Honey bees -- the canary in the coal mine: Gard Otis at TEDxGuelphU

Dave Hackenberg started beekeeping as a high school student in Pennsylvania got a few hives of bees by the time he graduated from high school he already had a couple of hundred hives of bees and he was already on his way toward becoming a professional beekeeper by 2006 he'd built up the number of hives he was managing to around 3,000 like many American beekeepers as you'll see in the following slide he moved these bees widely around eastern United States for pollination of crops and like many beekeepers would take his bees sell for the winter because they winter more easily in Florida just like many Canadians then they would have in Pennsylvania so he in the late fall he walked into one of his eight Berry's in Florida and he noticed an eerie silence now normally if you walk into an apiary abhi yard what you hear is the hum of bees that all the bees actively going back and forth from the hives out to flowers and returning with food and it was silent so and this was an apiary he had been in three weeks before everything looked fine he opens the first hive almost empty almost no bees opens the next time empty next time empty that was the story for the entire yard then he moved to a neighboring yard a few miles away empty empty empty and that day he realized that in about three weeks he had gone from 3,000 hives of bees to about 2,000 and or less and by the end of the winter by February or March he had lost literally 80% of his 3,000 hives of bees 2,400 hives of bees dead you can imagine the impact on him as an individual trying to make a living from beekeeping and this was called colony collapse disorder at the time several researchers went into the apiaries where he was experiencing these problems they inspected the highs they didn't find large numbers of parasitic mites on the bottom of the hive that would indicate that they were the cause they didn't find that there were any particularly notable diseases there was plenty of food everything about the inside of the highs looked fine the problem was the bees had just looked like they just walked out and disappeared into the environment and so they turned this colony collapse disorder when you don't have a real reason like a disease or something you can point to you make up a name that's kind of general encompasses everything colony collapse disorder or CCD so this gives you a depiction of Hackenberg business in a typical year for Hackenberg it started off there in Pennsylvania moved down to move highs across to California as you see there for the almond pollination after in January and February after he'd finished in California pollinating crops there the almonds then the hives are trucked back across the country to Georgia highbush blueberries up to Pennsylvania for apples and cherries in April on up to Maine for lowbush blueberries in May and finally back down to his home state if he has a home state I don't know how you live this lifestyle and say you have a home and many of these beekeepers actually maintain a home in Florida and a home somewhere else because of their lifestyle but by the time he gets back to his home state he's pollinating pumpkins honey has become largely a by-product that isn't particularly welcomed because if the bees collect too much honey then the hives are heavier but it just honey gets in the way of doing the other business but it when he gets back to Pennsylvania then he would try to get a bit of a honey crop to supplement his main income which is pollination contracts but the biggest beekeeping operation in the world is owned by Richard 80 in his sons and he had about 88,000 hives of bees and this is just to give you an idea of the magnitude of scale he operated his home bases in South Dakota but he operates over a number of states surrounding South Dakota and this is just one of several of the large honey extracting plants that they would have now at the bee lab here at campus we would have something that would fill up just sorry back just one tiny corner of that room but each of these three semi-automated honey uncapping extracting lines is capable of one point in time spinning the honey out of about a hundred and twenty frames of beat of honey each of those boxes that you see there is what would be a typical hive box like you would think of as a bee hive as being a bee hive here in Canada and it contains about nine frames full of honey so all of those boxes get transferred through that system and it takes on average I calculated it's about eight seconds to extract the honey from a single frame if I'm a hobby beekeeper it takes me probably two or three minutes to get the honey out of a frame very very highly mechanized high throughput and it's because such a magnitude of their operation but again here shows their operation now they started Richard a tea started out in South Dakota as I mentioned and was a honey producer that was his business when he started out he gradually expanded and got more and more hives and he spilled over into neighboring states so now they run as the term is they run bees in six different states North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas Iowa and Minnesota to do that they have to have it those extracting plants like you saw in the previous slide in several of different states so they're not transporting frames over huge distances gradually as they kept increasing the business one of his sons came of age and he took on the business of rearing Queens for the operation so his whole income and part of the business was raising the queen bees needed to reek weaned this large number of hives every year and then another bee another son came of age and he said dad there's a lot of almonds in California and they need pollination and it looks like they're getting pretty good prices for them so he convinced his dad that