Buzz Interrupted

By JOSIE GLAUSIUSZ

Fruitless Fall
By Rowan Jacobsen
(Bloomsbury, 277 pages, $25)

Every food on Rowan Jacobsen's breakfast table is there thanks to a bee. Honey Nut O's, almond granola, blueberries and cherries, apple cider and coffee: All are derived from plants pollinated by honeybees or are doused with the honey they produce. Even the milk that soaks his cereal comes from a Vermont cow that grazed on clover and alfalfa, two bee- pollinated crops. If honeybees and their wild relatives vanish, we could lose some of our most luscious fruits and vegetables -- up to 100 crops, from apples to zucchini. In "Fruitless Fall," Mr. Jacobsen warns that we may be on the brink of just such a disaster.

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Since the fall of 2006, it is true, honeybees in the U.S. and elsewhere have been suffering from a mysterious new malady called "colony collapse disorder," or CCD (in France they call it "mad bee disease"). When the syndrome strikes, honeybees do not merely sicken and die; they disappear. Beekeepers across the country report finding their hives empty of all but a queen and a few juveniles.

No one knows where the bees have gone. No one knows the cause, either, though theories abound, ranging from the absurd (cellphones, the hole in the ozone layer) to the alarming (rampant pesticide use, widespread loss of habitat). After extensive interviews with beekeepers and bee biologists, Mr. Jacobsen concludes that a "rogue's gallery" of stresses may have driven honeybees to the edge: parasitic mites and beetle beehive-invaders, and a slew of bacterial, fungal and viral diseases, not to mention "pesticides, antibiotics, malnutrition, urbanization, globalization and global warming." Florida's state apiarist, Jerry Hayes, tells the author: "I'm surprised honeybees are alive at all."

As Mr. Jacobsen explains in a detailed history of honeybee biology, these industrious insects did not evolve for the grueling industrial role they fill today. Originating in Africa and introduced into this country by 17th-century European colonists, the honeybee, or Apis mellifera, "is designed to lead a life of slow, controlled progression from brood to house bee to forager." Female worker bees visit a wide variety of flowers to gather pollen for bee larvae and to collect nectar that they turn into honey to feed the colony and help it survive the cold winter.

“Hackenberg yanked the covers off several more hives. No worker bees. Just a handful of young nurse bees clustered around the queen. A knot began to form in his stomach.” Read an excerpt from "Fruitless Fall"

Alas, that bucolic life is denied the modern honeybee. The insects are migrant workers, trucked across the U.S., particularly in winter, when 1.5 million hives of honeybees are shipped to California's expansive almond orchards, turning them into "a half-million-acre orgy of buzzing tree sex." The state grows 82% of the world's almonds and in 2007 produced a bumper crop of more than a billion pounds of nuts.

To keep up the pace of pollination and to combat pathogens and pests, owners feed the bees with high-fructose corn syrup and dose them with antibiotics and miticides. These combined stresses, Mr. Jacobsen concludes, suppress their immune systems and make them vulnerable to disease.

Mr. Jacobsen considers, and dismisses, some commonly cited culprits for CCD: the insecticide Imidacloprid (France banned it in 1999, but honeybee populations there continued to decline); and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (scientists detected it -- among other pathogens -- in 25 out of 30 CCD-affected U.S. colonies, but it produces symptoms, such as shivering wings and paralysis, that are not typical of CCD). He also ponders possible solutions to honeybee declines, such as breeding resilient bees or promoting small-scale farms and wilderness where native bees can flourish.

All of this analysis is helpful and instructive, but Mr. Jacobsen never produces solid data to justify the direness of his book's subtitle: "The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis." In fact, no independent, nationwide surveys of U.S. honeybee populations have been published in a peer- reviewed science journal since CCD first caught the public eye last year, nor has much money been available to study its scope.

The most recent assessment of honeybee status -- an informal phone survey of beekeepers in 23 states conducted by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Apiary Inspectors of America -- reported in May that beekeepers had lost 36% of their colonies between September 2007 and March 2008. But at least 71% of these colony deaths "can be attributed to non-CCD causes," such as parasitic varroa mites, according to the report's authors. An article on the ARS Web site titled "A Complex Buzz" reports that "while CCD is truly a serious problem, agricultural pollination is not in crisis at this time. There were enough honey bees to provide all the pollination needed in 2007."

The ARS statement does not guarantee that there will be enough bees in two years or a decade from now. Given the uncertainty, though, it seems close to hyperbole for Mr. Jacobsen to predict a "silent catastrophe" and a "fruitless fall" (a variation on Rachel Carson's antipesticide polemic of 1962, "Silent Spring") or to describe CCD as a "plague."

Mr. Jacobsen does not help his cause when he often fails to cite primary sources. He reports, for instance, that in Europe the situation has been "dire," that countries including France, Spain, Poland and Russia lost as much as 40% of their bees over the winter of 2007, and that "South America was devastated." But he does not supply any references for these numbers beyond newspaper and other media reports. Clearly, bees and some beekeepers are suffering. But journalists have an obligation to comb the data for irrefutable evidence before they prophesy imminent doom.

Ms. Glausiusz is the author of "Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects" (Chronicle, 2004).