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Keeping the Bees: Sustainable Pollinators for Sustainable Food

Tricia Edgar | Friday 23rd October 2009

When I ask the children who visit our nature center what bees do, they generally reply in chorus, "They make honey!" While some bees make honey, all bees are a critical part of our sustainable global food supply: they are a key pollinator species. As they move from flower to flower sipping nectar, they pick up pollen and fertilize plants, enabling crops to create fruit and seeds. In this way, bees are of foundational importance to the sustainability of our food crops. Unfortunately, their numbers are dropping. For years our food crops have relied on the free services of nature's pollinators. Now, as we face the decline of our pollinators, we're asking what's gone wrong.

Humans have created a world that is distinctly unfriendly to bees. Large agricultural systems are often monocultures. This means that a single crop is grown in one vast area, an area especially vast if you're a bee. The crop all blooms at approximately the same time and then the nectar is gone: feast or famine for the bees. Aerial applications of insecticides or the spraying of pesticides when crops are blooming also make life harder for these pollinators. To accommodate, farmers have come to rely on honeybees for crop pollination, and beekeepers often move the hives to areas that require intensive pollination. Ironically, this essential bee species is rather new to both Europe and North America. It migrated into Europe centuries ago and was introduced to North America in the 1600s. Today, honeybee colonies are collapsing as worker bees disappear from the colonies, leading to their collapse.

Native bees may fill in the pollination gap, yet these bees are also in distress. There are over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they are becoming extinct before they can even be counted. Parasites, disease and invasive insect species are impacting the populations of both honeybees and native bees alike. Bees are also losing habitat. Messy spaces at the edges of forests and fields are removed and made into neat, planted areas. Our less than sustainable tendency to pave urban areas also means that bees have fewer food sources. Over the last 70 years Britain has lost all but two percent of its wildflower meadows. These are tough times for bees.

Of course, bees are only one way that plants are pollinated. Some plants self-pollinate. Others move their pollen via wind and water. Still others rely on animals like birds, bats, beetles, and butterflies to help them reproduce. Yet bees are of great importance in many ecosystems, and they're of great importance to farmers, too. Worldwide, the value of the service that these pollinators provide is in the trillions. These small insects are the buzzing heartbeat of our sustainable global food system. To restore them, we have to reconsider our use of pesticides, the paving of our wild spaces, and the construction of agricultural monocultures. Bees are such small creatures, but they give us fine food for thought as we ponder the sustainability of our agricultural systems.

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