Author Archives: richienimmo

‘Zombie bees’ and the fear of hybrids

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Bee stories

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Across multiple news networks last week, stories emerged of a new and frightening spectre haunting the United States. Hovering between the world of the living and the realm of the dead; mindless and devoid of individuality, but driven by a malign collective will bent upon aggressive expansion and the invasion of new territories: the ‘zombie bee’. Combining reanimated cannibal corpse and swarming killer bee, a more striking instance of an entity conjured up for the cultural imagination as an anxiety-inducing hybrid is difficult to imagine.

killerbeesbThe reality is not quite so dramatic, though gruesome enough and certainly an issue of concern for beekeepers, entomologists and ecologists. First discovered in 2008, so-called ‘zombie bees’ are bees that have been infected by the eggs of the fly Apocephalus Borealis. The eggs grow inside the bee and are believed to damage its neurological system, which typically results in erratic, jerky movements, especially at night; hence the tenuous ‘zombie’ association. Rather than undead, these are actually brain-damaged bees which die within a few hours of exhibiting the ‘zombie-like’ symptoms (and incidentally, they do not then reanimate). The fly has previously attached mostly to bumble bees rather than honey bees, and the news stories were triggered by the first reports of honey bees infected with Apocephalus Borealis having reached the North-East of America.

This adds another affliction to the long and growing list of pressures on bees, and honey bees in particular, from parasites and viruses to pesticides, disappearing forage, and the stresses of intensive commercial beekeeping involving long-distance migratory pollination. As such, the emergence and spread of Apocephalus Borealis provides further evidence of the escalating crisis of honey bee ecology and the unsustainability of current forms of commercial apiculture, with dire implications for the world food system. But why has this been packaged in this instance as a story of ‘zombie bees’? No doubt in part simply because it makes for dramatic headlines, but one can also detect a deeper cultural logic at work. Zombie bees are just the latest in a series of apian spectres conjured for public consumption, such as in stories of swarming killer bees or aggressive ‘Africanized’ bees invading from the South. In each case a bio-ecological problem is transformed into something far more potent in the cultural imagination, such that bees become a locus for more general anxieties around invasion, contamination and transgression – whether of borders, bodies or boundaries.

swarm-1978-posterIn this way, discourse about bees has sometimes given voice to underlying essentialist and xenophobic structures of feeling, mixing modern bio-phobia or fear of nature with a fear of mixture itself, a terror of hybrids and foreign Others – whether human or nonhuman – which seem to bring with them an undoing of fixed identities and established boundaries. It would be simplistic to maintain that such discourse is explicitly racist, but certainly racialised undercurrents are never far away in these stories of non-native or hybridised bees invading and encroaching upon this or that home territory. Sometimes the threatening Others tacitly signified are political rather than racial, as in the common Cold War figuring of bees as both evil collective and collectivist evil, a pseudo-communist swarm.

candymanbeesThe zombie incarnation is especially interesting because zombies are so closely linked to very modern anxieties about mass society – both the perceived potential for ‘brain-washing’ and loss of individuality associated with mass culture and urban anonymity, and also the ever-present threat of disorder, social breakdown and collapse. candyman-vhsNor is the connection between bees and the undead entirely novel, as bees were often regarded in folklore as liminal creatures hovering between life and death, with swarming bees believed to carry the souls of the dead as they left the body. Bees have also long been seen – not without some justification – as barometers of the overall health of eco-systems. The phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder, which has seen a rapid decline of honey bees worldwide since 2007, has at times been cast almost as a story of approaching ‘end times’, in which disappearing bees become a focal point for deepening existential anxieties around the mounting risks to human, animal and ecological health associated with globalised industrial capitalism.

So the stories of ‘zombie bees’ reveal a great deal not just about the unfolding crisis of honey bees but about the recurring social and cultural anxieties that pervade late modern capitalist societies. In this respect, zombie bees are hybrids in a double-sense, not just in mixing together the cultural symbolism of the zombie and the bee, but in mixing together shared elements of previously separate sorts of anxieties: on the one hand about transgression of boundaries regarded as natural or essential; and on the other hand about the ecological consequences of modern society. Though they share a common sense that something is fundamentally out of kilter with the modern world, the political anatomy of these anxieties could not be more different and should not be conflated. Some hybrids are indeed malign.

