Category: Pollinators

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Buzz on GM crops and bees

We’ve written a bit here about pollinator problems. The looming shortage of bees in the US, and in Spain. We pointed to a piece that said maybe the problems in the US weren’t any worse than they had been, just better reported. Maybe the problem is monoculture? Throughout the recent buzz of hive-related news, though, we’ve ignored a few items that laid the blame on GMO crops. Why? Because they seemed a bit shrill, maybe even a tad one-sided. But a long and apparently comprehensive piece in the German news magazine Der Spiegel is neither shrill nor one-sided. And it seems to adduce good evidence that bees who are suffering a parasite infestation are abnormally susceptible to pollen from maize engineered to express the Bt bacterial toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis.

The work Der Spiegel reports is a long way from conclusive. But it does give pause for thought, and it is causing huge excitement among opponents of GM in all its forms. At the very least, it deserves a closer look. But wouldn’t it be weird if it proved true? And how would industrial agriculture respond?

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The rich tapestry of life

I hope I can finish posting this before the battery runs out on my laptop. It’s been one long power cut after another for the past couple of days and the one we’re experiencing at the moment started more than three hours back. Anyway, I thought this piece in EurekAlert really interesting and I couldn’t wait to blog about it. There’s this rare endemic plant on Mauritius called Trochetia blackburniana, you see, and it happens to be pollinated by the equally endemic gecko Phelsuma cepediana. But this is a day gecko, which means that to avoid predators they have to spend a lot of time hiding, and their favourite place for doing that is among the spiky leaves of Pandanus shrubs. Now, I’m not sure about Mauritius, but in lots of other places around the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Pandanus is a really useful plant: the fruits are eaten, the leaves woven into mats, people recognize and maintain dozens of varieties etc etc. So here’s something else that Pandanus is important for: protecting the pollinators of a rare Mauritian endemic.

P.S. Incidentally, Trochetia blackburniana, which is in the Malvaceae, seems to be one of the very few species of plants with coloured nectar.

Correction: Trochetia is actually in the Sterculiaceae. Apologies. Please read the comments for more interesting stuff on this genus.

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Is this good news for bees?

“I’m not convinced that it’s so much worse than what we saw in 2004 and 2005,” said Eric Mussen, a bee specialist with the University of California, Davis.

While bees are undoubtedly in trouble this year, Mussen said, there’s little evidence so far that it’s anything other than the continuation of their long struggle with disease, environmental stress and the hardship of being hauled cross-country in midwinter to pollinate crops in California.

“This time the media just became much more involved in it,” he said.

That’s from an article by Jim Downing in the Sacramento Bee. (I kid you not; it is actually a very good paper, although you may need to register and log in to see the full story, which is why I am quoting from it at some length.) Mussen is just one of the experts who says that the fuss this year about vanishing bees reflects more media interest rather than fewer bees.

“About all we’ve got is anecdotes,” said, Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation.

There is, in fact, no central agency responsible for monitoring the status of honeybees in the US. News comes by word of mouth, and while some beekeepers are playing down the crisis, hoping that farmers don’t question the pollinating ability of the hives they’ve rented, others are blowing up the problem in a bid for government support.

Years ago, Mussen said, many Central Valley counties employed a bee inspector to check the health of rented hives. That person helped resolve disputes between beekeepers and farmers and served as an informal census-taker.

Today, those inspectors are scarce. One of the few remaining is Clifton Piper, who has checked hives for the Merced County Department of Agriculture since 1973. He isn’t sure about the big picture, either.

“It’s difficult to see just how short the shortage is,” he said. Beekeepers often bolster weak hives with imported packages of bees from Australia, he said. And in cold and rainy weather, it’s hard to tell whether sluggish bees in a hive are sick or simply chilly.

I suppose time, and the price of almonds, will tell.

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Putting a forest together again

How would you rebuild a forest? There’s an enormous effort underway to do just that for the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, now down to only 7% of its original extent. This really short but intriguing SciDevNet piece led me to a fascinating Science article here. About 15,000 trees of 800 different species have been identified as mother trees, “the starting stock for the forest’s regeneration.” There’s a big awareness campaign aimed at local farmers explaining the long-term benefits of devoting some of their land to forest. And lots of different approaches to the actual reforestation are being tried. Sounds like this project is going to be a testing ground and model for years to come. How is it that there’s been so little news about it? Or do I just move in the wrong circles? Perhaps I just subscribe to the wrong RSS feeds.