Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Bees Won’t Be Easily Replaced

A beekeeper, a orchardist and me, a honey and apple eater, walked into a virtual bar … and that might be the beginning for a joke, but it was anything but. We were there to complain to each other about science’s most recent replacement for nature. Orchard pollination by drones.

We had heard of pollination by hand, practiced in China and especially used on apple trees, but most apple-growing regions are friendly to domestic honey bees which carry pollen from blossom to blossom, starting the fruiting process.

For the drones to be necessary, the grand plan is that we knock out all the bees as collateral damage when we kill the critters we don’t like, from ticks to mosquitoes to boll weevils to corn worms. Then, oops, realizing our mistake, we replace the collaterally damaged bees with something technological. And there, in the virtual bar, the orchardist showed us a youtube demonstration. A sensible and sober-looking young gent in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, just like us on our best days, was flying this drone (is it called “droning”?) around the apple trees, puffing pollen into the flowers.

How much does this cost? Where did they get the pollen? Will honey go extinct? Those are some of the questions we shared. We forgot the most important one, “How many taxpayer dollars have gone into this thing?”

Of course, we didn’t need to ask, “Why would anyone think pollination by drones is a good idea?” which would have made us sound naive, but it’s beginning to seem like the Why? Askers of any age are the most practical ones.

Grown-ups know “why.” The answer is, “because we can.” And the corollary is, “because there’s an industry inventing new uses for drones and pollen puffers, and that industry demands to be fed. And the other corollary is, “because we’re trashing species of plants and animals at the rate of 150 to 200 per day… that’s right, per DAY, according to the UN Environment Programme. This is almost 1,000 times the natural species disappearance rate, and more than any since the nearly instantaneous extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Most of those critters and plants won’t be missed by humans, of course. They’re too tiny for us to see, or maybe they live deep underground or in the oceans, but they’ll be missed by something, a predator that used the extinct species for food, or the network of bacteria that transformed the nutrients in the extinct bodies into something that plants can use. Nature is a food web, we learned way back when, and each bit of life in the web feeds something else. Humans, of course, are at the top, but, hey, we depend on everything below.

2017 was an especially bad year for wild species. Sea McKeon, a biology professor who hosts a naturalist podcast, says that several lizard species and a bat disappeared completely that year. In 2018, three charming little bird species went completely extinct—the po’ouli in Hawaii, the Cryptic Treehunter in Brazil and the Alagoas Foliage-gleaner, also in Brazil. Another—the Spix’s Macaw—is now extinct in the wild but still alive in captivity. It’s a pretty gray-blue bird prized for its talkative nature and its soothing demeanor. In the case of the tropical birds, it’s more likely that habitat destruction killed them off.

The same habitat destruction that’s bringing havoc to native villages in South American forests, by the way, as tropical rain forests were sold cheap and de-forested to become pastures and agricultural fields for corn and soybeans.

Saving a species depends somewhat on the critter’s ability to generate publicity, affection in the human heart, and grants in the scientists’ research lab. When scientists report that they are watching the vaquita, a tiny porpoise that lives in the Sea of Cortez, perhaps the smallest mammal in the world, or watching the northern rhino in Kenya, a fascinating armored behemoth, or watching the charismatic and impressive California Condor with its 10-foot wingspan, it means that those species will have at least a few more years. The rhinos, for example, are being reproduced because the two remaining females have been inseminated with sperm harvested years ago from males, now dead.

Insects, on the other hand, are often ignored by both the general public and the scientists who might be able to save them. Robin Verble, a biology professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, said there has been rapid decline of insects in South America and blames climate change. He says that heat in the valleys where the insects once lived drive them up the mountains to cooler climes. And insects, like the bees, are pollinators for plant species, providing millions of dollars of value for trees of every human use, providing nuts, wood for building and baseball bats.

And apples, the orchardist will add. And honey, says the beekeeper.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2019

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