Bees may need their own national refuges

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The Journal Star story on the hardworking life of America’s domesticated bees was a disquieting reminder of how rapidly the natural world is being pushed aside.

About half the domesticated bees in the country are shipped to California in the winter so they can pollinate almond trees.

That state’s almond industry is growing so rapidly that a few years from now three-quarters of the nation’s bees will be shipped there every year from states like Nebraska and elsewhere.

Last year, beekeepers made more money pollinating almonds than they did from honey production.

Not surprisingly, the process comes at some cost. When that many of the nation’s bees are thrown together, they have an enhanced chance of exchanging parasites and other ailments.

Meanwhile, the nation’s beekeepers continue to battle bee deaths. This year’s survey of beekeepers showed that 36 percent of hives were lost. The previous year’s loss was 32 percent.

Wild bees and other wild pollinators such as wasps and butterflies also are believed to be in decline.

There may be no single cause for the losses. Deaths have been traced to parasites, diseases, pesticide drift and the still-mysterious colony collapse, in which hives are abandoned with no sign of dead bodies or survivors.

New systemic pesticides that are safer for humans and other mammals may be more dangerous to bees, perhaps disrupting insect neurology, making it impossible for bees to return to their hives.

Other possibilities include habitat loss and the agricultural industry’s tendency to create vast fields of single crops that are virtual deserts to bees and other pollinators when they are not in bloom.

Monocultures “reduce the populations of wild pollinators, reducing the number of species and their abundance,” University of California biologist Claire Kremen told the San Francisco Chronicle. “You’ve taken a native ecosystem and replaced it with a single crop blooming at a single time. The rest of the year there is nothing blooming on those fields. There is nothing for the pollinators to eat.”

Nebraska’s beekeepers are among those who ship their bees to California. For the rest of the year, the bees are trucked back to Nebraska, where they do their part to pollinate alfalfa, apples in southeast Nebraska and even some soybeans.

In recent decades, farmland has been converted to grassland, fine habitat for wild pollinators, in programs like the Conservation Reserve Program. Now high grain prices are luring landowners into returning those acres to production.

The trends seem unsustainable. Perhaps one day the nation will be forced to designate tracts of lands for protection of pollinators, dotting the landscape with national bee refuges. The day has long passed when the natural world could be taken for granted.