© Richie Nimmo 2014.

Advertisement

‘Is honey okay?’ Sticking points in popular vegan discourse.

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Bee Theory

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A more reflexive post this week. The topic of veganism can be difficult to discuss openly and analytically in human-animal studies (HAS) circles, because it excites much passion and often a certain amount of defensiveness on all sides. That’s unsurprising, as the issue is one that obviously has implications for one’s personal choices and practices, and the debate is usually such that these choices become moralised – or highlighted as ethically significant – in such a way that the customary liberal individualism we hide behind is challenged. Consequently some may feel they are being unfairly judged, whilst others may feel the need to reassert the legitimacy of their beliefs and commitments, all of which mitigates against genuinely open discussion. As a result veganism sometimes seems like a sort of silent but unenforced orthodoxy in human-animal studies, with some regarding it as a prerequisite for HAS scholars, some settling for vegetarianism as a haphazard ‘good enough’ measure, and some far less certain about the necessary connection between veganism and HAS, but tentative about expressing this in the face of the conviction of others.

Full disclosure – having formerly been a pretty ardent advocate of veganism and practicing vegan for some 9 years, I experienced… I’m not sure what to call it as all the terms are value-laden – an epiphany? an anti-epiphany? a disenchantment? In any case I am no longer vegan and although there are still some animal products I won’t eat I cannot call myself a proper vegetarian. I hope I can still claim to have some understanding of what motivates veganism and of the ethos, and I by no means reject it out of hand. Indeed I find my current position hardly more satisfactory than my earlier vegan one, but somehow I find its open messiness and ad-hocery sits easier with me. Perhaps this is underpinned by the feeling that in the world such as it is we all live ethically untenable lives, and that in some sense it is better to be fully aware of one’s living embroilment within these contradictions than to strive to exempt oneself individually, an effort that is doomed to failure but which may nevertheless succeed in creating a blinkered sense of ethical purity and an accompanying feeling of certainty. Both purity and certainty I regard with suspicion; there is no getting away from the totality of what exists. Nor would I claim that this is fully coherent; it is more of a structure of feeling.

So that’s the reflexive context (confession? disclaimer?) for what follows, which is not intended as an attack on veganism per se, which would hardly be constructive, but which does problematise what I regard as the purifying tendencies that often seem to be a significant element in some vegan discourse, and which seem to underpin some of the certainties it espouses. I explain what I mean further by discussing the – admittedly quite particular – example of honey.

beehive

Stealing Honey?

As honey is an animal product, rather than a plant-based food, it is inconsistent with an animal-free diet and most vegans do not consume it. In popular vegan discourse there are a few recurrent core reasons given for this, which begin from general arguments concerning the consumption of animal products before applying these to honey. Prominent amongst these is always the argument that honey is produced by bees for themselves, should thus be seen as their property, and that beekeeping therefore amounts to stealing honey:

“In common with other animals kept to produce food products bees are farmed and manipulated, and the honey they produce for themselves is taken from them.  Vegans do not eat products taken from any animal, including bees, because it is neither desirable nor necessary to exploit animals in order to obtain food for humans.” (Vegan Society UK, 2012).

The striking thing about this is its absoluteness – it is not based primarily on an ecological or ethical critique of the problems of intensive large-scale commercial beekeeping of the sort that has contributed to the emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder, but is in essence a critique of beekeeping per se, regardless of scale and organisation. Thus an organic amateur beekeeper with a single hive, who extracts a modest quantity of surplus honey annually for sale or personal use, is no less guilty of exploitation. But there is a conceptual problem here, since ‘exploitation’, unlike cruelty or domination, is a political-economic term which rests on socio-culturally embedded systems of value and property, and is therefore not straightforwardly transferable to nonhumans.

