Help Protect Honey Bees from a Toxic Pesticide

Hey all!

Sorry I've been a little lax in blogging. I've been teaching more than full-time, and working to finish my novel. Anyway, here's a great opportunity to help save the bees. One of the more nefarious pesticides for honey bees is one called imidacloprid (IMD), a toxin created by Bayer Corp. What IMD reportedly does is make the bees drunk, essentially, and inhibit their navigational systems so they can't find their way home.

This letter encourages the EPA to reexamine the research on IMD, and make sure to ban its use when it has proven harmful to honey bees. Please click here and send a letter to the Office of Pesticides Programs at the EPA and spread the word!

Thanks! Here's the link.

My Vision

Back in March or April, I received an email stating that I'd won a scholarship to travel to New York and attend a leadership conference. I'd been chosen out of 3200 applicants along with 80 other amazing female participants. The White House Project and O Magazine, the two main sponsors, had asked us what we wanted to do to help make the world a better place. And my answer was: Save the Bees.

At the time, I'd created a plan to teach beekeeping to women in Africa and then write a book about it. While I still love this idea, what came up for me during the conference was that I wasn't as excited about the women in Africa (sorry, African women) as I was about saving the bees in general. So, I decided that what I really want is to raise money for bee research to figure out what's going on with the bee decline and get as many people beekeeping as possible.

Well--now that I've clarified my vision, I'm working on a website to do just that. I don't want to say too much about it just yet, but my goal is to get as many people beekeeping out there as possible: men, women, kids, people in cities, suburbia, and the countryside. I think that the more bees we have (as well the more bee gardens we have), the better chance we have of saving our bees.

My hope is that I'll soon have a website that can direct you to exactly what you're looking for in the bee department: You need bee equipment? Check. You need to get connected to your local beekeeping community? Check. You want the latest info on bee research and CCD? Check. Tips on beekeeping? Check. Wonder why the heck people are so wacky for bees? Check, check.

So...send me an email if you have an idea, or you want to tell me what would help you become a beekeeper or how you'd like to help in general. I'm hoping to have a one stop shop soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Yupbees: Young, Urban, Beekeeping Professionals

Maybe I'll be the first to coin it, because I'm all about this new movement. That's right: Yupbees. (The fact that this isn't coming up as a misspelled word in my spell check only confirms that this word will join the many greats in our lexicon.)

So, there's a great article about urban beekeeping in Germany. The country, like many others, is experiencing a severe loss in its bee population. While most people typically associate bees with beautiful hillsides of lavender and apple trees, bees need to be a part of every landscape, including our urban jungles.

What's interesting is that older beekeepers are trying to make beekeeping exciting and accessible to young beekeepers in the cities. They're offering classes and mentorships to help raise awareness and interest for young beekeepers, from school children to working professionals.

Currently, hundreds of thousands of bees are flying through the neighborhoods of Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich. Apparently, the densely populated Ruhr region now houses more bees than the surrounding countryside.

A lot of people ask if they can keep bees in the city. I have a friend who actually gets better honey yields when he keeps his bees in urban bee yards. People in the city tend to grow plants and water them year-round (or at least during the growing season), which provides more bee nectar and pollen than a field of wild flowers that might die mid-summer without water. The cities are also warmer than the countryside and bees can stay active and gather food longer than they might in a rural environment.

People are keeping bees on their balconies, rooftops, and even hotel roofs. They're also in London and even Manhattan, and now--thanks to a new Denver law--they're in Denver too.

And if you're wondering about honey, here's what one beekeeper had to say about the urban gold: "City honey has an outstanding aroma," said Benedikt Polaczek, a bee researcher at the Free University of Berlin. "And besides, it's very clean, because they don't spray pesticides as much in the city." In Manhattan, "Sheriff Beekeeper" David Graves sells his Rooftop Magic Honey at a premium price.

Join the Yupbee revolution. I'm a Yupbee and proud.

More love for Haagen Dazs

Let's give it up a bit more for Haagen Dazs. They have this kickin' cool website where you can make your own bee that looks like you. (Yes, that's what I look like. Seriously.)

Anyway, you can email a bee image to a friend and then it takes you to their website where you can get education on the bee decline and the role bees play in our ecosystem. It's fun. It's free. It's educational.

Now go eat some ice-cream.