they should truck bees across the mountains through Wyoming down into California prior to the snow is flying because it gets too risky for the bees and the trucker's to take them across in the winter and move them out to California where they sit and they wait for the almonds to come into bloom in January and February and you can see the magnitude of this now this is huge business for them 66,000 out of eighty eight thousand three quarters 150 truckloads of bees in convoys going across the United States from the central us out to California and then after they finished the almond pollination son go sell for the hive splitting and reek weaning some go back to the central US and then his grandson came of age and he needed a job so his dad and some beat some apple growers were leaning on him so he said Oh take five thousand bees to Washington and then take them across the Maine so now you can see they're going they're spanning the country from corner to corner from the Canadian border down to the southern states and all the way from California to Maine Ojai almonds well almonds are in the same genus same group of plants as prunes plums peaches that looks like a peach orchard really and most of the commercial varieties of almonds are dependent on insects for pollination they need insects like honeybees to visit one flower collect pollen all over the hairs on their body move them to the next flower it rubs off on the next flower and then you get seeds being set and you get almonds if you don't have pollinators from most of these varieties you don't get almonds so the growers are dependent on them and the growers in California keep planting more and more almonds to the point where they now are up to producing 80% of the world's almond crops all in California all in one part of California and all of them requiring pollination and they keep planting more and more so there's more and more almonds coming on stream at the same time there are fewer and fewer colonies of bees in the United States so that while the number of colonies has dropped from two no four and a half million to 2.4 million hives of bees in the whole United States the acreage of almonds has increased fivefold and it's gotten to the point where there's such a demand for bees the price for renting a hive of bees for pollination in 15 years has gone from $45 to a hundred and seventy dollars last year for one hive of bees for about three weeks to sit in California pollinating so what do you see in this picture anybody what do you see okay you see some flowering almonds anybody else you see a monoculture why is it a monoculture what else do you see beside the almonds you got grasses right but you don't see flowers that's the point here you've got the beehives they're in the crates those are beehives all bundled up on pallets for and I could for in a pallet and you've got some mountains in the distance so you got a bit of grass and some dirt but that is that almonds so what's up it's a monoculture and so the bees are during this period of three weeks they're collecting a single source of food it's like you sitting on the couch for three weeks eating potato chips at the end of that three weeks you're probably not going to have gotten a complete nutrition in your diet and that's what we've learned is happening with bees if they're on monocultures as opposed to where you had some weeds in the system dandelions and other things producing pollen and nectar the bees do better their immune systems are better so I mentioned they truck these bees over the mountains before the snow flies so they bring them out to the Central Valley of California which is in between the coast range and the Sierra Nevada it's fairly flat kind of dry and cold and in this period from November through to February when they move them to the almonds it's like a semi desert again what do you see in this picture you see a heck of a lot of bee hives taking this photo from the air and you see some buildings in the distance and it looks like an almond Grove off to the right and otherwise there isn't a flower in sight so they're there in the winter normally the bee colony what would it do in the winter well there's no flowers you stop rearing brood start rearing babies you hunker down you try to stay warm and you exist but they don't want them to just exist they want them to start actively producing more young bees before they move into almond population groves so that they'll have more bees more brood they'll collect more pollen they'll be better at pollinating so what do they do they have to give them food so they give them sugar syrup sucrose sugar syrup and they give them artificial pollen that is neither of which is nutritionally as good as what they would get from real flowers then you add to that that the way they exist in the summer is also in these monocultures of course I I grade the pictures right I don't show you a small field of canola show you one that goes as far as the eye can see same with the soybeans same with the coal we have vast acreages of central Canada and us that are covered with these crops and you can see there there are no weeds in that cornfield there's none in the soybean fields all three of these crops are genetically modified I don't have a personally a big problem with genetic modification of crops I don't think they're posing a risk of to the health of the bees or to us but what's happening is they grow these herbicide these Roundup Ready crops then the grower can come through and spray the roundup when those plants are small and they eliminate all the weeds so what would have been maybe a little bit of a poly culture with with some weeds in addition to soybeans or some weeds in addition to canola by the time they get done spraying the field and it drifts over to the surrounding edges of the field it's become an even more significant monoculture but