Exploitation is centrally about unjust or unequal exchange, usually involving labour, hence exploitation can occur without necessarily being accompanied by either physical or psychological harm or suffering – slaves are exploited, but so are most contemporary wage labourers, even those with apparently favourable salaries and working conditions, since the harm is not directly to them but to their interests. Whereas for the concept to be at all meaningful in reference to nonhuman animals then either physical or psychological harm or suffering would have to be shown to be present. Thus it is really the infliction of harm or suffering that is being misnamed ‘exploitation’ in such cases. One might shift the argument by asserting that bees are indeed subjected to harm by beekeepers – this is true, in that there is always a risk of harming some bees when beekeeping, just as there is always a risk of harming some insects when gardening – but that is beside the point, as the crux of the vegan argument is that removing surplus honey in-and-of-itself harms the bees, even when sufficient honey is left to ensure that the colony has plenty for its needs. So the assertion is that even if beekeeping could be done in such a way as to ensure that absolutely no bees were harmed, the removal of honey would still constitute harm via exploitation. But this relies on the idea that the bees’ interests are being harmed in an intangible way via a relationship of unequal exchange, when there is no common socio-cultural system of value in which to ground such a view

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Manipulating Nature?

Furthermore the claim is often made that the notion of ‘surplus’ honey is misleading since the bees only ‘naturally’ produce as much as they need, and a surplus is produced only when the colony is prevented by the beekeeper from dividing into another colony by swarming:

“Although beekeepers claim that bees naturally produce extra honey, this isn’t necessarily true. Bees make honey to satisfy perceived demand […] Under natural conditions, if the bees in a hive were producing a great surplus due to an increased population of bees, they would divide into two colonies and there would be none wasted. Hives are often prevented from dividing or swarming by beekeepers in order to avoid losing bees and therefore maximise honey production. If bees were left to themselves, each colony would cast one or more swarms each year.” (All American Vegan, 2013).

In this way the critique of exploitation is underpinned by the notion of ‘manipulation’, that is, human intervention into – or modification of – the natural behaviour of nonhuman animals, which is regarded as intrinsically unethical. The reasoning here is particularly problematic. For one thing it reifies the idea of ‘natural behaviour’; in other words, it treats natural behaviour as that which is ‘pure’, uninfluenced or uncontaminated by exogenous influence. But in a world made-up of complex entanglements of diverse entities and forms of life, no behaviour can meet such criteria – all behaviour is continually shaped and reshaped by myriad relations with other organisms and the changing environment, and it would be bizarre to see all this as distortion from some pre-existing and rightful ‘natural’ template; indeed, nature is precsely what constantly emerges from all these entanglements. But what really underlies the critique of ‘manipulation’ is the notion that human influence upon the behaviour of other animals is inherently harmful, so that it is specifically human influence that constitutes ‘manipulation’. This looks suspiciously like the old anthropocentric humanist idea that humanity (or ‘society’ or ‘culture’) is somehow separate from nature, since only then can any transgression of this separation amount to ‘manipulating’ the purity of nature. But humans are not separate, and nature is not pure – it is complex entanglement all the way through.

I find the vegan case against honey problematic then, insofar as it relies on an anthropomorphic misuse of the category of ‘exploitation’, as well as a notion of ‘manipulation’ that involves both an overly purifying view of ‘nature’ and an anthropocentric separation of humanity from other animals and the natural world. That is not to say that there are not other grounds for opposing beekeeping and honey production – a compelling ecological critique could be made of many of the practices associated with large-scale intensive commercial apiculture, for example. But the context-free argument that the use of animal products is unethical not in its harmful effects, which may or may not apply in any particular case, but in itself, and under all circumstances, looks like a disciplinary attempt to maintain consistency in the face of an example which does not lend itself to the vegan analysis.

© Richie Nimmo 2013.

From monarchists to communists: Bees in the socio-political imagination.

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Bee stories, Bee Theory

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Una apis, nulla apis – ‘One bee is no bee’. The proverb speaks of the quintessentially collective nature of bees, a recurrent cultural idea, but one which strictly speaking is built on error. There are many thousands of different species of bees on this planet, and in fact only a small proportion are social species – most are solitary. The cultural characterisation of bees as a thoroughly collective entity reflects the preeminence of Apis Mellifera, the western honeybee, in human thinking about apian life, which in turn reflects the intricate entanglement of this species with human society for many centuries. Honeybees became the bees, standing for all apian existence, and honeybees do indeed manifest a striking collectivism.

honeybeeWhen stung by a bee, one might well experience that as an encounter with an individual insect, and in a certain sense so it is; but for anyone who keeps bees the encounter is always with a collective, the colony, the hive, of which individual bees are merely emissaries. Unsurprising then that the cultural history of the honeybee is characterised by a never-ending thought experiment concerning the nature of collectivity vis-a-vis individuality. One could almost trace the changing cultural fortunes of the ideals of collectivism and individualism and their various ideological expressions solely through a historical analysis of discourses around the meaning and significance of the bee colony. Insofar as western thought has often been structured by a binary opposition between society and the individual, honeybees with their striking collectivism have been a barometer of the ever-changing relationships between those dialectical poles.