Haagen Daaz: Saving the Bees One Flower at a Time

Haagen Dazs rocks. Not only do they have this crazy cute website (complete with chirping birds and flying bees!) designed to help educate about bee decline and fund raise for bee research, they also have just announced a $125,000 donation to the University of Davis' department of Entomology to launch a nation-wide contest to design a half-acre bee garden for our beloved pollinators.

I'm not sure how to express how excited I am about this without a bevy of exclamation points. But, since I can't contain myself, here I go: WOOHOO!! GO HAAGEN DAZS and UC DAVIS!!!!!!!!

Phew. I feel so much better now that I got that out. I'm kind of against the use of frequent exclamation points, but sometimes it must be done.

(Haagen Dazs, by the way, also proves that you can become an extremely popular business with a name that no one knows how to spell or pronounce. In fact, I had to check the spelling on this company about five times while writing this post. Nice work, Haagan Dazs.)

Anyway, this genius idea will encourage landscape designers everywhere to submit a plan for a half-acre bee garden at UC Davis, to provide a haven for the honeybees used for research there. In case you didn't know, UC Davis is one of the bee research hot spots in the U.S. The garden will provide a seasonal variety of plants and flowers so the plants will have nectar and pollen year-round. The garden will also educate visitors on how they can make bee gardens of their own. The garden is expected to be the first of many pollinator gardens at UC Davis.

I can't help it--I must say it again: GO UC DAVIS!!!

As Eric Mussen, a Cooperative Extension apiculturist in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, said: "The garden will be extremely helpful in demonstrating that bees are not a nuisance in the backyard, but instead are obtaining food and water essential for their survival,"

That's right--bees are not a nuisance. They are responsible for about 1/3 of the food on your plate. In a time where there are a million different environmental causes that are--in many ways--so intangible, here's a cause that you can do something about directly, and it benefits the food on your plate. And...honey is yummy. Let's face it.

To see the original article with info about designing a bee garden, click here.
Or, to check out the Haagen Dazs website, go here: www.helpthehoneybees.com

Last, but not least, I left out a few of these: !!!!!!!!!!! It might be the caffeine I just drank (chai green tea with honey). God knows caffeine in my sensitive body is a bit like crack. But I think I'm just darn excited.

The Simpsons do Bees!

It's official. Bees are now part of pop culture. Even Lisa Simpson has her eye on the disappearing bee population. The episode is wittily titled: "The Burns and the Bees," and--though I won't vouch for the bee science in the show--it's nice to see the bee awareness spreading into pop media. The plot? Basically, Mr. Burns decides to build a sports complex in the one place where the declining bee population is thriving, and ends up getting stung financially as a result. It's cute--not The Simpsons that I knew and loved years ago, but still worth seeing. I'm glad a more mainstream audience will be exposed--even if only in a small way--to this very important issue.

You can watch the full episode of The Simpsons here. As a vegetarian (though not so strict anymore) and a frequent advocate of the environment and the oppressed (I say this a bit tongue in cheek) I have often resonated with the bleeding heart, slightly naive, Lisa Simpson. Now I do even more! If I could only get a chunky pearl necklace and that cool hairdo...

Smokers of the World, Unite!

No--I'm not talking about cigarette smokers; I'm talking about bee smokers. You can see me with a smoker in my profile picture--it looks like a tea kettle with a mini-accordion on the back, and is used to blow smoke into the bee hive to calm bees.

But what I really wanted to talk about is a protest in Britain a few weeks ago. Apparently 300 beekeepers joined together with their smokers in full effect, dressed in their Sunday best (starch-white bee suits) to protest the dramatic loss of bee hives in the U.K. We're talking 2 million bees in ONE year. Wow.

The beekeepers are angry that the government hasn't put enough money towards bee research. It's understandable why they haven't: Beekeepers don't have the same kind of sway that energy and science lobbyists do, for example...we face the same problem here in the U.S. In the U.K., about 2.4 million is being spent on bee research and to conduct hive checks, but the beekeepers would like to up that amount to 12.6 million.

Why the urgency? Check this out. According to an article about the event in UPI.com: "The beekeeper group said if the current state of deterioration continues across Britain, English honey supplies could be gone before the end of the year."

And when honey supplies are gone, we're talking about a bee decline that's so dramatic that it'll trickle down (and already has!) to farmers everywhere.