you add to that pesticides bees and pesticides have never been a good mix they from when we first started producing synthetic insecticides over 100 years ago every couple years we got a new in and we get bee deaths and there's problems but we try to manage this by selecting insecticides and working with grower with chemical companies and then with bees and beekeepers so that they produce chemicals that won't affect the bees to any substantial degree but the spraying you see on the Left although that still goes on is largely being replaced now with seed treatments if you're paying at all any attention to the news you will have heard about be deaths in Canada bee deaths in the u.s. they are linked to these or the they're being linked to these neonicotinoid insecticides these are chemicals that mimic the chemical structure in the action of nicotine which is a natural insecticide and they treat the seed coat so that as those little soybean seedlings are growing and as they grow up to get to the point of flowering and seeding any insect that feeds on those is experiencing a large enough dose of the insecticide that it kills it so your whole crop is protected just at the time of planting you don't have to go in and spray and do all sorts of things it has many attractive teachers but the question is how much are these insecticides affecting bees and right now I mentioned this as controversy in the news depends on who you talk to you can talk to experts in the field who work with bees and insecticides one of them will tell you the biggest problem our neo Nicks these insecticides and the next guy will say no I don't think it's that it's fungicides or something about nutrition it really the jury is out on this because we have conflicting experimental evidence and they're really it's I find it the most complicated issue that I've ever had to look at to try to sort out with respect to bees that I've ever faced it's really really complicated but here's my take on what's going on you have this these bees individual bees that live in social units these colonies in hides that we give them and they have an immune system now 15 years ago I put it in blue there it's kind of central the 15 years ago we knew literally nothing about the immune system of the honeybee and now we know a lot because it turns out that the immune system and how bees defend off against chemicals against diseases against parasites against all these different on slots is intimately linked with their immune system so you can imagine yourself where how you manage time how you manage stressors let's say that coming into the end of the semester early in the semester you had an exam you know next week and you had a little quiz the week after and you were able to manage those stressors very well but now that we're getting toward the end of the semester you've got exam over there and exam over here an assignment do a big paper here and exams are coming up and you start to be overwhelmed by the series of stressors hopefully you don't reach a tipping point that puts you over the edge and fortunately you have the option to make choices so you don't have to you can say all I'm not going to go out tonight I'm going to study because I need to direct my time toward getting this work done bees don't have those choices they're stuck down in a place they're put in an environment with whatever is done around them and they have to deal with that and as each of these stressors gets added to them maybe they can handle a bit of pesticide they can detoxify it and they can handle a little bit of nutritive deficiency because it's not that big and they can handle that but gradually their immune system reaches the point where it just can't handle anymore individual bee start to experience either sub-lethal effects or lethal effects and then if enough individual bees die the colonies start dying as well and that's what I think is going on so in this picture if you look at that drone bee on the right you can see a little family of parasitic mites that have been developed on that bee as it's developing and we used to think if you go to the upper right corner we used to think that those mites were really serious problems for the bees it turns out they really don't cause anywhere near as much damage as you would have guessed the biggest damage they do is that they affect they suppress the immune system of the bees on what but they don't kill the bee outright the beacon hand it's a little smaller but it can handle that family of mites being raised on it as long as they don't have viruses because if there are viruses in the mites they bite a bee they transmit it to that be another bee mite by it's not being transmitted to another and they are transmitting viruses that are extremely lethal and injected into the bees bloodstream and then as you see at the top there then that contributes to disease and it contributes to death but then we've got all these other stressors we've got the mono cultures that I talked about before where bees are experiencing a single source of pollen they're not getting their full nutritive demands met and as a consequence it affects their immune system we're exacerbating that by planting huge Anchorage's with these herbicide resistant crops so that all the weeds the alternative sources of pollen and nectar are gone and we've now we know if people have been debating stress like is it stressful to pick these up and truck them across the country gene let me think what do you think is that stressful hmm well it took a long time to pin it down but this year lo and behold it affects the immune system of the bee and finally we've got pesticides all different classes fungicides insecticides even the beekeepers are using my decides to kill those mites right inside the hive so we've got large numbers and secta sighs one of the scariest studies I heard a few years ago