In the popular imagination the collectivism of honeybees is often evoked through examples of their apparent altruism, thus: bees work themselves to death in just a few weeks producing stored honey for the future security of the hive; they will sting any creature that threatens the colony though this means the death of the stinging bee; and sick bees will voluntarily exclude themselves from the hive wherever possible to minimise the spread of infection. In each of these examples, collectivism is construed as the negation of individuality, the antithesis of self-interest. This is in itself an individualist and anthropomorphic framework, since for an entity with a genuinely collective mode of existence there are no individuals to be negated and no selves to be sacrificed. Nevertheless the cultural perception and status of bees has very largely been shaped by changing political inflections of this idea of self-denying altruism.

Mead-1-

At least as far back as ancient Greece, bee colonies were thought of as a kind of political community in nature, an ideal natural polity, and bees symbolised virtuous dedication to the collective good. This notion of the moral bee, wherein the bee is a symbol of civic virtue, as distinct from private interest, runs very deep in the cultural imaginary, having undergone various transformations and reinterpretations without ever quite disappearing. Interestingly it has been inseparable from the perception of bees as industrious, productive and hard-working; the dedication of bees to the colony is seen as manifest in their activity – they work not for themselves but for the good of the hive, and every bee must work. The drones who do not work are soon excluded from the hive and left to die when they have served their reproductive purpose. So the cultural enrolment of bees as symbols of civic duty, altruism and collective virtue is every bit as much an economic vision as a political one, amounting to a political-economy of bees. 

The-Sinister-Divine-Monarchy-of-the-BeesThis has been interpreted and used historically to assert the righteousness of certain forms of political-economic organisation, as demonstrated by their ostensible basis in nature. Throughout much of the medieval and early modern period for example, bees were hailed as paragons simultaneously of good governance, industriousness and obedience; the vision was of bees as exemplary of a natural order in which everyone knows their place and fulfils their duties efficiently, thus contributing to the common good, in a kind of apian functionalism. English Royalists in the 16th and 17th centuries pointed to the perfect submission of bees to their divinely ordained ruler as evidence that monarchy is founded in nature. A telling feature of such visions of bee society as the epitome of natural order was their assumption that the colony was a patriarchy, that the Queen was in fact a male King Bee, a misconception that was only finally dispelled at the beginning of the 17th century.

But the collectivism of bees has not only been made to signify willing subservience to a fixed order; the socio-political history of bees also encompasses a tradition of more egalitarian associations. Whilst Royalists in England hailed the divine monarchy of bees, 135082_bees26_RED_revolutionaries in France adopted the beehive as a symbol of the Republic, denoting the community of workers and the civic ideal. This alternative signification was always latent in cultural representations of bees, but with the social and political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries it became much more sharply distinguished from the more hierarchical and conservative strands of bee mythology. Bees were sometimes adopted as symbols of cooperative organisation and communal ethics by social reformist and workers’ movements, though this was nothing like as prevalent as the association of bees with the evils of collectivism by its opponents. For them the bee colony became not an ideal polity but a mindless and malign collective, the essence of which was ‘the swarm’, a multitude devoid of individual intelligence and free will.

Although it did not become fully developed until the 20th century, the Romantics were amongst those most responsible for crafting this negative vision of apian collectivism, in their critique of the dehumanising and de-individualising processes unleashed by industrial capitalism. For them the bee colony was akin to the industrial factory, a mechanically ordered production system in which individuals were turned into mere servants of the machine, devoid of meaningful individuality. This romantic critique deeply informed Karl Marx’s critical analysis of capitalist production and its alienation and dehumanisation of swarm_poster_03the worker. Ironic then that a century later, in the context of the Cold War, an almost identical critique was being made of communism by the ideological defenders of capitalism. From the 1950s onwards, bees came increasingly to be represented in mass culture as an evil collective, as a swarm, lacking individuality and subject to the irrational mentality of the crowd; the real target of course was the Soviet enemy and its supposed threat to western individualism and the American way of life. For much of the second half of the 20th century this ideological use of bees was pervasive, and bees became a symbol of anxiety and dread of the alien invader, whether communists or racial ‘others’.

