by Jacquelyn Vari

This past summer, as Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, VA began the weeks of preparation for new and returning students, another species was on its way to be welcomed by the campus community. Italian honey bees were in the process of being imported and set up in groups of three hives in a pasture a couple hundred yards away from the Guion science building on campus. Introducing the bees was intended to create a new system of pollinators and healthy wildlife, in which the bees are the main provider. Not only would these honey bees eventually provide the students and staff with the College’s own brand of Sweet Briar honey; they would also contribute to the wellbeing of the other organisms living on campus, simply by landing upon a flower petal.

In the past few years, discoveries about colony collapse disorder within bee populations and their direct effect on our society have become more prevalent, so the bees could not have been introduced at a better time. Colony collapse disorder refers to the mass extinction or, at least, apparent disappearance of worker bees within a hive, so that the hive is less effective in producing resources to maintain the hive’s operations. Several factors play a role in colony collapse disorder. According to a study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),researchers found that worker bees exposed to a particular chemical found in pesticides, Neonicotinoids, “exhibited lower life expectancies, by up to 23 percent.” This increasing level of low life expectancy contributes to colony collapse disorder, because the bees then have less time to do their jobs inside and outside of the hive in order to keep it alive. These types of pesticides, of course, aren’t usually found in nature; they have been brought into the ecosystem involved with the bees by humans through the need to protect crops. Bees land on plants treated with pesticides and absorb the tainted nutrients from the pollen and nectar contained within the plant. Additionally, the insecticides affect the quality of honey production. Similar to the way human bodies function, thriving on nutritious, pure foods, the bees take in the nectar they find and use that to produce honey. In an article published by ScienceNews, researchers concluded that “three out of four honey samples tested contained measurable levels of at least one of five common neonicotinoids.” This bodes that an even more plentiful species, humans, could be added to the list of victims. Ironically, therefore, the exact species involved with the introduction of the contaminant, is now a victim of its own efforts. Results from a study published in Environmental Health Perspectivesrevealed that the introduction of neonicotinoids to a woman’s body in particular led to an increase of and change in the way the enzyme aromatase was expressed in the estrogen hormone. The scientists made a frightening comparison: this case of estrogen transformation was similar to that in certain types of breast cancer. As horrifying as this seems, there are other silent yet deadly monsters even more threatening to the honey bees.

Varroa distructor, otherwise known as the Varroa mite, has become an increasingly prevalent threat to bee populations around the globe. This mite’s main job in its’ parasitic relationship with a honey bee is to attach itself to the body of the bee, most frequently the abdomen, and suck up the fat bodies of the bee. This action spirals into other forms of illness within the bees including Deformed Wing Virus (DWV), which drastically reduces the size and quality of a honey bee’s wings to shriveled up byproducts. Not only does this decrease the chance of the individual honey bee’s survival, but these circumstances have an overarching effect on the survival of the hive, as well. It is said of these mites that, “When there is one, there are two more hidden.” Therefore, the more Varroa mites present, the fewer bees there are to help with the daily tasks in the hive, creating a devolution of the entirety of the population.

 

 

As a member of Sweet Briar’s Beekeeping Club, I have a direct interaction with the buzzing bees. At a meeting last month, we decided to conduct hive tests to check on the quality and productivity of three of our fifteen hives, specifically the ones that our instructor, Brooke Savage, delegated as “at risk” populations. She notified us that the typical number of mites found in a relatively healthy hive is anywhere from two to four in a sample of about thirty bees. When we sampled the first hive, we found eleven. On the second trial, we found thirteen. This indicated to Brooke that she had to treat the bees with a direct varroa treatment relatively quickly before the cold season approaches. This aggregate of Varroa mites is alarming. Additionally, with the reduction in the number of drones (male honey bees) for winter’s sake, mites of this density could be catastrophic to the remaining members.

At ten a.m. on Saturday, November 10, I was joined by nine other students at one of  Brooke’s beekeeping classes. Her topic of the day: winter from the bees’ perspective. During this time of the year, it is especially necessary that the bees try to control their losses within the colony. When it comes to keeping warmth within the hive, Brooke said “they work together better than humans.” She described the football shape that the bees use to keep the hive consistently warm, with only a small percentage of the working bees in charge of heating the cells; the bees on the exterior of the figure take turns vibrating their bodies and wings in order to produce heat which in turn heats the entire hive.

Brooke encouraged us to approach the hives. “If you place your hand over this divider hole,” she said, “you can feel the warmth radiating off of the bees.” Every student surrounded the hive like a bonfire on a chilly night, astonished by the capability of such a tiny creature. Then, it was feeding time. Brooke instructed us to make a paste of ten pounds sugar, one gallon of water, and a tablespoon of lemongrass extract, since “the bees love this scent as much as I do,” she said. We stirred the mixture for a while until it was like the consistency of a syrup and then dropped about a tablespoon of it on each corner of the hive’s first divider, the wood board covering the first hive enclosure. Brooke gave us free reign in taking care of these bees, as she refers to them as our “sisters;” they are just like our friends. Her bright blue eyes light up each time she gets to answer our questions, especially when it means making fun of the drone bees (which she describes as “lazy”). She is passionate about her work, having been in the literal field for over ten years.

