Decline of Honey Bees Becoming Seriously Sticky Situation

With the extreme persistence of pesticides, parasites, and unhealthy diets, experts provide warnings on the ominous decline of the Western Honey Bee.

What would our world look like if there were no bees? Well, we’re on that path. Beekeepers across the United States have reported a 45.5% loss of their managed Western honey bee colonies from April 2020 to 2021, the second-highest rate of loss ever recorded.

The nonprofit organization, Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), has been conducting annual surveys since 2006. The results highlight high rates of honeybee colony turnover, driven by both elevated summer and winter losses recorded beginning that year. Why do the bees keep dying? What can we do?

Aydogan Ozcan, Assistant Director of the California NanoSystems Institute of UCLA, explains the critical importance of bees: “Ensuring the wellbeing of honey bees is a very important problem for global food security and ecosystem stability. There are many factors affecting rapidly declining bee populations, with parasitic infections playing a significant role.”

Extension Apiculturist, Elina Lastro Niño, offers an insightful perspective. She has a degree in entomology and has been studying bees in particular since 2007 when their die-off became increasingly widespread.

“I work with beekeepers and scientists at UC Davis. For years we have been studying bees, their behavior, and the not-so-elusive decline. There are lots of people working on it, and so far we’ve learned about the prevalent factors: parasites, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and fungi; a strict diet and pesticide usage as well,” Niño said.

“Honey bees are really healthy when they can have a mixed diet, just like anything else,” says New Roads science teacher, Eric Cleveland. “They’re normally getting pollen and nectar from many different kinds of plants, but if we only feed them almond nectar and almond pollen, there is a good chance they’re missing some nutrients.”

If a bee is kept on an unhealthy diet, ordinarily harmless mites are lethal. “This species of bee, which is Apis Mellifera, is susceptible to certain types of mites. If the bee can live with a mite – it’s like us having a tick, it’s not a big deal – and their health is reduced as well, that can kill them. Since they live in really close quarters, if one of them gets a mite, it spreads through their colony,” Cleveland said.

(Photo courtesy of Mr. Cleveland / New Roads School)

Honey bees are really healthy when they can have a mixed diet, just like anything else.

One thing farms are doing to improve the health of the honey bee is planting numerous crops in between their rows, which grows a complimentary flowering plant.

There is another factor leading to their decline, one that shouldn’t go unnoticed. Water, Niño says, is what we need: “Bees don’t do well, like here in Davis, California.” Bees, just like humans, can’t live without water. In the summer, bees use water to cool off, feed baby bees, and dilute honey, which can crystallize and become too thick for a honey bee to eat.

Cleveland illustrates an additional threat, “we use pesticides to try and kill insects that are harmful to our crops, but those pesticides kill honey bees as well. So, if we’re spraying a field before a flower grows, before there are honey bees, the chemical gets into the plant, and the plant is transported into the nectar of a flower. It’s possible they’re getting trace elements of the pesticide’s poison. We’re actively killing them,” he said, “and then wondering why they’re dying.”

But what more is being done?

In his lab at UCLA, Ozcan is working on developing a mobile phone microscope to detect Nosema spore (a deadly parasite). This mobile and cost-effective platform, weighing only 0.8 pounds, is composed of a smartphone-based fluorescence microscope, a custom-developed smartphone application, and an easy to perform sample preparation that enables labeling of bee parasite spores even in the field.

Ozcan explains, “Disease diagnostics by this new platform involve very simple sample preparation in order to tag parasite spores that kill bees. A drop of this prepared solution is placed on a glass slide, which is then inserted into the mobile phone microscope for analysis. The image of the sample is then captured by the smartphone and transmitted to a computer for automated analysis to quickly reveal the spore count, which is returned to the user in less than 90 seconds.”

In testing his platform, Ozcan and his team concluded that the device is capable of detecting the parasite concentration per bee that is below the threshold needed to advise treatment against Nosema parasites.

Ozcan offers a simple proposition: “Stop using pesticides for a few years – see what happens. If we were to do that, then we would see whether or not these colonies would collapse.”

If all of these factors – pesticides, poor diet, dehydration, and parasitic infections- were to harm honey bees, then what would the world look like?

“A world without the western honey bee would be very different. We grow grains, like almonds, broccoli, and mustards, which are pollinated by western honey bees. Without the western honey bees, those big farms would have to be broken up into smaller properties,” Cleveland said.

A shortage of pollinators leads to artificial pollination — humans taking the pollen from the male part, and transferring it to the female part of their fruit using tiny paintbrushess. This artificial pollination is conducted by humans, a mechanical technique used to pollinate plants when natural pollination is insufficient or undesirable.

“What we do is get a hundred-billion honey bees, but if we don’t protect those workers, we’d have to change our method of farming.” This means, “going back to smaller farms with multiple crops, bringing back the health of the entire community, restoring the health of biodiversity,” Cleveland said.

Niño, the beekeepers, and the multitude of researchers she consults with at UC Davis are trying to make sense of the dilemma as well.

“We’re studying different plants and seeing what they prefer; we will then recommend that to the public. Mustard plants, for example, are what bees love. We really work on helping them (beekeepers) find ways to get rid of the mites,” Niño said.

“I think we [Niño’s team] are doing the best we can to promote the decline of Honey Bees. We should be putting the word out, so people can be aware of how pollinators are important…and necessary.”

Experts agree: The western honey bees are in a sticky situation. We can wash our hands or “bee” the change.