About 130 million years ago during the early
Cretaceous period, something rather unexpected happened. A flower bloomed. This was undoubtedly awkward for the plant
involved. Nobody had ever seen a flower before. The plants all around it were mosses and seed-bearing
pines, cycads and ferns. They probably called the floral shrub names
and made jokes about the length of its stamen. You know how cruel plants can be. Exactly why and how this happened is not entirely
clear. Looking totally different from any other vegetation
of the time and with no obvious evolutionary ancestors, the emergence of flowering plants
remains a botanical conundrum to this day. In 1879, a grumpy Charles Darwin called it
an “abominable mystery.” What bugged him was that flowering plants,
collectively known as angiosperms, quite inconveniently didn’t follow his theory of gradual evolution. Like hip hop artists in the 1970s, they appeared
to have arrived from nowhere and then grown quickly in volume and diversity. In just a hundred million years, flowering
plants have conquered almost every habitat on earth, today accounting for 9 out of every
10 plant species on the planet. They have redefined the natural landscape
and formed the foundation of new ecosystems. And without them, we’d all be on the Atkins
diet. Recently published research suggests Darwin
was fretting over nothing: angiosperms quite possibly evolved progressively and over a
suitably long period of time, though their relative fragility makes finding them in the
fossil record harder than it is compared to, say, dinosaurs, who let’s face it could
have stood to lose a few pounds. Still, amgiosperms’ eventual total dominance
of the plant kingdom remains one of nature’s great success stories. But let’s not hype flowers too much - they
couldn’t have achieved this triumph on their own. All the angiosperm in the world is useless
to you if you can’t even stroll over to another plant and buy her a drink. No, flowering plants need help to reproduce,
and no-one has facilitated more plant-on-plant action than the humble bee. Fossilised nests of bee or wasp-like creatures
found in the Petrified Forest of Arizona date back around 220 million years, before flowers
existed in the form we know today. But scientists think that, back then, there
probably wasn’t much of a buzz between the blossoms and the bees. Flowers were pretty ugly and bees only went
for cheerleaders. But at some stage plants appear to have realised
they were missing a trick. Flowers began to evolve to be more attractive
to flying insects, especially bees. 90 to 100 million years ago they developed
petals and started competing with each other to lure the most pollinators, a process believed
to be partially responsible for their rapid diversification and colonisation of the earth. In response, bees changed their shape, structure,
and behaviour to optimise their access to pollen and nectar. It’s a famous story of co-evolution that
has seen flowers and bees live in mutually-beneficial harmony for millions of years. Until recently, that is. Because the world’s bees are dying, and
nobody knows exactly why. In mid-November 2006, American beekeeper Dave
Hackenberg made a discovery that would shake the beekeeping world. In a routine inspection of his 2400 hives,
he found 400 of them totally abandoned. The bees were gone. Not dead, gone. Like little buzzy ghosts. By February 2007, several large beekeeping
operations in the US had reported similar cases, with some losing as many as 90% of
their colonies. Similar disappearances had happened throughout
the history of beekeeping, also known as apiculture, with the first recorded case dating back to
1869. The phenomenon has been called by many names
over the years, including “disappearing disease”, “May disease” or “Spring
Dwindle”. But what took place in 2006 was unprecedented
in its scale. So, they gave it a new name: Colony Collapse
Disorder, or CCD. The original name was going to be Colony Upheaval
and neutralisation Tragedies, but then someone pointed out that the acronym was rather problematic. What’s really strange about CUN - I mean
CCD is that there weren’t any dead bees left behind, just empty hives. It’s as if one morning a lone worker bee
said, “Screw this, we work too hard. I’m going to Mexico.” And after some furious waggle-dancing 80 000
bees followed him. Some newspapers started referring to it as
the Bee Rapture, while in the UK they called it Mary Celeste syndrome after the merchant
ship discovered off the Azores in 1872 with not a single passenger aboard - I’ll be
covering that story in an upcoming video, by the way – subscribe so you don’t miss
it. For approximately the next nine years, CCD
