Editor's Note: Vermont author Rowan Jacobsen has written a profound book for our times. Vermonters, fire up your apiaries!

"A mysterious syndrome began wiping out honey bee colonies from coast to coast. The number of hives, which had been at 6 million during World War II, and 2.6 million in 2005, fell below 2 million for the first time in memory. Soon the syndrome had a name as vague as its cause: colony collapse disorder." - Rowan Jacobsen

'We are losing our ability to take care of living things. Why?'
Kirk Webster

Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen.

In Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of The Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, Rowan Jacobsen begins by laying out the basics of bees and pollination. Flowers, he says, have "male and female parts" and the plant anthers hold pollen which he equates with sperm. For fruit to emerge pollen must be taken to another plant's stigma and ovule. He says, drawings and all: "No flower, no fruit. It's that simple." Pollen is also a powerful source of protein, and is used by the bees to create more bees, and to warmly survive winter.

The honey bee (Apis mellifera) was brought to the Americas, by Europeans, and Jacobsen quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying that Native Americans called it 'the white man's fly...'  The author is suprised that US agriculture didn't collapse earlier given an overabundance of "misinformation" ("stupidity" even) and he documents how the state of Utah, no friend of Wobblies, banned the import of honey bees in 1929. Jacobsen calls for making/fostering a "good landscape for bugs" both wild native pollinators, which are suffering and little understood, and introduced domestics. Industrial monoculture and exotic plants don't provide this; they only increase habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, and insane workloads; "California almonds in Fedruary, Washington apples in March, South Dakota sunflower and canola in May, Maine blueberries in June, and Pennsylvania pumkins in July, the system hovers on the edge of breakdown."

In 1851, an Ohioan named Langstroth had the insight that yeilded the modern stand-up hive. Despite thousands of years of partnership it was only at this point that honey could be collected without doing great damage to the hive. Jacobsen believes that bees have used us to spread their genes around the world, and this deal was worked out over a shorter period than their relations with plants, beginning with the 'angiosperm explosion.'

In the midst of "the CCD plague of 2006-07" as many colonies succombed to Varroa mites as CCD. These mites arrived from the Far East, where they had "parasitized" the Asian honey-bee (Apis cerana). The mites, after sucking the blood of the hosts, and mating in the hive "brood chambers", don't always kill, but "they weaken the bees, and the carefully orchestrated hive dynamic.." The open wounds are through ways for varied "bacteria, fungi, and viruses" and give out "malformed, malnourished, [disease] crippled" adults. This sets the bee up for a winter of death.

Beginning in the 1990s, Apistan was introduced to control the mites. These "plastic strips" were coated with what was thought to be a "benign" pesticide, fluvalinate. This measure was quickly shown to be "ineffective" as the mites developed a resistance. The use of illegal "megadoses" was equally futile. Next came the cleverly named Checkmite, a nasty organophosphate (coumaphos) which the author calls one of "the most toxic chemicals on earth." This predictably lead to other mite resistances.

Bee-keepers eventually noticed that mites weren't acting alone. A closer look at the dead bees showed discoloration in organs, and an increased presence of many viruses; Jacobsen says: "The bees didn't have one disease. They had them all." The immune systems of the bees had been run down. Throwing weakened bees at Californias' "83 percent of the world [almond] supply" and expecting them to survive the winter was too much. At this point the search was on for a villain and solution.

For all the high-tech slueth work, and accusations against other countries, particularly Australia, we know only that "all honey bees are suffering extraordinarily high disease levels." Jacobsen also cites an authority as saying that big beekeepers, migrating operations, and small local outfits, are equally effected.

Plants can draw in insects with nectars, smells, colors, and pollen, but they can also repel with nicotine. Neonicotinoids, such as the common imidacloprid, are called systemic insecticides, in that they show up throughout an exposed plant. This and other insecticides, like Gaucho, were banned in France, under the precautionary principle; a happening almost unimaginable in the US. It appears that a steady diet of these insecticides, along with the earlier mentioned miticides are neurologically overwhelming. The benign reputation of Fluvalinate, which was established in the 80s, has also proven unwarrented. Since this earlier period Apistan had changed corporate hands more than once, and it is deadlier than first thought. Beekeepers have been poisoning their bees for over a decade. Incredibly, no interactional testing is done with these toxins. Only recently was it discovered, for example, that the fungicide Procure becomes more toxic when employed alongside neonicotinoids.  

