dead become mummified. Imagine living in a place where it rains perhaps once every hundred years. Not surprisingly, detailed weather data are not available for most of this large, sparsely populated area, but there are meteorological records that extend back for long periods for several places. The northernmost city in Chile is Arica; the average rainfall there between 1987 and 2002 was three millimetres per year. But that average is misleading because over one-third of the total rainfall in that sixteen-year period fell on a single day. It rained on a total of just fourteen days in those sixteen years, and in an earlier period, not a single drop of rain was recorded for fourteen years in a row. It seemed that the place where I was now stuck was drier than Arica, and I had only my broken-down truck to keep me company as the hours passed by. This was not the first time I had got into a bit of a pickle while doing fieldwork. For my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto I had studied geographic variation in bee social behaviour, obtaining samples all the way from cold temperate Ontario to the subtropical climes of the Florida Keys. At one point I drove my car into the Okefenokee Swamp at dawn trying to get to the next sampling site in time. Since then I have authored or co-authored over one hundred research articles on bees, most of them since becoming a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Over the past thirty-five years I have travelled to all continents except Antarctica (where there are no bees) because of my fascination with these essential and beautiful little insects. Arid lands are my preferred destinations for the simple reason that bee diversity is higher in semi-deserts than in any other type of habitat. The normally dry and sunny weather is appealing to bees, which don’t like to fly when it is raining or cloudy. Although my earliest research was mostly on bee behaviour, I have become increasingly aware of the need to promote the conservation of bees. Research performed in my laboratory demonstrates that bees are at a much higher risk of extinction than most other organisms. And that’s a concern because the world as we know it would not exist without the pollination activities of bees: not only would there be few wildflowers, but our food supply would be substantially reduced. Some almost essential items—such as coffee—would be at risk (though many would consider coffee absolutely essential). So it is extremely important to increase our understanding of bees and to spread the word about these valuable creatures as widely as possible. Consequently, I now put considerable effort into increasing general awareness of the significance of bees. I have, for example, written a pamphlet on the bees of Toronto; taught bee-identification courses in Ontario, Arizona and Kenya; written identification guides to the bees of Canada and adapted previously published ones for the needs of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the published ones for the needs of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It is because of my interest in the conservation of bees that I was in the middle of the Atacama Desert with no shade but that underneath the truck, where I had spent quite some time. Fortunately, I had a large drum of water—essential for anyone travelling in this part of the world—and a drum of gasoline. I knew of other entomologists who had run out of gas and been stranded in this region for days before anyone else passed by. Without water and gas, you would not last long. I imagined the headline: “Mummified Bee Biologist Found in Desert.” Large amounts of water and gas are two things everyone needs in this beautiful wilderness. But few take a drum of liquid nitrogen with them as well. Why would I take liquid nitrogen into the desert? At -196˚C, it was certainly not for cooling beer. The liquid nitrogen was for storing bees in a way that prevented their proteins from breaking down. Why was I interested in the proteins of desert bees? Why was I risking life and limb studying the proteins of insects so inconspicuous that even if you had thousands of them nesting in your lawn you would probably not know it? The answers to these questions form part of an extended narrative that eventually led me to conclude that bees may be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of the globe’s terrestrial habitats. Not only do I believe that bees can tell us much about the state of the natural world, but I also believe they are particularly good at indicating the state of the environment in areas that have been considerably influenced by human activity. But in case you think bees are unimportant, or even perhaps mostly a nuisance (after all, some of them sting), let’s imagine what the world would be like without them. Let’s start with the obvious: there would be far fewer flowers. Plants have sex through the transfer of pollen from the male part of one to the female part of another. Pollen may be transported on the feathers of a hummingbird, the hairs on a fly or the tongue of a bat, and lots of it is transported by the wind (you may have an allergic response when plants are having sex using aerial currents as their intermediary). But the pollen of most flowering plant species is transported on the hairs on the body of a bee. In the absence of bees, most flowering plants would not persist for very long. Yes, there would be some flowers left. The elongate red ones that are pollinated by hummingbirds; the large saguaro cactus flowers that are pollinated by bats; the white, moth-pollinated orchids that show up so well in the moonlight; and the dull flowers that give off a scent like rotting meat to attract pollinating flies —all of these flowering plant species could survive without bees. But the world would certainly be a less joyful place for us if the only flowers were on cactuses or smelled unpleasantly stinky. In the complexity that is the web of life, we rarely understand the extent to which the continued existence of one species is dependent upon the presence of another. When it was a mere seedling, did that bat-pollinated cactus require the shade provided by a bee-pollinated flowering plant to avoid shrivelling up in the dry desert heat? If so, even the cactus might disappear from the face of the planet if bees were no longer around. We simply do not know enough about ecological interdependencies to understand what proportion of the organisms on the planet rely, directly or indirectly, upon the pollination activities of bees. Certainly the loss of all bees would result in catastrophic cascades through the terrestrial ecosystems of the world. If many of the flowering plants were to disappear, the other species that rely upon those plants would also be in trouble. How many squirrels would there be without the nuts that result from pollination by bees? How many songbirds would there be without the berries that result from pollination by bees? No squirrels and no songbirds means no predators that eat the squirrels and songbirds. So the impact of bees extends throughout the food web—even to us. We are part of the food chain (usually the end link, because comparatively few people get eaten). We are also a very large part of the global food web, appropriating perhaps one-quarter of the entire ecological productivity of the planet. Not all our use of the world’s ecological productivity is through food. We cut down rainforests and drain peatlands to feed our insatiable demand for biofuels. We grow cotton for clothing, harvest wood for construction, and produce coffee to help us get going in the morning and sedatives to help us get to sleep at night. All these commodities rely to some extent upon the pollinating activities of bees. “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left.” That quotation has been attributed to Einstein, although scholars can find no evidence that the unkempt sage said anything of the sort. I think some, perhaps most, of us would survive for longer than four years without bees, but there’s no question that the food supply would be substantially reduced. Why? What exactly is the impact of bees upon our food supply? Consider breakfast. Eggs, maybe a slice of watermelon, toast with butter and jam, and a cup of coffee with a dash of milk—all are common components of a North American breakfast. The only item in the list that bees do not play a direct role in producing is your toast, since wheat is pollinated by wind. Eggs come from chickens, and chickens eat seeds, among other things. Many of the seeds in the diet of a chicken would not be produced in the absence of

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A world without bees would be much less colourful, with fewer plants and flowers. But that's not all -- food would be in much shorter supply, and available in much less variety. While the media focuses on colony-collapse disorder and the threats to honey bees specifically, the real danger is much gr
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