This ideological formation persists, as do all previous bee discourses in some form, though it is much less prominent since the end of the Cold War. More recently there has also been a significant rehabilitation of the cultural status of bees in the context of Colony Collapse Disorder and the serious decline of insect pollinators. Bees have increasingly come to stand for the damage that late capitalism and industrialised agriculture is wreaking upon the eco-system – they have become a ‘poster child’ of the environmental movement, and not without some justification. The final irony is that this development has seen many capitalist corporations scrambling to adopt ‘bee-friendly’ initiatives as a way to showcase their green credentials. It seems the civic bee is far from dead, and organisations keen to display their civic virtue still clearly hope to channel something of its symbolic power.

Claude Levi-Strauss famously suggested that animals are ‘good to think with’. When it comes to social and political thought, he might have added, bees may well be best of all.

© Richie Nimmo 2013.

For detailed cultural histories of the honeybee, see:

Claire Preston (2006) Bee. Reaktion Books.

Bee Wilson (2004) The Hive. John Murray.

If bees are workers, can honey be ‘natural’?

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Bee Theory

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Like many animals, honeybees have been perceived and understood in various ways in different societies and in different historical periods. One of the most persistent significations, which has endured for several centuries and which pre-dates the modern period, is that of honeybees as workers or labourers. Well before the development of modern scientific entomology, when many of the mysteries of the honeybee colony had yet to be unlocked, beekeepers could not avoid being struck by the remarkable industriousness with which bees – and honeybees in particular – appear to go about the singular task to which all of their activities are geared, which is the task of producing and storing honey. Whatever other meanings have been given to honeybee colonies, and whatever else humans have believed about bees, they have almost invariably been regarded as workers.

This is significant, because the activities of nonhuman animals are not often spoken of in these terms, as a form of work or labour. On the rare occasion that such terminology is used, it is usually meant purely as analogy, the intention being to compare certain animal behaviours with real – that is, human – labour, whilst taking it for granted that animals do not really ‘work’. The conceptual framework underpinning this is that ‘work’ properly so called is purposeful, deliberate, conscious activity, oriented toward some end or goal. It follows that only humans can be said to ‘work’, because – it is believed – animal activity is none of those things, but is merely instinctive behaviour. It might sometimes look like work, but to take this at face value is naive, because the animal does not really understand what it is doing.

An example of exactly this reasoning can be found in classical sociology in the work of Karl Marx. In a famous passage in Capital where Marx is discussing the social significance of human labour, he compares the skill and ingenuity of honeybees in the construction of their honeycomb chambers, with that of human architects (1976: 284). He goes on to argue that the fundamental difference between the labour of bees and that of human architects is that, whereas the bees operate on instinct, according to a blueprint drafted by evolution, the human architect designs the structure consciously in the mind before constructing it in reality. In this way Marx toys with the idea of bees as labourers, hence as social beings, before moving to place bees firmly back within the domain of unconscious nature.

553px_Honeybee_gorging

Marx refers to honeycomb, but honey itself is even more telling in this respect. Honey is commonly seen as a naturally occurring thing, as reflected in the marketing of honey as a ‘natural’ product and a ‘natural’ alternative to sugar and other ‘artificial’ sweeteners. At the same time however, because it is produced by ‘worker’ bees within colonies that are seen as highly organised micro-societies, honey is also regarded as in some sense manufactured. This apparent contradiction drove anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to place honeybees in an ambiguous zone between nature and culture, pointing out that even wild honeybees were markedly ‘civilised’ in their highly organised labour of transforming nectar into honey; he therefore suggested that honey is better seen not as ‘raw’ but as ‘cooked’ (1973: 28, 35, 55, 289). But if so, then the cooks are nonhuman, and in this sense honey is still conventionally categorised as ‘natural’, because apart from the work of managing the hives and periodically extracting the ready-made honey and putting it into jars, no human labour enters into its production; the actual work of converting nectar into honey is performed entirely by the bees themselves.