For all the problems faced by US beekeepers, if you ask some of them, and Jacobsen does, what challenges are greatest? they would say "China and its deluge of honey," both real and the syrup cut 'funny honey.' On one occasion US Customs seized shipments of honey, coming through third-party nation states, a practise called 'honey laundering' which evades tariffs on Chinese products, and after testing the honey it was found to be contaminated with the agriculturally bannned antibiotic chloramphenicol. This antibiotic is "used to treat anthrax and other severe infections" and it is feared that it use could evolve resistance to it. Eventually the use of this antibiotic stopped, but later testing of Chinese honey turned up the presence of ciprofloxacin (of the antrax antibiotic class of fluoroquinalones). Jacobsen contends that Chinese beekeepers are "tossing" this stuff "into their hives to deal with [a] ragging bacterial chaos simmering in a country with rampant pollution, spotty sewage treatment, and few agricultural standards." According to the author, following the work of Michael Pollan, these cycles of antibiotic use began on "factory farms" which are germ infested.

Jacobsen says: "Life should be slow, predictable, and low stress." One thing that could be adding to the stress of bees is the wipping out of their beneficial lactic acid bacterias. This hazard happens with humans, when they take antibiotics, and also with feedlot cattle; which are taken off of grass, and force fed corn, and Tylosin to counter the inevitable diseases. Jacobsen cites a veterinarian, from Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, as saying that he would have no job if cattle were allowed 'lots of grass and space.' It is proposed that instead of marketing protein shakes for stressed bees we should instead question our industrial agricultural model.   

Oddly enough "Britain's imperial economic botanist" Sir Albert Howard has had a formative influence on Kirk Webster, a Vermont beekeeper (  80... ). For Webster agriculture must have balance, and if it doesn't nature won't be long in telling you. To this way of thinking "pests and diseases are not the enemies of the farmer; they are actually allies, helping to illuminate weaknesses in the system before irrevocable damage--exhausted soil, genetically weak cops and animals--[are] intoduced." Webster told the beekeeping community that too much transporting, "tenement living," and overwork were the problem. In regard to the "unnatural collision" between the European bee, and Varroa, the use of chemicals only weakens the bees, makes the imbalance worse, and ensures that the "eventual 'correction' [is] more traumatic when it comes." Jacobsen says that Webster's introduction of hardy Russian bees to Vermont, his willingness to live poor, show us a way out of "the predatory and destructive economic system we live in now--it creates a real alternative."

Jacobsen goes on to discuss the ecological idea of resilience; which "focuses on a system's ability to recover from a disturbance." The idea is to live with the earth in such a way that "undesirable states" are not just turned on. He shows how a fishless state was reached when a mining/dredging operation upset the way of midges, diatoms, and fish in a lake. He says that when you start looking for resilience you encounter "a world littered with systems that have flipped to undesirable states." The author says: "Managing systems for resilience, instead of efficiency, means making them bottom-heavy so that they are unlikely to reach an unexpected tipping point." What is needed is "diverse habitats, diverse livelihoods, diverse creatures, and..genes."

In a later chapter Jacobsen raises the prospect of a "post-fertile world..." A world which is to some degree already with us; in which workers scurry up in trees, and over cliffs, to hand pollinate plant species. He says that this "fertility crisis is underway." The author mentions the "keystone" plant the Strangler Fig, and its partner the Fig Wasp; if they suffer a set back then a whole series of consequences are percipitated in an eco-system. In other circumstances we have a "steady degradation--a continuous loss of resilience." He mentions the rarer and rarer Bumble Bees of North America, and how these wild pollinators make honey bees better at what they do.  Our ignorance of these insects is astounding, as they only emerge when our economy takes a hit. We can choose, he says, this beautiful world of the ancient 'angiosperm explosion' of plant insect partnerships, or an uglier place in which "sex has run its course as a fruitful endeavor."

The book is more hopeful in its many appendices. One reveals that African bees are resistant to many diseases, and very good at dealing with mites. There is also some speculation that "top-bar hives" and "natural-cell hives" may offer benifits; this insight came from seeing that feral hives have varied size combs, unlike like traditional stand-up ones (for information on natural-cell hives: www.bwrangler.com). Another appendix lists wild flowers, for pollinator gardens, that are of use to the many day and nightime pollinators (www.pollinator.org). So, go out and craft wild gardens, and take up beekeeping as a hobby (www.xerces.org).