5. Bee alive or dead

The bees have been dying.  Apart from varroa and the many other things that bother bees, in the last few years they have been catching a sort of flu all over the world.  No-one really knows what is causing it because no single cause is common to all the 'deadouts' - dead bee colonies.  This mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder isn't brought on just by chemical build-up in their forage because bees in less polluted areas are affected, too.  Nor is it the travel that bees endure because bees have been shipped around for centuries.  Researchers are looking into the possibility that increasing human-induced stresses on both bees and their habitat are increasing their overall vulnerability to diseases which the creatures have previously fought off.

Whatever we may think we know about nature, modern life does not really understand or feel close to the natural processes on which we depend.  In the city there is no earth, for example - it's all covered over.  We live at one remove from the Earth, yet continue to rely on it, ultimately for everything - from oxygen to food to a regulated climate to plentiful water.

Could the plight of bees be telling us that something is going wrong with the order we humans are imposing on our ecology?  Dennis van Engelsdorp thinks so.  He blames Nature Deficit Disorder among humans - living with progressively less awareness of, or care for, the Earth, including the Earth on our doorstep - gardens, parks, urban-fringe nature reserves and so on.  If we want to find out what is wrong with the bees, we might have to start by taking a good look at ourselves, he says:

• http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dennis_vanengelsdorp_a_plea_for_bees.html

PS Confession: What I did to the bees.

We were all delighted when the National Bee Unit was awarded a contract by a herbicide company to test the toxicity of a new product on our bees.  This was in 1991, which is when the government's privatisation drive was just getting under way in earnest.  The National Bee Unit folk knew that if it didn't operate commercially, it would be shut down and the government's lab work would be given to private companies.  So the herbicide contract meant that our lab was good enough to operate commercially, and it also gave us a new interesting thing to do.  For some reason - perhaps because I was keen - I was asked to assist in the testing.

To test the herbicide's toxicity, we were looking for its LD50, which is a standard measure meaning Lethal Dose 50%.  The LD50 is known when, of the bees contacted by a certain dose of chemical, half die and half survive.  We caught hundreds of bees from our apiary and divided them between petri dishes, ten at a time.  We also made up solutions of the herbicide - I think we arranged the solutions so that each successive dose was ten times as concentrated with the herbicide as the last one, but I don't remember exactly.

With a large pipette I had to put a tiny droplet of the weakest of our solutions on the thorax of all ten bees in the first petri dish and see if any died, and then increase the concentrations in successive dishes until bees started dying.  I felt pretty cool - I only had a GCSE in Biology and now I had a white coat and was doing an important and exacting job - but I wasn't prepared for what happened to the bees.

In the first few dishes the bees looked unaffected, but as the concentrations increased, I started seeing the odd bee trying to scrape off the solution.  Then I saw the  bees behavaing erratically - walking faster around the edge of the dishes or spinning around on their own.  With stronger doses, the bees became highly agitated, beating their wings sporadically, stumbling about, lying on one side or moving their legs across their bodies with obvious urgency, as if to clean something off themselves that they couldn't see.

I carried on, but I began to feel extremely uneasy about what I was doing.  It was difficult to administer the solution to the next dish of bees because as soon as I planted the droplet of herbicide on the first bee, its immediate neighbour attacked it and they fought.  By the time I managed to get the blob of herbicide on all ten bees in the dish, several had been killed.  Their bodies twisted up as the venom did its work, while the bees who'd done the killing were dying too as they tried to wrench their barbed stings away.  The remaining bees continued to stumble, run around the edge of the dish and wipe their bodies.  We had our LD50 and I had had enough.  I think my lab partner, much more experienced than I was, was also feeling disturbed.  I can't remember what we said to each other but I was relieved that we didn't have to do any more.

I still feel horrible about my complicit cruelty to the bees.  I swore I'd never do anything like that again, but of course the bees and their ecology continue to pay with their little lives for me to eat a cheaper loaf of bread (if it's not organic).  The other day I heard someone say, 'There's no such thing as cheap food - it's all expensive.'  They meant that ecologically, everything is expensive.  When we think it isn't, we suffer from the Nature Deficit Disorder that Dennis van Engelsdorp warns us about, and which I was suffering from on that day in the lab.

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