In a worrying development that could threaten food production, South Africa’s traditionally tough honeybees — which had been resistant to disease — are now getting “sick of humans,” with the population of the crucial pollinators collapsing, experts said.
The seriousness of the global problem was highlighted when US President Barack Obama announced a plan last month to make millions of hectares of land more bee-friendly.
Loss of habitat, the increasing use of pesticides and growing vulnerability to disease are blamed by many critics for the plight of the honeybees. Environmental group Greenpeace, which has launched a campaign to save the insects, said that 70 out of the top 100 human food crops — which supply about 90 percent of the world’s nutrition — are pollinated by bees.
Illustration: Lance Liu
In South Africa, an outbreak of a lethal bacterial disease called foulbrood is spreading rapidly for the first time in recent history, said Mike Allsopp, honeybee specialist at the government’s Agricultural Research Council in Stellenbosch in Western Cape Province.
“It is exactly the same as around the world; the bees are sick of humans and the pressures and the stresses [that] humans are putting on them,” Allsopp said. “In the past, they were less vulnerable because they were not stressed by intensive beekeeping and pesticides and pollution.”
The foulbrood hitting South Africa is the US strain of the disease, he said, adding that South African bees have previously coped with the European version.
The fear is that the disease could spread north throughout Africa, where hundreds of thousands of people work in small-scale bee farming, Allsopp said.
“It is a ticking time bomb. Every colony that I have looked at that has clinical foulbrood has died and we are not seeing colonies recover,” he said.
When Cape Town honeybee farmer Brendan Ashley-Cooper, 44, discovered foulbrood in his colonies in 2009, he knew the worst was yet to come.
“We thought we were going to have this major explosion of foulbrood,” Ashley-Cooper said. “I did not know what to do; I did not know what the extent of it was. I was just worried about the bees.”
Six years later, the nightmare has come true for the third-generation beekeeper as hives die off.
The state of South Africa’s bees has never been as bad as it is now, he said.
Foulbrood attacks bee larvae, leading to the collapse of the colony. It is spread when bees raid the dead colony, bringing spore-infected honey back to their colony, or by the importation of contaminated bee products.
While North America and Europe have battled foulbrood for centuries, South Africa’s bees have stayed healthy — a resilience attributed to the nation’s diverse bee population, which has naturally fought off disease and pests in the past, and to strict government regulations that require any imported bee products to be irradiated.
Yet today, the hardy South African bees are under siege.
“Foulbrood has spread massively in the [past] five months; it has now spread over a 500km by 400km area, where most beekeeping operations are infected,” Allsopp said. “It is growing rapidly and I can think of no reason why it will stop, unless human intervention stops it or controls it.”
The stakes are too high for beekeepers to ignore, Allsopp said.
“We cannot afford to lose our bee population, not because of the losses of honey, but because we have 20 billion rands [US$1.62 billion] worth of commercial agriculture that requires bee pollination,” he said.
Faced with the realization that the bees cannot adapt to the foulbrood threat fast enough to sustain agricultural pollination, South African officials say that they are in talks to introduce stiffer regulations to tackle the disease.
“There is a team that is currently working on an action program that will be between industry and the department that will be announced in the next few weeks,” South African Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries official Mooketsa Ramasodi said.
The government plans to clamp down on the registration of beekeepers, heighten awareness of the issue and enforce beekeeping management measures — such as checking larvae regularly — which are aimed at identifying the disease before it kills a colony, he said.
South Africa would use antibiotics to treat hives — a controversial method — only as a “last option,” Ramasodi said.
Ashley-Cooper worries that the government action might be too little, too late for an industry that he said has a laissez-faire approach to beekeeping.
In general, South African beekeepers leave the bees to fend for themselves, confident that they will eventually recover, as they have always done in the past, he said.
“It is really a beekeeper issue; it is about beekeeper education and becoming modern beekeepers,” Ashley-Cooper said. “We are keeping bees like our grandparents did 150 years ago. There is huge room for improvement.”
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