was a researchers at Pennsylvania State who collected pollen coming into hives from beehives all along the eastern seaboard of the u.s. they analyzed it for pesticides over a hundred different chemicals of all of those classes fungicides herbicides insecticides might assigns any one single colony is at any one point in time bringing in six to eight or nine of these in a completely unregulated mix we have no idea how these insecticides are interacting with each other so they're getting an onslaught from all of these different things so who killed the honeybees well no one individual factor and not the same mix in any from one place to another it's a combination of all of these things building up and finally getting a point where the bee just can't handle it anymore so what do we do one thing that we do know is that the problem isn't cellphones thank the Lord we can you all use our cell phones this was the big news a couple years ago and very quickly died but it's not the cause of colony collapse disorder you can rest assured so I look at this long list of various stressors various factors that can affect colonies of honeybees and my initial reaction is to go oh my god throw my hands up in the air and go study butterflies or do something else and I do that to some extent I do study honeybees our butterflies don't laugh but as a scientist and as a person involved with bees I and my colleagues can't do that we have an obligation to the beekeepers we have an obligation to the other crop growers they don't want to kill bees they want to produce a nice healthy environment as best they can but they have to run their Pratt and they have to run their businesses so I look at that initially I say throw my hands up in the air but then I say well what can I do about it or what can we as individuals do about it and okay climate change in habitat destruction those are big problems they're not going away they're big their societal issues week in each one of us do our little bit there are many things we can do to try to express our viewpoint but as individuals we all accept our little dent in that big problem is going to be very small and hard to detect but those of us are those in the world who are agriculturist those who are either growing the crops or keeping bees can make choices thank you an exam time they can make choices about what they're going to do and adopt different practices there was a very interesting book came out a few years ago looking at intermediate strategies that conventional farmers were picking up pieces of what organic farmers do they weren't ready to make the whole shift to organic farming but they were willing to adopt some of the principles and bring in these changes in their practices which actually then let for example strip farming with multiple crops multiple sources of pollen for the bees pollen and nectar crop pests numbers usually go down when you have inter plantings as opposed to a single monoculture yet you usually can use less pesticides so you're reducing the impact on the environment and those bees so those are things they can do and the beekeepers themselves have some choices too and they go out and they buy a queen bee they can buy a queen bee from the guy they've always bought it from or they can buy a queen bee from so many whose producing mite resistant bees these are bees that are either been bred or now starting to appear in the environment naturally that have much more resistance to these parasitic mites and if we can get parasitic mites out of the system if you remember that slide the mites are affecting the immune system of the bees on what they're transmitting viruses that are lethal and we're having to use my decides to control the mites and the high so you get rid of literally three different things get infected if we can just get the mites down to where we don't have to treat them and control them and the beekeepers themselves have become now much more aware of bee nutrition I think 20 years ago they would have put anything in a bee hive and assumed it was fine now they know that they need to pay attention to what they're feeding the bees you feed bees on poor quality pollen substitute they can deal with that for a couple of weeks and then the whole system crashes so there are now some new products on the market that are much more nutritionally balanced and that meet the full needs of the bees so I'm not and we're not out of the woods with this they're bees are experiencing big problems and I didn't think that one of the key things to keep in mind here is that the bees are our canary they're they're the organism that's telling us through these colony deaths there's a problem with our agricultural system our agricultural system is not working the way it should be shouldn't be dying in massive numbers like this they should be able to exist like they have for millions of years so something is wrong they're telling us and it's our job to listen to them work with them and find these problems and I think we're making big strides I think the problems we're seeing now are my hope is that they're going to diminish over the coming years as we come to grips with the relative importance of those various factors so with that I want to thank you for being here today at this event and I'd like to thank my beloved honeybees who continue to teach me and my colleagues so much about how to live in a social environment with other members of our same species and how to live a more balanced life with our environment thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 9,776

Rating: 4.7530866 out of 5

Keywords: Gard Otis, tedx, tedx talks, TEDxGuelphU Inside Out, ted, University of Guelph, tedx talk, TEDx, Colony Collapse Disorder, Honey Bees, ted talks, ted x, TEDxGuelphU 2013, TEDxGuelphU, ted talk

Id: SYPP7vBxGFs

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 17 2014