claimed about a third of all bee colonies in the United States every year, without anyone
being able to work out exactly why. And then it just… stopped. We’re not really sure why that happened
either - do we actually know anything? - but for about the last five years we haven’t
seen that particular set of issues, or at least not to anywhere near the same extent. Good news, right? Unfortunately not. Bee populations have continued to nosedive,
with more than 30% of tracked American honey bee colonies dying off every year for the
last decade or so, up to around 40% last year and the year before. But it’s not only the US who are experiencing
this - it’s a global trend. Hanyuan county in China's Sichuan province
is known as the pear capital of the world, but with local bee numbers in steep decline,
the annual pollination needed to ensure a full crop of fruit is now done mostly by hand,
one flower at a time. And in Germany, a decades-long study of protected
nature reserves found that 75% of flying insects in these areas have died over the last 30
years or so. Some scientists suggest that this is all part
of a wider mass extinction event in which the majority of the planet’s species will
die off. This has happened five times before that we’re
aware of, and we could be witnessing the 6th right now. After all, populations of animals all over
the planet are declining so rapidly that researchers say we’re in a process of "biological annihilation." That might seem hard to believe, but only
because when people say “endangered animal” you probably automatically think of some of
the big ticket beasties like tigers and rhinos.. But insects make up around 90% of all species
of animals on the planet, and more than half of all living things. There are approximately 1.4 billion insects
for every human on earth, but around the world that ratio is rapidly declining. The obvious question is, “Why should you
care?” Nobody likes insects anyway, right? Especially ones like bees that can fight back
when you piss them off. But insects, and particularly the bee, are
crucial to human survival. Besides the honey bee, there are actually
25 to 30 000 different bee species, and they could all be suffering too. That matters because without them we wouldn’t
have most of the food we eat on a daily basis. Remember the flowering plants I mentioned
earlier? They include the fruit, vegetables and crops
that make up the bulk of our natural diet, and they’re all pollinated by bees and other
insects. According to the UN, up to 75% of world food
crops depend on bees and other pollinators in some way, while one international study
estimates the annual global food production that depends on pollinators is worth half
a trillion dollars. Without insects, but especially bees, our
food system wouldn’t necessarily collapse, but many more people would go hungry. We would still be able to grow staples like
grain and cereals which are pollinated by the wind, but fruits and vegetables would
be unavailable or unaffordable At a minimum you would lose access to good nutrition and
most of the stuff that you like to eat. Unless you’re super rich you’d probably
have to start familiarising yourself with the symptoms of scurvy, and you likely wouldn’t
be able to get your hands on coffee. I’ll let that one sink in for a moment. No. Coffee. Beyond our human concerns, if all the bees
died off the ripple effects would be felt throughout most major natural ecosystems. Without pollinators there would be fewer plants,
which would ultimately mean less food for most of earth’s animal species and more
extinctions of all kinds. Basically, an armageddon of the natural world. It’s a pretty bleak picture, so how do we
stop it from happening? First step, of course, is to understand the
problem. Easier said than done, since this is a complex
issue with many moving parts. And no, it’s not, as some have suggested,
caused by cellphones, electromagnetic radiation, a Russian mind control experiment, or aliens
- aliens really do get blamed for a lot of stuff don’t they? It’s no wonder they never visit. But scientists have identified a number of
things that could be impacting the populations of all insect pollinators. Perhaps the most obvious candidate is climate
change, which impacts all ecosystems, but there isn’t yet much evidence to directly
link climate change to insect die-off. Another concern is habitat destruction. Humans have a nasty tendency of taking over
natural environments to build things like car parks, shopping malls, and starbucks outlets,
leaving less room for other species to live and grow. Strongly related to this is modern agriculture,
which sees increasing areas of land, usually forests, being cleared and repurposed to grow
