A "Bee" Wildering Vanishing Act, by Madeleine

March 22, 2020

Alicia Olive is a beekeeper of Astoria, OR. Since 2021 she has chosen to live away from the ever-expanding city and currently inhabits a small plot in a forest on the outskirts of the city, where it's literally just her, her house, and her bees. Since her house is at the edge of about a quarter-acre clearing, she plans to make a farm with some animals and a small field, although she refuses to buy any pesticides to spray her fields. "I shall have a small fence to keep the animals out, but I will not put up with pesticide companies. Obnoxious, they are! Let the bugs chew my fields to dust for all I care. I fear for my bees, and my bees are like a staple in my life," she states when we asked her more about it, but she says no more. She left us wondering about why she could possibly put up with living off the land, and with no pesticides to assist her. But even more so, why be concerned about bees? How do pesticides link to bees? What could she possibly be worried about?

As soon as we got back to the city, we did some research, and the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together. We found out that what Alicia was concerned about wasn't just her issue. It was just about every beekeeper's issue. It's a mysterious plague called Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. The disorder causes worker bees to abruptly cease their work and leave. The bee farmers come back to find the queen, baby bees, plenty of drones, lots of honey—but zero workers. Why? Scientists suspect that this isn't the full picture, and there is something that causes the worker bees to fly off. Most agree that it is a smaller disease that infects a colony's worker bees. The bees then realize they are sick, then fly off to try and save the other bees from getting sick—an unselfish suicide commitment. When their only outlet to food outside vanishes, the poor honeybees who are left are forced to live off the supplies they have, and as soon as they run out, will die of starvation. What could be the cause of this suicide epidemic among worker honeybees? The disease, of course, that causes their strange abandonment. But what is the cause of the disease?

"The main theorem us scientists have," says 23 year old Daniel Carbella, a scientist at the Institute for Young Learning Scientists (IYLS), "Is pesticides. There is a particular one that is quite deadly one called oxytetracycline HCI, which is used on farm fields to help kill mites. It makes them vulnerable to a threatening disease that is known to be able to kill off a hive in a matter of days. Another hypothesis is that normal farm chemicals are contaminating pollen that bees bring back to the hive. The reason we think this is because research shows that the worker bees' hives that use commercially grown plants for resources are the ones that are harmed by Colony Collapse Disorder, while the hives that rely on wild flowers and berries are completely unphased -- and because of the CCD, people are forced to raise the price of their honey or they'll end up bankrupt."

Alicia, as it turns out, is doing what we suspected—being in the woods is her way of boycotting against use of pesticides. If her fears are realized, beekeeping and farming today could never be the same. If we lost bees, due to CCD or another cause, we would lose so many fruits, veggies, nuts, and other crops (such as cotton, a huge industrial crop for us, and food for other animals) that our diet, clothes, and products need immensely. Plus, it might make some other species go extinct because they've lost their food. If we lose bees, we won't even need to spay for mites and grasshoppers and locusts on our plants because there will barely be any plants, and most of the bugs will have died off because their main source of food—our crops—is almost gone. We should do the best to change our ways now, before it's too late for us and bees alike.