Such ambiguity underlines the tensions inherent in trying to categorise a nonhuman animal which exists in structured societies engaged in highly organised collective work dedicated to the production of something valued by humans. Other animals produce things of value to humans of course – cows produce milk, chicken lay eggs, but not through highly organised collective activity which lends itself so well to being categorised as ‘work’; and other animals produce things through highly organised activity – beavers build damns, birds make nests, spiders spin webs; but these products are not highly valued by human beings. Even more significantly, there are no other ‘livestock’ animals whose products we consume, but whose bodies we do not. For all these reasons, honeybees have no equals when it comes to  exposing the fragility of the conceptual framework that underpins our notions of what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘manufactured’.

© Richie Nimmo 2013.

References

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1973) From honey to ashes: introduction to a science of mythology, II. London. Cape.

Marx Karl (1976) Capital: a critique of political economy: volume I. London. Penguin.

Who killed the bees? Pesticides, risk and the politics of knowledge

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Bee stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

In April 2013 the European Union imposed a moratorium on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides for two years. This was the culmination of more than a decade of campaigning by French beekeepers, joined latterly by an array of green groups and environmental organisations from across the EU. These groups are convinced that the class of systemic pesticides known as neonicotinoids are the primary cause of the rapid decline in honeybee colonies seen around the world since at least the 1990’s, and accelerating since 2006. The UK government was one of a minority of states that voted against the ban, having briefed against it throughout the deliberation process. Though the moratorium was a significant victory for the beekeepers and their allies, it is only for two years, and the scientific evidence on both sides remains ambiguous and fiercely contested; so this is by no means the end of the story.

The field of STS has consistently argued that scientific knowledge is never just about ‘facts’ but is always also about power. Facts are not simply ‘discovered’ by science as absolute truths but are constructed in social contexts riddled with power relations, such that power and knowledge are always intertwined. What becomes a fact and what does not is a social and political issue, concerning what kind of knowledge – and importantly whose knowledge – acquires legitimacy and authority. It is revealing to think about the debate over neonicotinoids in these terms: Many beekeepers in France became convinced over a decade ago that a worsening trend of honeybee losses was linked to the introduction of ‘Gaucho‘, a brand name for products manufactured by the German agro-chemical company Bayer which contain Imidacloprid – amongst the most widely used of the neonicotinoids. Their sustained campaign against these products became internationalised after 2007, when a working group at Pennsylvania State University researching the causes of a spate of particularly dramatic losses amongst US beekeepers in the autumn of 2006, produced a report in which they named the condition ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ (CCD). The new term quickly became ubiquitous in media reports worldwide and its apocalyptic overtones caught the public imagination, so that CCD came to be perceived as a new, unprecedented and urgent crisis not only of honeybees but of pollination, and therefore of agriculture and food production. This helped to create the conditions in which the anti-neonicotinoid campaign was able to enlist many more allies, until it was strong enough to achieve the considerable coup of out-lobbying the big pesticide companies within the EU legislative process, if not within all member states.

The relationship between the politics and the science of CCD is complex. Despite ongoing research since 2007 neonicotinoids have not yet emerged as an entirely convincing candidate for a sole causal agent. Instead there is an emerging scientific view that CCD is a complex multi-causal phenomenon, with pesticides interacting with each other and a number of other stressors to ratchet up the existing threats to honeybees from parasites and viruses. In the absence of a ‘smoking gun’, two political approaches have predominated: One is to insist that more research is needed, because a toxin must be decisively shown to be specifically responsible for the suspected environmental damage before it can be withdrawn; this is the stance of the UK and US governments. The other is to adopt the ‘precautionary principle’, which argues that if there is good reason to suspect that a toxin may be responsible then it should be withdrawn while further research is carried out; this position underpins the EU’s recent policy.

