The Most Threatened Part of Our Food System: Honeybees

Our industrial agricultural system has been blamed for destroying family farms and poisoning the land and water. But one of the most horrific casualties may be one the hardest working and most under-appreciated contributors to our food system — honeybees.

Over the last few years, honeybee populations have dropped by half and scientists have begun researching a phenomenon they are calling Colony Collapse Disorder, to which beekeepers are losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives for unknown reasons.

Last night at a Kitchen Table Talks event in San Francisco, I got to see how CCD is affecting beekeepers in the film Pollen Nation, which tracked a beekeeping family from Minnesota as they loaded hundred of their hives onto a semi and took off for California. The film points out a couple of startling facts: One out of every three bites we take in the U.S. is thanks to the diligence of honey bees and; these little pollinators are responsible for $15 billion worth of food. Without them we're very well screwed.

But here's what I found most interesting: There are 1,300 migrating beekeepers in the U.S. They travel thousands of miles with their bees on trucks and then release them into monoculture industrial ag farms to do their thing. It somehow seems fitting that our energy intensive agriculture system is dependent on trucking in pollinators from across the country, and it also seems hugely indicative of a failing agriculture system that these creatures are teetering on the brink.

They are likely threatened not by one, but by a combination of factors, including mites, viruses, pesticides, loss of habitat and the stress of their cross-country travels. For the sake of their future and our future food, this would seem to be yet another reason why organic and local food systems are so desperately needed.

Photo credit: jbaker5