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Going to Bat for Bees

Eileen Ecklund

It’s a warm, sunny day in April, and the California lilac (Ceanothus) bush in my San Francisco backyard is humming. Hordes of fat, fuzzy bumblebees swarm its blue blossoms, collecting a good dusting of pollen to share as they bumble from flower to flower. If I rouse myself to look around a bit, I might find a tiny solitary bee or two curled up in a checkerbloom flower, lounging after a good meal, or some leaf-cutter bees carefully excising Clarkia leaves to use as nesting material. A bright orange California poppy flower might sport an equally brilliant green sweat bee. All this bee bliss going on under my nose is a lovely harbinger of spring, but it has been carefully orchestrated: my husband, a conservation biologist and bee booster, has chosen plants specifically to attract bees to our little backyard ecosystem.

The larger world has not been so kind to bees in recent years. Last October, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), in its report “Status of Pollinators in North America,” warned that populations of bees and other pollinators, including butterflies, bats, and hummingbirds, are declining. Honeybees have suffered periodic mass die-offs from diseases and parasites, and most recently have been abandoning hives for reasons that are not understood. This phenomenon, now known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has afflicted about a fourth of all bee colonies across the country, Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation, estimated in late April. “A lot of beekeepers have lost 40 to 50 percent of their hives,” he said, and some have reported losing 80 to 90 percent.

Between 1947 and 2005, the number of honey-producing commercial honeybee colonies (a colony is the population of a hive) in the United States dropped by more than 40 percent, from 5.9 million to 2.4 million, according to the NAS report. Other pollinator losses are largely undocumented, but nevertheless were reported as “demonstrably downward” for some species. The decline has been recognized since at least 1996, the year Stephen Buchmann and Gary Nabhan’s book The Forgotten Pollinators was published. The authors stated that “a pollination crisis has now become obvious in rural as well as urban settings not only in North America but on other continents as well.”

Buchmann and Nabhan also pointed out that pollination is “a process that not only keeps us fed and clothed but feeds our domesticated animals and their wild cousins as well.” Honeybees and other pollinators are essential to about three-fourths of the flowering plants in the world, some 250,000 species, including many of the fruits and vegetables that are most important to us.

But as more agricultural and wild lands disappear under pavement, less and less habitat remains for bees to forage and nest in, and what is left is often fragmented, so that it’s difficult for bees to move among habitats as different plants come into bloom. Modern agricultural practices such as monocropping--growing just one crop from fencerow to fencerow--and intensive chemical use have made large swaths of the remaining green space hostile territory for the tiny pollinators.

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