“You need to always have a purpose and goal in mind each time you go to the hives,” she says. “If you don’t, that’s when mistakes happen.” Swarms of bees due to lack of care are not foreign concepts to many casual beekeepers. In each beekeeping class she likes to reiterate that “we need to be on the bee’s schedule, not our own” because most troubles with beekeeping originate with a beekeeper only taking care of the bees when they’re able to instead of when the bees need to be taken care of. Like most cases with the environment, it’s when humans stop caring, that survival becomes a problem for countless species.

The large variety of trees on campus also represents the various roles at play within the ecosystem of Sweet Briar. Chestnut, oak, and dogwood trees surround us at every angle, yet we don’t know much about their history or their future. While we do not have American Chestnut trees on campus (we instead have Chestnut trees from Asia), the close sisters of our variation have been suffering while ours are thriving. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the American Chestnut was one of the most prominent species in North America, but at the beginning of the 20th century, a severe ‘chestnut blight’ struck the continent due to an Asian bark fungus and drove the trees into near extinction. The endangered marking of this plant was brought about by natural causes, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate. Some other species, however, became extinct. The Saint Helena Olive tree, for example, became extinct merely due to human activity and deforestation. This plant was native to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, but as people continued to control the land over four centuries, they destroyed “much of the native vegetation through deforestation for timber and agriculture, and the grazing of introduced goats,” according to an article by Wildscreen Arkive. This plant was cursed from the start; it had been confined to this one habitat for decades, and yet the conservation efforts that humans put in place were done, as they often are, too late. The fiery red, clove-like buds of this tree are a true representation of beauty lost when it is underappreciated.

 

 

Such occurrences aren’t exclusive to Sweet Briar’s campus, however. The college’s biodiversity is just a small part of the global ecosystem in which similar issues are on the rise. With more studies drawing arrows pointing towards neonicotinoids as a major threat, one research project in particular demonstrates their effect on another species not frequently discussed. ScienceNews conducted a study on wild white-crowned sparrows after people noticed a change in their flight patterns. They concluded that neonicotinoids must have an effect on the birds’ interpretation of direction. According to the study, “when placed in a large, inverted funnel used to study birds’ migratory orientations, the neonic-fed birds tried to fly in directions other than north,” whereas the birds fed sunflower oil were not handicapped in their sense of direction. Though the effects were temporary on the birds, only lasting for about two weeks, the results raised an even greater question for the scientists. If we now know that honey bees, humans, and white-crowned sparrows are all being harmed in various ways, what other unknown impacts are these sorts of chemicals having on the environment? The effects of these substances can sometimes be irreversible, as seen with the honey bees.

Yet there are even worse dealers playing this devil’s game. An uptrend of waste has been produced by humans as we continue to build our population. We are charged fines of up to $2,500 for littering in Virginia, yet the cost to the environment is much more than we can see with our naked eyes. In “The Effects of Littering on the Environment & Animals”, Sciencing. journalist Catherine Irving details the exact amount of disruption we cause. Irving notes that the World Wild Fund for Naturereports “some 1.5 million tons of plastic waste from the water bottling industry alone.” A disturbing result of this waste came in 2012 when “a young sperm whale was found dead, floating off the coast of Greece…his stomach was full of 100 plastic bags,” according to WDC Kidzonein an article, “Litter in the Seas and Oceans.” Each time we choose to not recycle our plastic water bottles, we add to the literal and symbolic mountain of trash that we’ve created, similar to the way Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach, VA was built upon the city’s wastes over the years. Since we don’t have good plans in place to control or manage this waste, we instead turn it into an amusement park. We could take trash to burning plants where plastic and cardboard is melted down to be used again, but the release of these gases leads to carbon dioxide presence in the air, and then we are taken on a roller coaster ride of determining which is the lesser evil. Carbon dioxide has become an increasingly more prevalent topic as researchers identify its’ correlation to the change in global average temperature. The Environmental Protection Agencyreports in “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle,” that the average “passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.” If we were to consider this calculation to mean one tree for every driver, we would realize that there are significantly less trees available to consume the amount of carbon dioxide produced by just one car. A study from North Carolina State University reports that, “a tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year” but it “can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.” Though there might be more trees on the earth than cars being driven, that doesn’t account for the fact that increasing human populations take a shorter time to reach driving age than an oak tree to reach maximum maturity. This unfortunate calculation puts not only our species but so many others at risk. Polar bears will suffer through shorter durations of winter and increasingly narrower ice caps for habitat. Rising sea temperatures will create more perilous ecological conditions for coral reefs to thrive. The list of harm goes on, but our number of opportunities to make change does not.

Analogous to how the food web and our ecosystems work together, each species serves a job and duty, even the Varroa mite. Homo sapiensare still the only species on earth with the capacity to understand how we are the only source of environmental change. We owe it to our fellow brothers and sisters in the natural world, flora and fauna alike, to ensure that the conditions of the planet are sustainable for an indefinite amount of time. After all, we are just one species, a part of the planet’s mass biodiversity. We are just another part of the food chain.

In the midst of this natural chaos, the honey bees are winding down for the winter ahead near the newly herbicide-coated fields which are now prepared for the growth of wildflowers next spring. They are out foraging for the scarce flowers still in season, working their hardest to ensure the survival of the hive in its entirety. Each day, the harsh winter wind tempts them to stay in the warmth of the hive, yet they know they have a job to do. Human beings could learn a lot from this community of workers. If we were as resilient and group-oriented as this species, our efforts in making the lives of these honey bees and countless other organisms better would be much more pronounced.