Science studies scholars Sainath Surayanaryanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman have argued that the former approach means delegitimising the practical knowledge of beekeepers in favour of a narrow conception of scientific authority; whereas the precautionary principle acknowledges that in cases of considerable complexity the experientially grounded knowledge of practitioners may sometimes be ‘ahead of the curve’. Ruling out other forms of knowledge as ‘unscientific’ is typical of what James Scott has called ‘seeing like a state’, whereby techno-bureaucracies impose top-down schemes rooted in ‘expert’ ways of knowing that are divorced from the real intricacies of lived practices, very often leading to great waste and inefficiency, abject failure, and sometimes even disaster. Yet the UK government is not averse to dismissing scientific expertise in favour of practical wisdom when it suits, as illustrated by its recent insistence on culling badgers to appease disgruntled farmers in spite of the expert view that this will do very little to reduce bovine TB. So there is more to this than a preference for science over other forms of knowledge, and sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory of ‘risk society‘ provides a further way to understand what may be going on.

Beck argues that in contemporary societies the social mechanisms for managing the risks attendant upon industrial technologies have broken down. Previously risks were managed via a ‘calculus of risk’ woven around the institutions of insurance, precautionary after-care and the ‘polluter pays’ principle. But in the nuclear, chemical and biotechnological age, the risks have become so pervasive and so great in magnitude that they are effectively incalculable, individual polluters often unidentifiable, and precautionary after-care rendered meaningless; society is therefore substantively ‘uninsured’. The vacuum is filled by the dogma of technological infallibility and by the denial and normalisation of risk, which means that every ‘accident’ chips away cumulatively at public confidence in scientific authority and political integrity. With this in mind it becomes easier to see why the anti-pesticide campaign has grown much faster than the specific scientific evidence against neonicotinoids, and it is not just about an anthropomorphic ‘cute response’ to bees as stripey little creatures; it draws upon a much deeper public anxiety concerning the ever-increasing risks to human, animal and ecological health associated with techno-scientific ‘progress’, and the capacity and willingness of our political and regulatory institutions to acknowledge and manage these risks in the long-term interests of the public, rather than the short-term interests of powerful corporations and their lobbyists. And as honeybee losses continue at an unsustainable rate, the UK government’s rejection of the precautionary principle suggests that such anxiety is by no means unwarranted.

© Richie Nimmo 2013.

Colony Collapse Disorder: crisis, complexity and controversy

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Bee stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

The phrase ‘colony collapse disorder’ was first used in 2006 to refer to the phenomenon of dramatic, large scale and unexplained disappearances of commercial bee colonies, initially in Florida and California. Superseding the earlier term ‘Fall Dwindle Disease’, it was said to be distinguished from the periodic winter losses that are a normal hazard of beekeeping by a number of characteristics: firstly the sheer suddenness of the collapse – with large and apparently thriving colonies sometimes disappearing almost overnight; also by the presence of significant stores of honey remaining in the hive – ruling out lack of food supplies as a cause of the sudden evacuation; and by the absence of obvious invaders such as other bees, wax moths or beetles taking advantage of the empty hive to consume the honey. It was also associated with an almost complete absence of the bee carcasses that would normally be found within the hive and littered around the entrance to collapsed colonies. These features combined to create the sense that this was something new, never before encountered; hence ‘colony collapse disorder’ was born.

After some initial scepticism about early reports, the scale of colony losses across 22 states by the spring of 2007 had given credence to the idea that ‘CCD’ was real, and it began making headlines worldwide. In the context of a dawning awareness and rising alarm at the potential impact on food production and the agricultural economy if the rapid rate of colony losses continued, the first scientific research attempting to identify the cause of CCD began in 2007, initially at Penn State University in collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture research service. The most promising candidates for a cause included the widespread use of relatively new ‘neonicotinoid’ pesticides, which were believed by many to detrimentally affect the apian nervous system; the apparently unstoppable progress of parasites such as the parasitic Varroa mite and associated viruses such as nosema infection and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, introduced into vulnerable honeybee populations by the under-regulated transcontinental trade in honeybees; loss of genetic diversity due to poor breeding practices favoured by some commercial breeders; the unintended consequences of GM crops in weakening bee immune systems; over-intensive exploitation of honeybees in monocultural commercial pollination, leading to intolerable migratory stresses on that species and the crowding out of native pollinators; the increasing frequency of unseasonal weather associated with climate change, which is known to affect the reproductive and foraging cycles of bee colonies; and changing landscapes involving the loss of areas of diverse flora such as wildflower meadows that play such a vital role in sustaining native bee populations.

