Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee

3. Saving the Bees: Colony Collapse Disorder and the Greening of the Bee

44 > 45 honey and pollen reserves. But hives cannot sustain themselves without worker bees and would eventually die.1 Although agricultural records substantiate that bee colonies have gone through periods where they have dwindled and disappeared throughout the last century, many beekeepers and entomologists agree that the current behavior of bees is unique, some would even say alarming, and a few go so far as to say it is potentially catastrophic. To say that CCD has triggered large-scale bee deaths obscures and simplifies what is happening to the bees today. Technically, worker bees disappeared and strangely there was an absence of dead bees, and little evidence was left as to what triggered their desertion of the colony. Because bees simply left their colonies, their bodies were not available to scientists (or anyone for that matter) to conduct postmortem autopsies. Commercial beekeepers didn’t encounter a mass of dead bees when they lifted the lids off their hives. They encountered nothing—silence and abandoned combs, and a few lifeless bees. Suddenly, millions of bees were not just sick or dying: they were literally gone. There were clues, but no answers, so the gravity of the problem was undisputed and the mystery compelling. The media picked up on the inherent mysteriousness of the honeybee ’s disappearance or, as one New York Times article proclaimed, “one of the great murder mysteries of the garden.”2 In this CCD story, the bees didn’t get sick and die due to natural reasons (like bacteria) they were in fact “murdered.” In the public’s eye, this placed the bees at center stage in a media-driven ecocultural detective mystery. The bees eluded the experts, and the rest of us. Did they leave purposefully— simply walk off the job? Were they forced out of their hives? These important questions were sometimes trivialized and sensationalized , making it seem as if the bees were kidnapped or abducted by some alien force. For example, on July 5, 2010, the television show Good Morning America aired a short segment entitled “The Vanishing Bees,” detailing how American honeybees have been “disappearing without a trace.” A box across the screen declared that ice cream could “go next,” if the bees continue their strange behavior. Rather than detail possible causes of CCD and the serious threat to the diversity of our food supply, the focus was on our ice cream supply. However, a cutaway to a Häagen -Dazs ice cream plant assuages concern that ice cream is destined 46 > 47 sources. We could live without bee pollination, but the range of foods that we are accustomed to would be drastically reduced. In other words, there is real cause for concern about bee extinction. The website BeeGuardian .org, citing a U.N. report, concluded that “of the 100 crop species that supply 90 percent of the world’s food, bees pollinate more than 70 percent.”5 Apples, strawberries, avocados, carrots, broccoli, olives, onions, and peanuts are on the lengthy list of fruits and vegetables that we commonly eat and have come to expect at grocery stores, all courtesy of bee pollination. As we inspect labels to see if produce is organic or grown in California or Chile, we regard food as being produced by human networks and actions—types of farms and farmers—but rarely by types of bees. We collaborate with bees and employ them but fail to give them credit in a way that takes into account their essential role in our dietary desires and agricultural industries. This chapter explores the answers to the “what happened to the bees” questions and, importantly, even the questions themselves. That is, why do humans even care? Why is this a news story in the first place? Why is CCD so controversial? We are interested in the opposing ways people approach CCD, particularly the ongoing debates and conflicts within scientific communities and rifts between beekeepers. As reflexive feminist and qualitative sociologists, we examine the construction of scientific knowledge itself and the multiple “contested truths” of CCD. For us, the “truth” is not the point. Our aim is not to empirically “discover” the answer to the mystery that is CCD but to explore the human attention paid to it and how this buzz around bees may be motivated by professional , political, environmental, emotional, or economic interests. While the “Where have the bees gone?” questions are straightforward, it is difficult to provide succinct or...