Tag Archives: colony collapse disorder

‘Zombie bees’ and the fear of hybrids

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

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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.

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

23 Monday Sep 2013

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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

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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.