Prof. Elizabeth Elle calls from work. Her office this sunny weekday morning is in the middle of a Pitt Meadows blueberry field, where she is busy counting bees.
How does one count bees?
“You stand in front of a blueberry bush,” she says, “and when you see one, you go ‘One.’ And when you see another, you go ‘Two.’
On this day, she has counted five different species of bees going about their business — the non-native honey bee, apis mellifera, brought in by the grower, and four native bee species that have found their own way there: the blue orchard mason bee, the yellow-fronted bumblebee, the mixed bumblebee and the red-tailed bumblebee. (“It has a big red bum,” Elle says. “Seriously.”)
There are that many types of bees, her interviewer asks?
Elle, suddenly excited, replies:
“You know how many species of bees there are in B.C.?
“About 450! And there are probably lots more! Because we keep finding them! How cool is that? That’s as many species of bees in B.C. alone as there are species of birds in all of Canada.”
Elle is a biologist at Simon Fraser University. She knows bees. She is passionately concerned about saving them, especially native species, which have been facing a well-documented decline around the world.
Our own native Western bumblebee, for example, was plentiful in the Lower Mainland 20 years ago. It hasn’t been seen in the past few years, she says, and now may be extirpated here.
The reasons, she says, are myriad — pesticides, weather, the increasing resistance of bee parasites to our corrective measures. And there is the stress that monoculture has on bees.
“Think of eating broccoli for a month,” Elle says. “Supposedly, it’s good for you. But after a steady diet of it, you’d start to experience deficiencies. It would weaken you. The same goes for bees that are expected to feed on nothing but a field of blueberries.”
As it was reported in The Sun Monday, there’s a shortage of honey bees to pollinate Lower Mainland blueberry farms. The sudden closure of two bee suppliers in Alberta exacerbated the supply shortage, and farmers were left to scramble.
This kind of news has helped to lend the decline of bees in recent years an apocalyptic air: If the bees go, the story goes, global starvation follows.
Elle isn’t as alarmist.
“We’re not all going to starve to death. Nothing like food shortages have been documented yet.
“But, as the saying goes, one out of three bites you eat is thanks to a bee. So there’s a large percentage of crop production that is reliant on some sort of insect for pollination.”
And bees, which will live in a box, which consent to domestication, are the most obliging of insects. They are man’s best friend, not Rover.
While their numbers decline, our reliance on them has increased. The global acreage of pollinated-dependent crops keeps going up. Coffee. Chocolate. Fruit. Nuts.
That was one of the reasons Elle found herself in a Pitt Meadow blueberry field Monday. She was trying to quantify how well the bees were doing at pollinating.
“We’re doing an experiment to see if the growers are getting as much pollination service as they need to get a full fruit set.
“We compare some flowers that are just opening to whatever (insect) pollinators are in the field to similar flowers that we add pollen to by hand.
“If we (as hand-pollinators) can improve the size of the number of fruit over what the bees are doing, then we can tell this grower that he has a pollination deficit.”
The news is not heartening.
“We have documented over the past couple of years that growers are not getting as much fruit as if they had full pollination of their crops.”
It’s for this reason Elle has spent much of her efforts on the conservation of native bees and the spread of agriculture methods that would help propagate them. Native bees are more efficient and, simply, they’re here.
At least, in the case of the Western bumblebee, they were.
“I do think there is something of a canary-in-the-mine situation here,” Elle says.
“I think any species loss is a barometer of a greater environmental state. But a loss of things like bees, which do things for us, should be especially concerning.”
The public, she believes, is waking up. But she tempers her sense of hope with caution.
“I think there is at least some conversation about natural environment and conservation.
“But where it’s getting complicated is in that apparent conflict between resource extraction and being green. I personally don’t think they have to be in conflict, or I wouldn’t, as a conservation biologist, be working in an agricultural industry.
“So we have heard a lot of rhetoric about it’s ‘either/or’ but not a lot of talk about people looking to find a middle way. And I think it needs to be louder. And I think not just about conservation issues but also about climate change and other environmental issues that are going to have profound effects on our province in the coming decade.
“Basically, the problem honey bees face is us. It’s a disease of civilization.”