I’m a lucky guy. Part of my job involves getting out and about and talking to a huge range of interesting people who are more often than not doing interesting things. But few of those experiences have left a stronger mark on me than an afternoon I spent recently while I was working on a story about young farmers Joel and Jen Comer.
Joel was kind enough to take time out to drive me out to a couple of Lister sites where some of their hives (which they own in partnership with his parents) are situated. Wanting to get some good photos, I pushed my queasiness as far down as I could, donned a white jumpsuit with attached screen mask, jammed my bare hands deep into my pockets and accompanied Joel as he approached a group of wood boxes, each of which is home to tens of thousands of bees.
Now, it’s hardly a secret that bees are fascinating creatures. And it didn’t surprise me at all when, a week earlier, Jen told me that she and her husband had “fallen in love” with them. I’ve known Lew Truscott, who has spent more than half of his long life raising bees and reaping honey, for a long time and his enthusiasm is contagious.
Over the years I’ve come to admire farmers for the multitude of skills they need to survive. Now, I am coming to understand that beekeeping is a specialty of an entirely different magnitude, and it’s hard to overestimate their importance to our planet.
Since my photo session with Joel I’ve read a couple of books on the subject, watched a documentary film and even re-watched Ulee’s Gold, a wonderful movie starring Peter Fonda that was made 15 years ago, earning him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. I’ve been thinking and even dreaming about bees.
In the documentary I watched, one of the beekeepers interviewed described honeybees as modern day canaries in coalmines. Canaries were once kept in coalmines because they would stop singing when the air in mineshafts became impure. It was a sign for miners to get out while they still could. Bee health, the keeper argued, is a similar harbinger. When colonies began to mysteriously disappear, or “collapse”, about a decade ago many took it as a dire sign of what was happening in our environment.
While the collapse hasn’t turned out to be the worldwide catastrophe some predicted, it has helped focus attention on some of the dumber things we do as a species. The American obsession with mono-crops might be the single best illustration. For many years a highly subsidized agriculture industry has been encouraged to produce corn and soy, high protein crops that have the added “advantage” of helping to supplement fossil fuels. Crops are no longer rotated, the land has little opportunity to rest and rejuvenate and innovations like genetic modifications have resulted in vast tracts of land being treated more like laboratories than farms. These parcels end up being liabilities, not assets, to the environment.
In California, which has long been treated as a giant, albeit artificial, oasis instead of the desert it really is, an enormous move has been made to produce almonds. Hundreds of square miles of trees, and only trees, have been planted, so many that more than half of the entire country’s bee population is required to pollinate the flowers in a three-week growing period. Beekeepers are paid to haul their hives from as far away as Florida on flatbed trailers, place them in the orchards, then remove them when the flowering is over. The bees can’t be kept there any longer — there are no other food sources for them in the almond orchards.
I don’t think you have to be a pot-smoking, burnout leftie to conclude that this practice can’t be healthy in any way except the production of a valuable nut. It’s yet another mono-crop that reduces the planet’s biodiversity and pushes bees into the industrial stratosphere, where they become vulnerable to all sorts of dangers.
When colony collapse threw its first scare into beekeepers, farmers and scientists alike, an observation by Albert Einstein was commonly cited. Without bees, Einstein had predicted, humankind could die out in four years.
Whether or not he was right, the prospect that one of Earth’s most important — and fascinating — species is at risk is as depressing as it is frightening.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.