Category: Threats

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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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An appreciation of the importance of crop diversity

There’s an important post entitled Vegetables of Mass Destruction over at The Daily Kos, a blog. Important not so much for the content, most of which is familiar, well-meaning and just a tad parochial, but for the location. The Daily Kos is one of the most popular sites in the blogosphere, averaging around half a million visits a day. If just some of those readers go away with a slightly better appreciation of the value of agricultural biodiversity, that will be A Good Thing. So thanks to cookiebear and The Daily Kos for their support.

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How to halt desertification

IRD in France has released the results of a long study of the Jeffara region of Tunisia, which has been very prone to desertification. The study pinpoints the role of agriculture and the use of natural resources as key factors in the spread of deserts, but acknowledges the very complex interactions at work. The press release concludes:

“[D]egradation can be checked by prohibiting the development of endangered natural environments for cultivation. However, real practical alternatives must in that case be proposed to farmers, in the agriculture sector, through maintenance of a certain diversified production in their holdings and enhancing commercial value of high-quality local or regional produce, but also by means of diversification of activities and of sources of revenue other than farming. This diversification would offer people improved flexibility to face up to climatic and economic hazards and enable them to manage better their families’ financial resources. In addition, the effort government has made in water management, through the CES, could be enhanced by schemes for desalinating brackish water and recycling waste water.”

But can they find a way to diversify and add value before the farmlands, soils and water have vanished completely?

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Very diverse barley discovered … and already under threat?

SciDev.net reports on a paper in Theoretical and Applied Genetics that identifies the world’s most genetically diverse barley varieties. SciDev.net and other press reports focus on the high diversity of the barleys, found growing in farmers’ fields around the captial city of Asmara in Eritrea, as a source of potentially valuable material for improving tropical varieties worldwide. They point out, too, that the populations are threatened by urban development and that Eritrea has no genebank in which to protect them. But does Eritrea really need its own genebank, or have they more pressing priorities? A researcher from ICARDA, which has a perfectly serviceable genebank, was on the team. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture guarantees free access to the material if stored there. Eritrea was one of the first signatories of the Treaty. What’s the problem?

More interesting, perhaps, is a part of the paper that the reports I read neglected to mention. The molecular analysis indicates that the Horn of Africa may be where barley was first domesticated. That honour usually goes to the Fertile Crescent, with the Horn a “secondary centre of diversity”. But Eritrean and Ethiopian barley may actually have been domesticated independently.