The Truth About the Bees

Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.

In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”

All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”

The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.

A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the USDA and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.

Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.

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As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.

This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.

In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times. “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.

By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees. The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”

She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.

Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers, and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.

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Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.

All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.

This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”

In 2018, Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan, conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.

Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.

Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.

To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.

In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.

Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees. Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)

What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem. The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.

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