Check out the article where I found the picture, and see some other great pics here and here.

Keeping it Light

I love this comic by Lela Dowling about CCD that I found on The Daily Green's bee blog. It's wonderful! Click on this link here to see it in all its glory.

Jumping the Gun on CCD

I just emailed Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine and a wonderful blog on beekeeping in The Daily Green. I asked him about a book that came out this spring about Colony Collapse Disorder, titled A Spring Without Bees, by Michael Schacker. I found this book quite illuminating, especially because it pointed to a specific cause of CCD: An insecticide called Imadacloprid (IMD) produced by Bayer Industries. In the book, Schacker makes the argument that IMD is responsible for CCD, and argues that we need to remove the pesticide from our agricultural production.

Now, I'm an organic fan all the way, but I also wondered how Schacker was able to be so confident about his conclusion when I hadn't really come across anyone else as confident in my research. So, this led to my email to the esteemed Mr. Flottum, and he had an interesting comment to make. He said that he felt Schacker jumped the gun, essentially, about IMD as the cause of CCD (could I get anymore acronyms here?). He felt that there was a lot of evidence supporting CCD being caused by a pathogen, not a chemical.

However, Mr. Flottum went on to say that he did feel that those pesticides and chemicals were contributing to the worst of the honey bee issues they were facing, and that some recent research has pointed to IMD as one of the major honeybee threats as well.

Well, I have to say that I was a little bummed to hear him downplay a definitive answer, but I think his hesitation is important. I really and truly believe that we have to change our agricultural system all together, that it's unsustainable, and that it should begin with pesticides. However, I also think it's important to fully investigate the situation before making hasty conclusions. To me, that is bad science and bad environmental management. But--more than anything, I think it just represents the fear we have that this is a huge dilemma and that we have to do something to act quickly, before we suffer a loss that might be too crippling for the honeybee industry to bear.

(P.S. You can see me jump the gun in an earlier blog here. Feeling sheepish. :)

How is aspirin related to honeybee decline?

There's a lot of speculation out there about what's causing the bee decline, specifically CCD. Until there's a definite answer, unfortunately, it's especially difficult to rally a movement to stop CCD as well. What do we do? People ask. Buy organic? Support local beekeepers? Keep bees in our yards? How can we help?

To answer the above: yes, yes, and yes. But...that's still not enough, as the bees being affected by CCD the most are typically commercially raised bees. So--something has to be wrong with the agricultural ecology that supports the bees. And once you bring large scale farming industries into play (commercial beekeepers typically partner with large commercial farming industries like almonds to get paid for pollination services), things get a whole lot more tricky.

If you are seriously interested in CCD and bee decline, you must check out Michael Schacker's A Spring Without Bees. He discusses CCD causes in length, largely by looking at research done in France on the use of a pesticide called Imidacloprid, trade name Gaucho. Imidacloprid (IMD), a neonicotinoid, is an insecticide manufactured by Bayer Cropscience. (Yeah, the same Bayer that makes Bayer aspirin.) Sunflower seeds, for example, are coated in this insecticide, and it remains in low levels in the flower when it finally blooms. Bees then consume the insecticide in micro-amounts through the nectar.

Research conducted in France showed that IMD caused "deranged" behavior in bees--specifically that bees become "intoxicated" and were unable to navigate their way back to the hive. Germany has banned the use of IMD, and France has had an ongoing battle between Bayer and their beekeepers. In the meantime, hives numbers have dropped tremendously, from 1.45 million in 1996, to one million in 2003.

Here's an excerpt from the Sun Journal (read their full article here) about some research done in France:

In 2003, a French television documentary team filmed honeybee activity after exposure to imidacloprid. Clumsy and uncoordinated, their legs trembling, the bees looked like drunks unable to find the key to the front door of their hive. Others had trouble leaving the hive, seemed disoriented, and when they were eventually able to make their way out, soon disappeared, never to return.

This is important, as the main symptom of CCD is that the bees completely leave the hive, deserting their honey, the queen, and their larvae, all of which they are highly programmed to protect.

There's too much to say for this short blog, but in short, there is increasing evidence that it isn't cell phones causing CCD, it isn't mites, and it isn't some kind of weird virus. I think it's pesticides. Now we just have to wait for the definitive research to prove it.