Despite ongoing investigations at numerous institutions, none of these has yet emerged as an entirely convincing candidate for a sole causal explanation, with multiple factors present in all cases examined and no single factor present in every case. It therefore seems increasingly likely that the phenomenon known as CCD is a hybrid or multiple rather than singular phenomenon, with several factors potentially interacting in complex ways. The absence of a single authoritative explanation has frustrated the search for the sort of relatively simple ‘single bullet’ solution sought by policymakers. To use other environmental crises for comparison, CCD is proving to be rather like climate change – a complex multi-causal problem requiring fundamental changes in social and material organisation.

Reports of dramatic honeybee losses across the world were soon being linked to ‘CCD’, in Canada, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Croatia, and the UK. This was despite the insistence of some national governments that the bee losses in their country were not further manifestations of CCD, with its implication of a systemic and worldwide honeybee collapse, but were in fact unconnected contingent events. From a strictly analytical point of view this is not entirely unreasonable, given the difficulty of strictly distinguishing between ‘normal’ winter losses and CCD, not to mention the doubt as to whether ‘CCD’ is a singular phenomenon at all. But in practice this stance has often legitimised a political reluctance to significantly increase funding for research that might improve understanding of the factors contributing to the wider and longer-term pollinator decline, the occurrence of which is undisputed. Ironically the cautious scepticism of many pathologists and other experts – the very people in need of greater funding in order to more adequately address the problem – as to the existence of ‘CCD’ as a unitary phenomenon distinct from previous cycles of colony losses, has sometimes tended to shore up this political position.

In contrast, other parties to the debate, including many beekeepers whose livelihoods are under threat from colony collapse, have been convinced for some time on the basis of their lived experience and a wealth of anecdotal evidence not only that CCD is real, but that neonicotinoid pesticides are centrally to blame, and (particularly in France) many have campaigned vigorously for years alongside a range of environmental groups to have these chemicals banned. Meanwhile the big pesticide manufacturers whose profits rely upon routine agricultural use of their products have lobbied intensively against this, and have funded research designed to exonerate neonicotinoids under the guise of researching the causes of CCD. In this way the debate about CCD has become an intensely political and economic battleground rather than simply an arena of disinterested scientific investigation.

The beekeepers and anti-pesticide campaigners secured a significant victory in April 2013 when the EU banned the use of neonicotinoids for two years in member states. The rationale for the temporary ban was that it would provide breathing space for further investigations into CCD, including studies of the effect of neonicotinoids upon bee brains and nervous systems, as well as making it possible to observe the impact upon the bee population of eliminating these pesticides from the environment for the stipulated period. There are many doubts about the adequacy of the ban, especially given that it proscribes just 3 major neonicotinoid products – clothianidin, imidacloprid and thaimetoxam – when recent pollen studies suggest that bees are exposed to a whole ‘toxic soup’ of as many as 35 different chemicals, the synergistic and long term effects of which are not well understood. Nonetheless, by imposing the ban the EU significantly deployed the ‘precautionary principle’, according to which, if there is reason to suspect that a substance is causing significant harm to to health and/or the environment, then use of that substance is halted until its safety can be established beyond doubt.

This is in direct contrast to the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ approach that has been urged on governments by the pesticide companies, and which notably has been adopted by the UK government, which opposes the ban, with a DEFRA report published in March 2013 disputing the methodologies used in a number of studies that have shown detrimental effects upon bees of even sub-lethal doses of neonicotinoids. According to DEFRA’s approach, a substance should not be withdrawn from use – with the accompanying financial consequences for the manufacturer – merely on the basis of reasonable suspicion, but only when its harmfulness has been established beyond all doubt, something which the companies concerned will use all of their lobbying power to prevent or delay.

In either case, the question of what the appropriate standard of proof should be in the context of complex interactions between multiple causes becomes a political issue, with critics on all sides always able to use the absence of a single direct cause-and-effect relation or ‘smoking gun’ to create sufficient doubt to allow them to press their case. And with the evidence pointing to neonicotinoids as a sole or primary cause continuing to be less than decisive, unless there is a serious breakthrough in the next two years it seems inevitable that this debate will be revisited and that it will continue to be contested ferociously.

© Richie Nimmo 2013.