food. In the last 50 years, the human population
has nearly doubled while the average calories consumed per person has increased by about
30%, so the theory goes that we need more land to grow more food. There’s a lot of debate about that particular
point, not least because a lot of the food we grow is being fed to animals, not people. About a third of all arable land, in fact,
is used to grow crops that feed livestock. But we’ll save that debate for another time. Climate change and habitat destruction can
partly account for declining populations of wild animals, but they don’t sufficiently
explain why so many commercial and domestic honey bees are dying too. To understand that we need to consider the
three Ps: pesticides, poor nutrition, and parasites. To increase size and reliability of yields,
commercial farming relies heavily on the use of pesticides and insecticides. It stands to reason that bees, being insects,
do not react particularly well to these substances, but some are worse than others. A relatively new class of insecticides, neonicotinoids,
are used widely in agriculture today and may be outright deadly to bees, short-circuiting
their memory and navigation. As the name implies, these chemicals have
an unintentional nicotine-like addicting effect on the bees, causing them to repeatedly come
back for more. Other pesticides have less lethal effects,
but they work to weaken bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to disease and
parasites. Making matters worse is a mass drop in the
quality of bee nutrition. Left to its own devices, your average honey
bee would spend its day humming show tunes and flitting from flower to flower, drinking
nectar and collecting pollen. Then it would fly home to its hive, where
the nectar would be converted into honey, and the pollen would be used as a protein
food source in the form of bee bread. In this scenario, a bee might visit hundreds
of different flowers from different plants every day, enjoying a diverse diet in the
process. However, modern farming methods tend to favour
monoculture, the practice of planting massive areas of land with a single type of plant. At its worst, this might be thousands of hectares
of farm land planted with commercial crops like soy or corn, which aren’t pollinated
by insects. To a bee that’s the equivalent of an empty
supermarket. A food desert that will effectively lead to
starvation. Monocultures of flowering crops aren’t much
better, though. California produces 80% of the world’s almonds,
with more than 1.4 million acres of land dedicated to almond trees and very little else. Come spring, that’s a lot of almond flowers,
and those need a lot of bees. Every February, an incredible 85% of all commercial
bee colonies in America are taken to California for the single largest managed pollination
event anywhere in the world. The demand is so great that even more hives
are flown in from countries like Australia. On the surface it seems like bee paradise:
hundreds of miles of almond flowers - what more could a bee want?. But because all the blossoms are from one
variety of plant, the bee’s diet becomes one-dimensional, lacking sufficient nutritional
diversity. Imagine if you only ate one thing all day,
every day. You wouldn’t starve, but you wouldn’t
be very healthy, either - even if that thing was broccoli. As a result, bee immune systems become compromised,
an effect made worse by the large quantity of pesticides used in the almond groves. So, with pesticides and poor nutrition creating
weaker bees, the stage is set for the final P in our puzzle, parasites, and one vicious
bastard in particular: the varroa destructor mite. This horror story of a creature is only about
1.2 millimetres long, but it’s capable of doing some serious damage. It starts by climbing onto the back of a bee,
where it proceeds to wedge itself between the plates of the bee’s exoskeleton. Once there, it pierces the skin, injecting
a cocktail of digestive enzymes that gradually liquify the bee’s insides, providing the
mite with an all-you-can-eat bee-smoothie buffet. Delicious. Hives used to be able to withstand varroa
attacks, provided the infestation didn’t overwhelm more than 20% of the colony. But nowadays, with weakened immune systems
and pesticide-resistant strains of varroa mite, the survival threshold is only about
3% of the bee population. After that, the hive is decimated. And it's been happening more and more for
the past three decades. Solving the bee genocide issue isn’t rocket
science, which is lucky because most of the scientists working on the problem are entomologists. But it is a problem that needs to be addressed
if your kids hope to be eating something other than gruel in 50 years’ time.
