TheMillerCircle.org

It may seem a bit odd writing about honeybees just when a worldwide influenza pandemic is rapidly building up around us, with a new virus that hasn’t been seen before (though it seems to be susceptible to some of the antiviral agents that we have in supply). But unless we view the plight of the honeybees as something requiring an equivalent sense of urgency and action, our food supply could be in danger of contracting due to the lack of nature’s best pollinators. As a followup to the breaking news about the plight of the European honeybee and the recent loss of more than 13 million hives in Europe, Leon Kreitzman , writing in Olivia Judson’s column in the Times, has explained in more detail the social networking behaviors of bees and the delicate nature by which newly discovered nectar locations are transmitted to the bees through their “waggle dance” within the hive.

The renowned animal behaviorist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel prize for figuring out the nature of the bee “dance” and since then new findings have only further astonished us about the complex, nectar location behavior of bees. The information transmitted through the “waggle dance” provides accurate cues about the vertices of nectar sources that are accurate up to about 15 km from the hive. Bees detect location through their ability to see the plane of polarized light, which together with internal circadian rhythms that are reset each day to the solar cycle, allows them to provide information to their hive mates about new food sources, the direction and distance of the source, which are transmitted and compensated for the changing time of day.
Not only are bees accurate at finding their sources of nectar, but they have internal timing cycles or clocks which tell them when they should go onto another flower bed that will be opening and more advantageous as a target. These tireless wonders essentially have their own built-in global positioning satellite by extracting this information from the sun and correcting for movements of the sun during the day. When we see failures in the social hive to adapt and survive in what we believe is the normal environment of the bee, we must recognize that this is not just the canary in the mine telling us to get out. In the first place, we have no where to go unless we want to join G.W Bush on his first trip to Mars, all expenses NOT paid. The fact that bees are disappearing in prodigious numbers means that the environment that we have modified or created by whatever means, is incompatible with the normal lifespan of the bee, meaning that it is also incompatible with a lot of planetary humans, as the food supply could face a dramatic retreat without effective pollinators to carry out their essential tasks. This should be viewed as a national emergency, every bit as dramatic and needy as that of a pandemic flu episode, not merely a failure of the free market system to properly gauge the true value of bees! However, now that you mention it, that is also true. The free market had underestimated the value of bees and pollution. What did they get right that’s truly important?
RFM