I love it when I’m right!
There’s a serious problem, internationally, with bees — it’s called “colony collapse disorder,” where whole colonies of bees just die off. Since bees are the principal pollinators of a tremendous variety of important human foods, we would all be up the creek without a paddle if bees become truly scarce. This seems a credible threat to our food supply, and scientists are racing to identify its causes.
In March of last year, in a post entitled, “Food Variety, The Birds and the Bees,” I proposed that perhaps bees suffer from oxidative stress, when they are forced to live on only one or two kinds of food, just as humans do. (I’m no bee expert, I was just thinkin’ …)
A friend just recently sent me an article from the BBC news that reports on some work by French researchers that makes just this point. Bees had much lower oxidative stress, and much healthier immune systems, when fed 5 pollens than when fed just one.
Why do we care? Well, I mean, besides celebrating the awesome fact that it appears I called this one right on the money?
Well, two reasons. One is, most of the world’s important agricultural crops are pollinated by honeybees. Without them, we would be in a world of hurt. But if this theory points to an important cause of the mysterious death of honeybees, picture this: a simple solution might be to plant lovely flowering garden borders around orchards and other pollinated crops. Gorgeous, too!
Also, in a sense, we have the same need as the honeybees. We don’t eat many flowers (although nasturtiums are yummy, have you ever put nasturtium blossoms in your salad? — But I digress). Yet our bodies do require a wide variety of nutritious whole foods to keep us healthy and thriving.
July 6th, 2010 - 9:28 pm
I’m taking a permaculture class. What you say about having flowering gardens around orchards reflects a permaculture principle: using complementary plants; having trees that are surrounded by plants that nurture it and each other, keep away bugs and deer, etc. There’s a technical term for this, but I can’t think of it now.
However, I also learned that the plants that we will lose without bees are not essential to our survival so much as to our joy : e,g., strawberries. Grains for instance are not pollinated by bees as far as I know.
July 6th, 2010 - 10:24 pm
Thanks Linda, for your insightful comments. The permaculture principle you mention speaks to the idea that when we take action that is aligned with the web of nature, rather than trying to switch nature to a big-factory model, we reap a variety of benefits, and some of them may be surprising (like honeybee survival).
I also love the thought that fruits like strawberries are “essential to our joy.”
I would propose that “survival” is a relative term. We can, indeed, “survive” on a diet of grains and meat for quite a while: decades, in fact. However, abundant research shows that joyfully surviving, without illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and immune system imbalances, requires eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Which is another way of saying that eating a highly varied diet is much more aligned with our own natures than eating a “factory” diet of just meat and grains.