by Thor Hanson
Basic Books, 2018
A couple of months ago I heard Thor Hanson interviewed on the radio and he said – maybe not exactly, but close – that “Keeping honey bees does little or nothing for bee conservation. It’s a little like keeping chickens for bird conservation.” I ordered his new book immediately and have not been disappointed. Not that Hanson doesn’t love honey bees, but however fuzzy and golden they may be, their ecological role has been greatly overrated.
As Hanson reminds us, honey bees have been studied and admired since Virgil wrote about them. They and their honey are featured on cave paintings from the Stone Age, and mead has been brewed for at least the past 9,000 years. It seems that the African bird called the greater honeyguide has been leading people – not badgers, as folklore would have it – to bee nests since ancient times. Honey has been an important part of the human diet for such a long time that it may have contributed to our success as a species, because of sugar’s importance to the brain.
All of this has kept the honey bee front and center, while the 20,000 or so other bee species, many of them far more effective pollinators, have been largely ignored. Buzz comes to the rescue, beginning at the beginning, probably about 125 million years ago when bees evolved from wasps, which feed animal matter to their larvae. The benefits of a bee’s vegetarian diet of pollen and nectar, compared to the wasp’s dangerous life of hunting, has paid off. Now bees are far more numerous than wasps.
Other kinds of bees – the diggers, masons, bumbles, leafcutters, miners, alkali, and sweat bees, to name just a few – are, unlike honey bees, native to North America. The honey bee’s native range is in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Their introduction to this continent has been consequential: A single domesticated honey bee colony is estimated to consume enough pollen and nectar to provide for 100,000 other, and usually better, pollinators.
In the course of this book, Hanson goes on forays in search of bees, bee experts, and farmers, often accompanied by his son Noah, who shares his father’s passion and has better eyesight. They find that while the beloved honey bee has experienced widespread and devastating losses – still unexplained – other bees, especially some once-common bumblebees, have been walloped to extinction or near extinction. One of the experts Hanson visits lists what she calls the four P’s: parasites, poor nutrition, pesticides, and pathogens. Many insects develop resistance to pesticides – but not bees. For crop-eating insects, pesticides pose a familiar and usually temporary setback. But bees have always been welcomed by flowers and have had no reason to figure out how to deal with adversity. Exposure to several chemicals at once, chemicals that on their own are harmless, is disastrous for bees. Worldwide, it’s a worrying trend.
And not just for the bees. The books demonstrates just how dependent our own food supply is on pollinators. Hanson visits a McDonald’s, where he disassembles a Big Mac with tweezers to separate all of the parts that rely on insect pollinators. Absent pollinators, the sandwich would be even more unappealing.
Despite all the bad bee news, this book is a pleasure to read. Hanson has also written books about feathers and seeds, which might not have as alarming a message, so I will make a point of tracking them down.