what you need to know about The Pollinator Crisis
The Data
Honey bee “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD) was first widely reported in 2006. Beekeepers were shocked and confounded by millions of worker bees simply abandoning honey bee hives.
CCD raised an alarm. Subsequent studies revealed a much wider crisis. North American native bees, including American bumblebees, are declining at an alarming rate. These declines are part of an enormous decline in insect populations worldwide.
In many parts of the world details of insect decline are obscured by lack of data but evidence of the extent of the loss continues to increase.
A 2014 global analysis of 452 insect species concluded that insect abundance had declined by an estimated 45 percent over the previous 40 years.
A 2017 European study found that insect abundance, as measured by biomass, had declined by more than 75 percent within 63 protected areas in Germany—over the course of just 27 years.
A 2017 study of North American and Hawaiian native bees found hundreds of native bee species are sliding towards extinction. The study by the Center for Biological Diversity was able to evaluate only 1,437 species of over 4,000 native species due to the lack of sufficient historical data. Of those studied, more than half were declining, and nearly 1 in 4 (347 species) are imperiled and at risk of extinction.
The widespread decline of European honey bees has been well documented in recent years. But until now much less has been revealed about the 4,337 native bee species in North America and Hawaii. These mostly solitary ground-nesting bees play a crucial ecological role by pollinating wild plants and provide more than $3 billion in fruit-pollination services each year in the United States.
— Center for Biological Diversity, March 2017. Pollinators in Peril: A systematic status review of North American and Hawaiian native bees.
In 2018, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described an almost pristine rainforest in Puerto Rico, in which the biomass of insects and other arthropods like spiders had fallen between 10- and 60-fold since the 1970s.
In April 2019 a review of worldwide data published in the journal Biological Conservation reported the biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide, with more than 40 per cent of insect species facing extinction, with near total loss of insects possible by century’s end.
There may be no more explicit data than this last that expresses the seriousness of our climate crisis. Our food production system and our entire worldwide ecosystem cannot survive without insects.
The study identifies the two most threatened groups of insects as key pollinators—bees, moths, and butterflies—and dung beetles and related insects responsible for recycling nutrients and processing animal wastes into soil. This may be less obvious than what bees do, but it is equally important.
These losses spiral through the broader ecosystem. Birds cannot survive without insects; all birds eat insects at some point in their lifecycle.
The point is made by a September 2019 study, published in the journal Science, that reports three billion birds have been lost in the United States and Canada since 1970. The study cites the causes as pesticides, habitat loss, and the huge decline in insects. (Read why birds matter in National Geographic magazine.)
Although CCD has declined, annual honey bee losses continue to be high, credited to disease and varroa mites. Losses of domestic honey bee hives have averaged 38 percent for over ten years, more than twice the prior rate.
In June 2019 the annual honey bee survey of the Bee Informed Partnership led by the University of Maryland reported U.S. beekeepers lost 40 percent of honey bee colonies during the year ending April 2019, the highest number in the 13-year history of the survey.
Today there are ~2.9 million managed honey bee colonies in the U.S. This number has been rising in recent years but is actually down from 6 million in the small farm and family garden world of the pre-1940s. Yet worldwide, beekeeping has increased by ∼45% during the last half century with honey bees now found on every continent but Antarctica. And before that, these lands were the diverse bee environments that existed prior to the arrival of the European settlers who introduced the honey bees.
When California was wild, it was one sweet bee-garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean. Wherever a bee might fly within the bounds of this virgin wilderness--through the redwood forests, along the banks of the rivers, along the bluffs and headlands fronting the sea, over valley and plain, park and grove, and deep, leafy glen, or far up the piny slopes of the mountains--throughout every belt and section of climate up to the timber line, bee-flowers bloomed in lavish abundance. Here they grew more or less apart in special sheets and patches of no great size, there in broad, flowing folds hundreds of miles in length--zones of polleny forests, zones of flowery chaparral, stream tangles of rubus and wild rose, sheets of golden compositæ, beds of violets, beds of mint, beds of bryanthus and clover, and so on, certain species blooming somewhere all the year round.
— John Muir
There are widespread reports of a recent spike in urban beekeeping in response to the bee crisis. However, where forage has not increased at the same pace as new bee colonies, all bees may suffer from poor nutrition.
https://daily.jstor.org/rise-city-bee-urbanites-built-21st-century-apiculture/
I’ve come, however, on a special mission on behalf of my constituency which are the ten to the 18th power—that’s a million trillion—insects and other small creatures and to make a plea for them....
If we were to wipe out insects alone—just that group alone—on this planet—which we are trying hard to do, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land and within a few months.
—E. O. Wilson
