Fragments From Floyd

This is the draft of a piece for an upcoming installment in my biweekly newspaper space. I appreciated input on the past one on "social capital" which did go to print in last week's paper. If you have comments for amending or correcting this one, I have a few days before deadline. The topic of pollination is important and of longstanding interest to me. The decline of pollinators is one of many "canaries" that suggest we have a lot of changes to make in the way we relate to nature.

Almost four hundred years ago, the first settlers established a permanent colony at Jamestown on our eastern shore. They brought with them their tools and their customs, their values and faith. And they brought their bees.

What we think of as "the" honeybee is not a native species on this continent but the European bee that lived in close association with mankind for seven thousand years before America was discovered. It made better honey and more of it than the bees the first Virginia settlers found already living here. The industrious insect spread west across the New World, providing a taste of sweetness to those often bitter lives on a new continent.

What the pioneers knew too about the honeybee was that if these insects were abundant in their fields, yields of many fruits and vegetables were high and food was plentiful. The honeybee has served an important role in the pollination of over ninety major food crops and provides a fourteen billion dollar service for American agriculture every year. One third of the food we eat comes from plants that must be pollinated by butterflies, beetles, birds or bees. Sadly, in recent decades, many of these pollinators--including both honeybees and native bees--are in a dangerous state of decline and some food crop and native plant futures are at risk.

The causes for this decline are several. First, social hive-forming bees like the honeybee have been victims of imported mites that cause high mortality in naturally-occurring wild hives. These hive diseases have reached such high incidence that natural bee colonies in trees or cavities are practically non-existent. Pesticides (like the widely-used Sevin) have caused millions of dollars of loss in bee colonies near prime agricultural land. Farmers now pay high rates for commercial hives to be brought to their crops just when the flowers open for pollination, so they will yield full, edible, marketable fruits.

But perhaps the greatest loss of pollinators may have come from the spread of cities and, paradoxically, modern farms whose creation has cleared away forest, hedgerows and flowering "weeds" which provided both cover and food for the agents of pollination. The intimate relationship between pollinators and their host plants is such that most cannot simply choose an alternate food source when their preferred plant species has been eliminated from the landscape and replaced by a monoculture of human or animal food crops. Plants disappear, bees starve.

As honeybees disappear, the good news is that native bees are better pollinators of some crops than European honeybees who, after all, did not evolve to take pollen or nectar from American flowers. Native insect pollination saves an estimated 3.1 billion dollars annually through natural crop production--an "environmental service" not typically factored into the credits column of our agricultural ledgers. But the numbers of these mostly solitary ground nesting bees is also in decline, in some cases in the southern states, wiped out by invasive fire ants and also subject to the effects of insecticides and habitat destruction. In several European countries, as bees decline, as you might expect, so do the plants they pollinate, in a chicken-and-egg cause-and-effect downward spiral.

The loss of pollinators is both a cause for concern for its potential impact on future food production, and as a symptom of larger problems facing us in the coming years. Our hope to solve these problems lies in cultivating a genuine understanding and respect for the little things we've disregarded-things as small as bees and soil microbes and songbirds-that if healthy, provide priceless environmental services we take for granted to our peril.

It seems to me that the foundation of our health and viability as a species may lie more in the efforts we take to insure diversity and viability of these small players than in the grossness of our national products or the strength of our armies. To do right by the world our children will inherit, we will need to work in harmony with natural systems-oceans, prairies, forests, deserts and tundra-that have been self-sustaining communities since long before mankind's numbers, power and insatiable demands exerted pressures on a resilient but not indestructible natural world.

We'll need to consider the value of healthy homes for birds and bees, to see them as our teachers, our charges as good stewards, and as our fellow residents on a healthy planet. Let us get our ducks in a row: they can go on, the better perhaps for our absence, but we can't live here without them.